If you say the machines don’t need to be cleaned on the parts people don’t touch then that’s your thing, I guess. If you think it’s OK to laminate a “Watch it! Bagsnatchers!” Sign over the urinal instead of creating an establishment where it doesn’t happen, your call.

But…

Tokyo fix-all multipurpose commercial realty. Quietly stylish. Slick enough to skirt vogue for a decade; unobtrusive enough to get old and hide.

Have a good time!! Welcome to a special place ★ We wait for you challenge !!

What are all those card readers for on Japanese arcade cabinets? Here’s a quick guide.

Tokyo is never not busy, but sometimes it lulls. Like an ocean when the waves aren’t crashing but the bottomless power of the gloom is about to find another swell.

Tateishi Segafront’s a weird design mashup: 1930s Art Deco cinema entrance, 1940s militaristic stars and 1950s sailorboy babystripe, silver starshooting hopes of the spaceage 60s, bubblebumped 1970s lavalamp blobs, and Sega’s 80s iconography superimposed off-centre.

Anata No Warehouse in Kawasaki is themed to look like Kowloon’s walled city, the famous Hong Kong slum.

Milling about mainstrip Ikebukuro. A monumental Sega in the kind of playground district that gets remade in computer games. Level designers, empowered to build anything at all for free, see no reason to change it.

Figureheads was a Japan-only Squenix megafranchise that just never quite came to be. But while it lasted it was killer.

Let’s climb up these labels for game centre gubbins.

2017’s Densha De GO!! updated the 1996 classic with some neat features like sounding your horn in salute to trackside workers. But the basics are the same: Drive the train when told, stop the train when told. Don’t go too fast; don’t go too slow. Don’t stop at the wrong place on the platform – you’re measured to the centimetre.

Sega in the basement open 10 til 24.

Not many Japanese arcades really resemble anything we had in the UK, but Tokyo Joypolis is London Sega World’s alternative future.

When the Japanese borrow from other languages, creativity trumps authenticity. Sniggering at “English” misses the point – no one cares if it’s correct. It’s not for you.

Densha De GO! was a 1996 train driving simulator that let you experience all the grind and tedium of menial work for the low, low price of ¥100 a credit.

A Sega tower with seven signs bulges over the Akiba crossroads. This slice of the city is Sega, from gutter trench to scraped sky.

Akihabara out the back door of Taito Hey. People and electronics and karaoke and videogames and train lines in a pile.

I love seeing these bell-and-basket city bikes parked at this strip-mall Sega. Despite being specifically located for car access – drivable by an economically viable catchment of residential suburbs – for someone, this is the local arcade.

Check out this huge Sega logo stretched across the ceiling in Sega World Funabori. Funabori is a seriously old-school Sega: a large out-of-town premises with colourful, family-fishing Sonic signage and top-floor karaoke.

Japanese arcades are like common rooms for gamers: no entry fee, no cover charge – and… no staff?!

Sonic turned up in 1991. Flash, spicing up the playground, giving gangs of tough kids chance to gather round a gritty, grown-up renegade (a blue hedgehog in red trainers).

Out-of-town Sega. Out-of-everything out here, disconnected.

Japan’s heaven of arcades might not be what you think.