Landmark Akihabara arcade Adores is latest Tokyo game center to walk out business

Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood is a mecca for anime and video game fans, with a higher concentration of enthusiast oriented shops and venues than somewhere else in the country. But as the otaku flame burns bright in Akihabara, that doesn’t mean every establishment lasts forever, and the lights are going to go out at Adores, a landmark arcade right next to the Akihabara Station building. The arcade opened in September of 2012.

The first two floors of the scarlet Adores Akihabara Building 2 certainly are a game center filled exclusively with crane games/UFO catchers. This being Akihabara, many of the machines are stocked with plushies, figures, or other merch of popular game and anime characters. Floors 3-10, meanwhile, offer karaoke boxes in a convenient location for belting out a few anison numbers after a shopping trip with fellow fans.

Adores Akihabara Building 2’s official Twitter account keeps fans informed of new arrivals, like the chibi Akigumi plushies in the above notice. Their currently pinned, tweet, though, is something less inclined to bring a smile to otaku faces, since it reads:

“Thank you very much for your continued patronage. Because of various circumstances, we are closing on June 30. We desire to offer our deepest gratitude for our customers’ many years of support.”

“Various circumstances” is approximately as vague as explanations get, but it’s almost sure that the pandemic is a contributing factor. Ordinarily Akihabara draws a wide array of visitors from outside not merely Tokyo but from outside Japan aswell, and fewer tourists means fewer persons putting coins into crane games. Karaoke, too, is a thing that many persons feel is too risky to be indulging nowadays, and Adores’ rent, with the building located along the district’s greatest street, can’t be cheap.