I've visited plenty of arcades in Japan, and they were all horrible. Sure, the games were interesting, but they are sad and sometimes creepy places. Smoking is allowed in there, and with Japan's well known tobacco abuse problem, words fail to describe the stench in there.
My Japanese girlfriend told me that "nobody normal would ever go in there" and was actually disappointed in me wanting to enter in that sort of place.
Later I found out that like most of the entertainment sector, arcades are run by organised crime and the men who frequent them are seen as losers.
From my experience, there are two "types" of arcades in Japan: one called "game centers" (ゲーセン, pronounced gay-sen), and another "pachinko" or "slot", also called パチスロ(pachisuro).
The former is actually really nice. FYI, if the place you went to is a SEGA or a Taito Station, then it's very likely a game center. It does have some machines that use "medals", which I assume is some sort of gambling thing, but it's just a small subset. The main focus is on fighting games, arcade games (well duh), rhythm games(like Ongeki, maimai Deluxe which I love), Densha de Go! (a realistic train driving simulator with the inside looking like a cockpit of a commuter railway train), some robot games, Dance Dance Revolution, Kantai Collection, Fate/Grand Order, zombie shooters and many more. I will admit that atleast one Taito Station in the Tokyo suburbs has the smoking smell in it, but otherwise they are pretty nice places.
The other type is well, the pachinko and slot machines shops/arcades. They are the gambling machines, and almost everyone I know has a negative impression of them. If someone tells me they go to pachisuro for fun, I will just be polite on the surface, but internally I would avoid associating with them any further than required. The way to tell these apart is that they will very likely be in front of, or within 2 minutes walk of a station, will have smoking allowed in it, will have something like "new machines!" or "renewed machines!" in their advertisements, won't allow anyone below 18 or 20 to enter, and will have slot machines and many old people spending away their life savings inside. I avoid those like the plague.
All in all, I love the game centers though. If you get a chance, do try one of the games I mentioned above in the 2nd paragraph. Maybe you will find something you will like. :)
I couldn't believe how loud pachinko parlors were. I tried to set foot in a few and could feel my hearing being damaged by the second. The closest noise i've heard elsewhere is the ball mills used for grinding coal in power plants.
I was talking about "Gehmu Sentah", aka Game Centers being horrible.
Pachinko is Pachinko, not an arcade. I'd appreciate a less patronising tonality, especially because you are wrong in saying that in Japan, Pachinko and Arcades are seen as even closely related.
May I ask what is your alleged expertise on Japan based on? I lived in the country for several years.
Aren’t the pachinko places almost completely run by North Koreans? I’ve heard this is one of Kim Jong Un’s biggest sources of income, but that could have been exaggerated or made up.
That's just one of many Japanese xenophobic myths. Like they're saying the Yakuza only recruits Korean-Japanese people. Or whenever you tell a Japanese person you saw someone behaving badly in Japan, their first reaction will be "he / she was Korean / Chinese". Not "probably", they pretend they know.
The world knows too little how brainwashed the Japanese public is.
By boat, or more specifically, ferry. This is why North Korea gets angry whenever Japan decides to sanction the ferry route between the two countries. Though I guess they haven't let that route run since 2006, I'm not sure how they do it now.
Japan doesnt have normalized relations with NK. You can't just take a boat there with bags full of yen.
I think what you've heard is probably a reflection of SOUTH Koreans who work in Japan, who are discriminated against by the Japanese, and as such work in places like pachinko parlors because bigotry keeps them out of more reputable and better paying jobs. They do ship money back to family in SK.
Northern Koreans are trapped by their regime and escapees are rare.
The bigotry towards South Koreans in Japan and how so many of them are forced to work in pachinko or other shady businesses is so common there's even a famous novel about it:
What arcades are you talking about, if you don't mind me asking? All the Sega ones were about as mainstream as you could get. I would walk out of Sunshine City in Ikebukuro and see it filled with normal-ish people. I even took my kids to play Taiko no Tatsujin in Nakano Broadway.
The tobacco issue was a lot better in Tokyo when I left; most indoor places are non-smoking now. IMO that is the only true benefit Tokyo reaped from the 2020 Olympic preparations.
