You can now rent Sega’s iconic Building 2 Akihabara arcade space, but it’ll cost you…A LOT

Even hanging some of those cool posters on the outside will cost you a small fortune.

Last month marked the end of an era in Tokyo’s Akihabara, with the closing of the multi-floor Sega Building 2 video game arcade. For nearly 20 years, the seven-story skyscraper proudly welcomed visitors to the world’s biggest otaku neighborhood, often with gigantic banner of anime/video game characters hanging down the side of the building.

But while the games, UFO catchers, and sticker picture booths have all been packed up and shipped out, the building itself, called the Dai Ichi Handa Building, is still standing, and looking for a new tenant for its first seven floors. Even if Sega has decided to go elsewhere, the structure, which was built in 1984, still has a great location, boasting fantastic visibility and plenty of pedestrian traffic going to/from Akihabara Station, which is just two minutes’ walk away. And while the newly available floors aren’t incredibly spacious individually, between the seven of them you still get just over 1,114 square meters (11,991 square feet) of total floor space.

▼ Photos of the current state of the interior and floor plans

So if you’re looking to open some sort of cool anime/video game-focused venture in the heart of Tokyo, this is your chance, right? Well, that depends on how much seed money you’ve got saved up, because monthly rent is listed at 15.4 million yen (US$146,500).

On top of that, there’s a monthly building management/maintenance fee of 935,000 yen. You’ll also need to provide 12 months’ worth of rent, or 184.8 million yen, as a deposit. Oh, and reikin/”key money,” the non-refundable gratuity paid to a landlord before moving in, is in effect too, and will cost you an additional one month’s rent, meaning that by the end of the first month, the new tenant will need to have handed over 215.6 million yen (roughly US$2.05 million).

But hey, at least you’ll be able to hang some cool banners on the outside of the building, like Sega did when it occupied the space, right? Maybe, because once again, that’ll cost you. Since the tenant is just renting the interior space, not buying the building, the basic lease doesn’t provide rights for the structure’s exterior. Those are a separate fee, and appear to be an option that’ll set you back 350,000 yen (US$3,300) a month, plus, of course, the cost of producing the banners themselves.

▼ Even with Japanese arcade games costing 100 yen a play, that’s a lot of rounds of Virtua Fighter.

Add it all up, and it starts to get a little easier to see why Sega vacated the iconic location, especially when it’s also paying rent for multiple other arcades it operates within a few blocks of the Dai Ichi Handa Building. Making things particularly tricky is that the building’s interior design features escalators that run from one floor to the next, which would make it hard to isolate the floors and offer them as separate rental properties. If you’ve got deep pockets and big dreams, though, the Dai Ichi Handa Building’s online rental listing can be found here.

Sources: At Home, Gen Estate via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Wikipedia/毒島みるく (edited by SoraNews24)
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