Japan’s Looming Demographic Nightmare Blamed on Game Arcades

Tokyo is one of the places in Japan famous for its arcades ranging from purikura, or print club machines (popular to Japanese schoolgirls), “crane machines” (or UFO Catchers as the Japanese calls them), to familiar fighting-, quiz-, music-themed games.

In Asia and particularly Japan, video game rooms thrive from public support. In Brad Stone’s blog, he quoted Masumi Akagi, publisher of Japan’s Game Publisher magazine, in saying that “there are 9,500 arcades in the country with more than 445,000 game machines made by Japanese companies like Namco and Capcom“.

Take for example Shibuya district wherein arcades after arcades line up the streets and cluster like mushrooms. These arcades are teeming with Japanese, especially the teenagers and students. These kids lose themselves in addictive games like Sega‘s The Great Battle of Three Countries, or Sangokushi Trisen, another card-type game based on the wars of medieval China.

In contrast with US, where arcades are a rapidly dying breed due to the popularity of home video systems like the PlayStation, Japanese arcades not only provide venue for entertainment, but also a venue for obsessive subcultures. We must take into the demographic problem of Japan wherein there is there simply won’t be enough workers to support the senior population due to the decreasing birth rate.

What makes matters worse is that Japanese kids are more interested in saving the world, one Gundam battle at a time, than to go to work and save their country. Although the Japanese government exerts effort to somehow regulate the arcades, these effort seems to be futile in a place where “quarter kids” have grown up yet still having fun.

Via MSNBC

Tokyo is one of the places in Japan famous for its arcades ranging from purikura, or print club machines (popular to Japanese schoolgirls), “crane machines” (or UFO Catchers as the Japanese calls them), to familiar fighting-, quiz-, music-themed games.

In Asia and particularly Japan, video game rooms thrive from public support. In Brad Stone’s blog, he quoted Masumi Akagi, publisher of Japan’s Game Publisher magazine, in saying that “there are 9,500 arcades in the country with more than 445,000 game machines made by Japanese companies like Namco and Capcom“.

Take for example Shibuya district wherein arcades after arcades line up the streets and cluster like mushrooms. These arcades are teeming with Japanese, especially the teenagers and students. These kids lose themselves in addictive games like Sega‘s The Great Battle of Three Countries, or Sangokushi Trisen, another card-type game based on the wars of medieval China.

In contrast with US, where arcades are a rapidly dying breed due to the popularity of home video systems like the PlayStation, Japanese arcades not only provide venue for entertainment, but also a venue for obsessive subcultures. We must take into the demographic problem of Japan wherein there is there simply won’t be enough workers to support the senior population due to the decreasing birth rate.

What makes matters worse is that Japanese kids are more interested in saving the world, one Gundam battle at a time, than to go to work and save their country. Although the Japanese government exerts effort to somehow regulate the arcades, these effort seems to be futile in a place where “quarter kids” have grown up yet still having fun.

Via MSNBC