It greatly depends; the notorious slot machine (pachinko) industry is mostly run by organized crime [1] and pachinko lovers are not well received in general, but arcade game centers described in this article are not necessarily pachinko parlors. And if a single arcade does have both pachinkos and other ordinary games, they are typically sectioned so that if you only want to play ordinary games you don't ever need to cross the pachinko area (in the other words, pachinkos are pervasive but also well hidden from the public sight).
[1] Many of them are also run by Korean Japaneses and this is a consequence of the discrimination of Koreans in Japan.
Only if you count Round One, Sega, Taito or Namco as organized crime (all of which run major nationwide arcade franchises). I don't claim every arcade is free of organized crime (quite contrary), the industry has moved on quite a bit.
I mean it's already proven that Konami is a Yakuza business, it's pretty safe to assume that in uniform culture like Japan, no non-shady entities would get into video game arcades because the risk to compete with organised crime isn't worth it.
I admit, one would have to have lived in Japan and made all sorts of experiences there in the entertainment sector in order to not discount this as paranoid bs.
But when you understand how the Japanese economy is divided by sectors, and that historically, the entertainment sector (hostess clubs, adult video makers, brothels, arcades, gambling parlours, horse racing, boat racing, etc.) has always been run by organised crime, it's very obvious that no reputable company would touch it.
"Run by the mob" to us in the West conjures up images of thugs doing half-assed things in an unorganised, small way, but that's not true for Japan. The Yakuza not having to hide in Japan, has succeeded building well-functioning, big international corporations - when you visit their offices, you'll meet no tattooed thugs with missing pinkys. But that doesn't mean that they're not another branch of a criminal empire.
> it's already proven that Konami is a Yakuza business
It was never proven so. Honestly speaking this rumor (from the Western side) is mostly a knee-jerk reaction from Kojima's firing, which lacks substantial evidences. Yes, Konami is well known for its shitty business and toxic inside culture but that can always happen without Yakuza ties. To my knowledge there was no direct evidence demonstrated for any major gaming company being under the heavy Yakuza influence. Partly because it is so sensitive subject and partly because you are misunderstanding Yakuza ties.
You are right that Yakuza does run big corporations, but traditional Yakuza was concentrated on specific industries like construction and gambling. The 1991 Act on Organized Crimes [1] effectively destroyed the lowermost structure of Yakuza groups so they no longer possess an effective means for violence (and any remaining lower structure has been largely outsourced by now). Major groups surviving today are therefore more like investment funds, with the seed money coming from past organized crimes. They do still commit crime (and they still fight wars with rival groups a lot), but their crimes are no longer discernible from other financial crimes. Having a Yakuza tie in terms of funding is not really a surprising matter for that reason. They can't overtake existing enterprises as like they could in the last century.
> no non-shady entities would get into video game arcades because the risk to compete with organised crime isn't worth it.
Do you know that Japanese showbiz has a rather strong Yakuza influence and yet there are many companies not affiliated with Yakuza? Unlike supposed Yakuza connections to gaming companies there is a substantial body of evidences, Yoshimoto Kogyo and Burning Production to name a few (known to be affiliated with Yamaguchi-gumi and Inagawa-kai respectively), and yet their influence falls short of the entire industry.
The problem you have is that you don't have practical experience living and working in the country and haven't been able to develop a feel or "bullshit radar" for how things work there. The 1991 act was just another sham which was set up for show, i.e. to convince Japan's overseas trading partners that it is cracking down on organised crime. It's just a document Japan can always point at and say "see we have outlawed the Yakuza, aren't we just like you?",similarly how you just did ;-)
You simply need to understand that in Japan, that the insight you made: "Yes, Konami is well known for its shitty business and toxic inside culture but that can always happen without Yakuza ties" is simply wrong.
Companies who behave like this in Japan are not normal companies. They always have ties to organised crime, full stop. No normal company would risk being seen as a black kigyō, because like I tried to explain above, the divisions between those companies and reputable companies in Japan are extremely strong and there is no gray area.
From your name, I reckon you are culturally inclined to perpetuate false myths out of some East Asian pride reflex?
If you had enough insight to infer my nationality (which is not even a secret), you should have also inferred that most Koreans have no f---ing reason to have "some East Asian pride reflex" right? You really sounds like some random Westerner who happens to know something about Japan and is desperately trying to overgeneralize that to other Asian countries.
