Zeon Attack!

Venture upstairs, and the light becomes dimmer, the cacophony louder. The air, only a fraction of which is oxygen, stinks of cigarettes and concentration. There are slightly familiar fighting games, quiz games and music games where you play an instrument like drums, guitar, even DJ turntables, to a rapid fire beat. Dancing games popular in the United States, like Dance Dance Revolution, appear passé.

I saw exactly one Tetris machine, and it appeared lonely. Instead, the upper floors of the arcades were dominated by multiplayer card games, like Momo's Gundam battle. Players compete against each other on networked terminals in virtual baseball, soccer, tennis, mah-jong and horseracing, each with their own fanatical followings. Player rankings are stored online. You buy the playing cards at any toy store—they resemble old baseball trading cards—and success in the game improves their value. In each arcade, there are also bulletin boards for players seeking to trade cards. "I want an extra Kawasaki [a player]. I will give up an extra Nioka. Let's exchange," read a note that "Oyabi" had taped in one Shibuya arcade.

Arcade baseball can't hold a bat to Sega's The Great Battle of Three Countries, or Sangokushi Trisen , another card-type game based on the wars of medieval China. I can honestly say I had no idea what was going on, except that players—who lined up for the busy machines in one Shibuya arcade—manipulated their virtual armies and weapons with playing cards on a magnetic surface, in the same way Momo did with Gundam. We talked to one college-age player, Maseki, who had an iPod stuffed in his shirt pocket and a Kirin beer in his hand. He said he plays about twice a month at about $3 a game, though the stack of character cards in his hand betrays a deeper addiction. "I can learn all the background and histories of the characters," he said, adding he also reads manga related to the Sangokushi saga.

Not content to simply survey the action, I played a bit too. I tried my hand at the multiplayer fighting game Dark Resurrection and picked as my virtual warrior a white polar bear. I played the computer and was drubbed by a mohawked fighter who resembles The Rock. My Japanese interpreter, fighting as a boxing-gloved Kangaroo with a snowboard on its back and scuba fins on its feet, was defeated in the game by a tattooed girl.

So this is what we are missing in America, with our arcades abandoned by the big entertainment and game companies and converted into Baby Gaps. Japan's "quarter kids" have grown up and are still having fun.

Yet there's evidence that the country is ambivalent about its arcades. Japan is facing a looming demographic nightmare. With an increasing elderly population and a decreasing birth rate, there simply won't be enough workers to support the senior population. At the same time, young people dubbed neets (who live with their parents and refuse to get jobs), and freeters (who only have part-time work) are much-discussed social groups who exacerbate the population and workforce imbalance.