Namco Akihabara, a new arcade in Tokyo, boasts six floors of challenges, including Gundam fighting, claw machines, trading cards games and Taiko drums. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
Contact us to discuss your requirements of claw machines in japan. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.
A new arcade in Tokyo’s Akihabara district boasts six floors of challenges, from Gundam fighting to claw machines and Taiko drums.
No wonder Namco Akihabara opened shop in Japan’s anime, video-game and electronic retail hub. It competes for consumer time and yen coins with a cluster of similar arcades.
In the basement you’ll find more than 40 stations for a Gundam-themed fighting game. It’s similar to other fighting games like Street Fighter or Tekken in which multiple players choose a character and fight until only one is left standing.
In Namco Akihabara's basement you’ll find just over 40 stations for a popular Gundam-themed fighting game. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
Namco Akihabara's first and second floors are stocked with claw machines filled with figurines and plushies of characters from popular anime like Pokemon, One Piece and Dragon Ball. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
The first and second floors are stocked with claw machines filled with figurines and plushies of characters from popular anime like Pokemon, One Piece and Dragon Ball.
The claw arms have varying strengths, so you may need a couple of tries to gauge the strength of each machine’s grip. I found that most of the claws were very weak and gripping the prize inside difficult.
Each attempt at a claw machine costs 100 yen with a sixth, free attempt added if you pay for five attempts at a time. A change machine near the escalator will break up your paper bills into coins.
Most of Namco Akihabara's third floor is dedicated to a Taiko drum game that is popular in arcades across Japan. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
Most of the third floor is dedicated to a Taiko drum game that is popular in arcades across Japan. The game has a variety of songs to drum along with, and you can use your own drumsticks if you choose.
In the back are video games with anime themes, the most notable being JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Gachapons are machines common in Japan that dispense a variety of small toys in plastic capsules that typically cost between 100 and 500 yen. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
The fourth floor is occupied by a gachapon forest. Gachapons are machines common in Japan that dispense a variety of small toys in plastic capsules that typically cost between 100 and 500 yen. Each machine displays a picture of the prizes you have a chance of winning. The machines on this floor cover a wide range of themes, including animals, food, Gundam and popular anime.
After receiving a prize from the gachapon machines, return the empty capsule to the capsule return machine in the corner next to the escalator to the fifth floor. This gives you a chance to win more prizes, and the directions are posted on the capsule return.
Namco Akihabara's fifth floor opened recently and is designated for trading card games like Pokemon, One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh! (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
The fifth floor opened recently and is designated for trading card games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!
The walkways on the floors with claw machines and in the gachapon forest are narrow and you may not have the ability to turn around and travel against the flow of traffic depending on how busy those floors are.
I recommend bringing a backpack to hold your winnings, but plastic bags are available on the second floor for a small fee.
Namco Akihabara, a new arcade in Tokyo, boasts six floors of challenges, including Gundam fighting, claw machines, trading cards games and Taiko drums. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
On the QT
Directions: A short stroll from Akihabara Station’s Electric Town exit. Address: 1-15-9 Sotokanda, Chiyoda city, Tokyo 101-0021
If you want to learn more, please visit our website how much does a custom vending machine cost.
Times: Open daily, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Costs: 100 yen for most arcade games
Dress: Casual
Food: You’ll find plenty of snack options in the area.
Information: 03-6260-7400; Online: bandainamco-am.co.jp/game_center/loc/akihabara
While enrolled at THINK Global School, students are encouraged to be creative during the course of their studies and travels. When the students document these thoughts, we are often delighted with the results. In the following exercise for Guillermo Machado’s mathematics class, ninth graders Danielle and Galek document their work in trying to determine how much money a Japanese claw machine requires before resulting in a win.
Today, apart from traditions, Japan is best known for five things: cars, anime, computer parts, nuclear reactors, and video arcades. The first time I walked into one such arcade I was shocked. In addition to all the usual thrills such as Mario Kart, Dance Dance Revolution and sharp shooter-like games, there was also an extremely large amount of claw machines. While these are obviously not unheard of to Westerners like myself, rarely are they seen in such copious amounts and in such serious gamer territory. Running though my mind at the time was a thought shared by many first-time visitors to such places: “I wonder how much money the arcade is making on these things?” in addition to the popular “What are the odds that you would actually win a prize?” And so, when the time was ripe for Galek and I to choose a math project, we remembered these shared thoughts and ponderings and resolved to turn it into our mathematical investigation.
First things first: in order to calculate the sum, we would need to find out, on average, the probability of winning a prize from the machines. The only way to do this was to play them. In order to keep a balanced experiment, we alternated machines and more than one person would have to play each round. That would be the first step in our investigation. From there we also arranged to poll some of the other players in order to ask them how much money they spent, how often they won and how many times they went to the arcade per week on average.
What we needed:Research Questions
How often do you come here?
How much money do you spend here each time?
Have you won anything today?
The survey itself would cause complications, one of which being the language barrier. Working together with Theresa, a student from Hiroshima International School, we were able to translate all three of our questions and put them into an instant, looped survey on the iPad using the application, “Quick Tap Survey.”
On the day of the investigation, we arrived at Taito Arcade with the iPad in hand. Using garbled combinations of what we hoped were Japanese words and phrases, we asked Japanese strangers to complete our survey. The program uses multiple choice questions that have to be tapped by the user in order to register their responses. After asking exactly fifty people our three questions we proceeded to the second stage of our investigation.
Once we were finished with the second half of the experiment, we collected the data into charts and graphs for use in our calculations. In order to calculate the total amount of money spent at the arcade per week we needed to know how many people visited the arcade’s claw games per day. After discussing it with the manager, we were told that number was 1,000. Armed with that knowledge, we then proceeded to calculate using the statistics we had collected. Please see below for more information about our equations.
After completing this section we proceeded forward to measuring the probability of winning one of the claw games. We were both given 1,000 JPY. So as to keep the investigation accurate, we both played the same machine once before moving on. After trying 25 times, we won once. This makes the probability of winning a claw game at this particular arcade in Japan 1/25 odds. Perhaps this graphic will better help illustrate the point:
On the whole, we quite enjoyed this project and were very satisfied with both the end product and the process we went through. I feel as though we learned a lot on the way, and equally importantly, took great joy in conducting the investigation. We were able to enhance our surveying skills, probability skills and, most importantly of all, graphic representation skills through it.
Are you interested in learning more about japanese claw machine? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!