By the way, the same can be said for most Koreans. In fact Koreans don't like Japan so much that there are widespread false beliefs about Japan---say, the social acceptance of the Adult Video industry (which still doesn't exist) or the fabricated reporting of COVID-19 cases (which might or might not have been happened, but if it did happen, was not that excessive as the rumor suggested) or even that there is zero stigma about game centers (there is, but not to the extent you have initially suggested). There are also many true beliefs that I can independently verify from multiple sources, including those about the modern Yakuza. But you seem to believe that the Japanese society is so conglomerated that it can make any such source up to cover its innards and you can only trust insider's accounts (and I do have plenty from my friends in Japan). How am I supposed to rationally continue this discussion given that?
As a Japanese, I can say "Yes, Konami is well known for its shitty business and toxic inside culture but that can always happen without Yakuza ties". Other Japanese people would agree. Working environment in some Japanese company could be terribly bad for worker. See "Most Evil Corporation of the Year" award.
Stop trolling. You should have any source to say "this company is operated by yakuza".
I agree about the horribleness of Japanese game arcades, but that actually can be an attraction if you’re in the right (or wrong?) frame of mind. I’ve dropped into “game centers” quite a few times over the years—usually just to use the restroom, though occasionally to look around. While arcades in the suburbs can be just annoying with the noise and teenagers, those in the scuzzier areas of big cities—Shimbashi and Kabukicho in Tokyo, Isezakicho in Yokohama, Nishinari in Osaka—can have an atmosphere of life-on-the-skids ennui all their own. I remember, one weekday afternoon, watching several middle-aged guys silently sitting at a horse racing game—something like the ones in [1] and [2]—in the dim basement of a run-down building in Shimbashi. It looked like they had been there all day. What a way to spend one’s life.
I haven’t been in any arcades for several years, but apparently they have been no-smoking since April 2020 [3, in Japanese].
In case anyone’s interested, below are some Google views of Japanese game centers that don’t look very enticing, at least to me. The first three are in Osaka; the fourth is in Shimbashi, Tokyo.
Here's one I frequented semi-regularly when I lived in Tokyo. It is also maybe one of the most iconic game centers, being in Akihabara right outside the metro station with a large "SEGA" sign. Super not sketchy, mostly normal and mostly young people, no smokers, several women, even people there as couples.
The whole entertainment sector in Japan that caters to nerds aka otakus is very much not enticing to normal people. It's very seedy, and run by crime syndicates.
The arcades I went to in Akihabara was pretty family friendly, but I did go to a smaller one on the 3rd floor of an anonymous looking business building in a different neighborhood and it was a bit seedy, but it was just nerdy guys playing classic games and classic consoles and not dangerous seeming at all. I wonder if your gf's perceptions are colored by how conformist and competitive Japanese culture is. Of course those men are "losers," they are spending all their time playing children's games. My understanding is that men and women over 25 who aren't married there are seen as "losers" as well, and not being married and being video game obsessed must be a kiss of death in that culture.
As a child of the 80s I'm very familiar with the seedy arcade in the USA. I remember every machine having an ashtray wedged between controller and screen and that awful stink. I doubt the men there were regarded as anything but "losers" by the mainstream of the time as well. Being a capitalist culture, gamers weren't respectable until streaming and tournaments in which they could become wealthy. Money makes right in our culture. So our current perception of gamers is very far from what people thought back then who couldn't get rich playing games.
There is also a very real problem with shut-in otaku/hikikomori culture. A lot of otakus are real losers by the standard of any western society, their level of social isolation is massive and there is no redemption for them. Otaku and gaming subcultures often overlap, inevitably there is some association.
It depends on the location. There are (maybe now, were) plenty of smaller arcades in standalone buildings that were under-ventilated, dimly lit, and always ridiculously loud. But many others are in shopping malls (like Aeon) and have some of the same games (and many more UFO catchers) without the smoking etc. Everytime I'm back in Japan I notice more restrictions on smoking, it's obviously still highly prevalent, but most larger/newer arcades have some floors or areas where smoking is restricted.
Just a tip, if you ever want to check out pachinko places, bring earplugs. To find out why, just walk in front of the automatic door, and you'll discover very quickly how much was invested in a multi-pane sound-insulating door. It's an experience.
I haven't visited them in Japan, but the two Round1's I've been to in the states have been great. They have standard US arcade games, but also a good selection of Japanese rhythm and fighting games. And when I say Japanese, I'm talking very obviously direct imports, same cabinets and everything. And yes, some of those games are only in Japanese.
