We check to see whether or not the rumors of Odaiba’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Odaiba is a man-made island in Tokyo Bay, but is it also a ghost town? Over the past few years, a number of entertainment complexes and sightseeing attractions in the neighborhood have closed down.
● Oedo Onsen Monogatari hot spring bathhouse (closed September 2021)
● Giant Sky Wheel Ferris wheel (closed August 2022)
● Venus Fort shopping center (closed March 2022)
● Megaweb Toyota History Garage (closed December 2021)
● Immersive Fort Tokyo indoor theme park (closed February 2026)
In addition, broadcaster Fuji TV, whose headquarters is located in Odaiba, is still reeling from a 2024 sexual harassment scandal, and has been keeping a lower profile and scaling down fan events hosted at the facility. And while Odaiba shopping center Diver City isn’t closing down, it is just about to lose its full-size Unicorn Gundam statue, which is going to be dismantled at the end of this month.
So yes, the Odaiba district, as well as the Aomi neighborhood it blends into, have lost some points of appeal, and recently many people online have been voicing their opinion that the area’s days as a fun place to spend the day are over. Curious to see if it’s already deserted, we hopped on the train and rode to Tokyo Teleport Station on the Yurikamome Line, Odaiba’s most centrally located rail stop…
…and right away saw a whole lot of people.
Heading up out of the subterranean station, we observed a steady stream of pedestrian traffic heading towards Diver City, plus the shoreline blocks where the Aqua City entertainment complex and Joypolis video game arcade are located.
Looking in the opposite direction, though, things were much less lively.
That there is the empty husk of the building that used to contain Venus Fort, the Megaweb Toyota History Garage, and the Giant Sky Wheel. Actually, it’s also the building that used to contain Immersive Fort Tokyo, as it moved into Venus Fort’s old location. Unfortunately, the concept of an amusement park dedicated to large-scale walk-through immersive mystery and horror experiences turned out to be either too narrow in appeal, too high in operating costs, or some combination of the two, and after opening in March of 2024, Immersive Fort Tokyo failed to make it to its second birthday before permanently shutting down. In the six months since then, there hasn’t been any announcement as to what the building’s fate will be, and even from the outside, you can feel a sense of emptiness while looking at it.
However, while no one, of course, was going into the building, there were a whole lot of people walking past it, and in the opposite direction from those headed to Diver City and Aqua City.
Curious to see where they were headed, we followed the flow and learned that they were on their way to Toyota Arena Tokyo, a new sports and music venue that opened in October of last year.
On this day, up-and-coming boy band Number_i was holding a concert at the arena, which has a maximum capacity of 11,000 visitors. Though it was still some two hours before the group was scheduled to take the stage, fans were already lining up to purchase merchandise being sold at stands set up in the paddock area of the City Circuit Tokyo Bay go-kart track next to the stadium.
Large numbers of fans were also arriving at the nearby Aomi Station and making their way to the arena, making this part of the island feel very lively.
But as we walked back towards the former Venus Fort/Immersive Fort Tokyo building, things started looking very lonely again.
Next to Diver City is a massive parking area, which was almost entirely empty. This isn’t really a reflection on Diver City’s popularity, though, as the shopping center has its own attached parking structure.
This lot is more of a neighborhood overflow parking area, and it’s also sometimes used as an event venue for open-air events like music festivals. On this day, though, it was quiet and still (though it did give us a nice line of sight to Gundam’s head, peeking out from above the tops of the trees between the lot and Diver City).
Continuing down the pedestrian path further away from Diver City, there were so few people around that it started to feel like we’d wandered into a rather nicely landscaped liminal space.
After walking past yet another large and empty parking lot, we were in the vicinity of another Yurikamome Line stop, Tokyo International Cruise Terminal Station, which used to be called Fune-no-kagakukan Station. Why the name change? Because the Museum of Maritime Science, as the Fune no Kagakukan facility was called in English, largely ceased operations in 2011, and its buildings were demolished in 2024 and 2025.
As the station’s new name implies, though, there’s also a terminal for international cruise ships here, which opened in 2020.
We decided to mosey on over and see if there was anything cool inside, like a restaurant row or some souvenir shops.
There was not.
It’s startling how utterly devoid the building’s interior is of anything not related to processing passengers for embarkation and disembarkation. Unless you’re getting on or off a ship, the only reason to spend any time here is to take in the views from the outdoor observation deck, which, admittedly are pretty nice.
The deck doesn’t draw many visitors, though, as it was basically just us and this person who’d brought their SLR camera with them to snap long-distance pictures of the boats in the bay.
Speaking of boats, though the Museum of Maritime Science is no more, its biggest attraction is still on display. Even after the museum’s closure, the Soya icebreaker vessel, famous for a series of Antarctic research and rescue missions in the 1950s and ‘60s, remains docked in Odaiba as a museum ship.
As you can see, though, it wasn’t exactly buzzing with activity, and that was sort of the theme for the rest of our walk around Odaiba.
At one point, we came across this group of perched pigeons lined up on top of a fence, and it was more company than we’d had for a long time. As if to hammer home the point that this wasn’t really a people place, not a single one of the birds felt the need to fly off or otherwise put any distance between us as we walked by.
Once we were back to Tokyo Teleport Station, though, we had many members of our own species around us, a lot of them walking towards Toyota Arena Tokyo as the start time for Number_i’s concert drew nearer.
So can Odaiba be called a ghost town? Eh, that’d be going too far. It’s definitely lost a lot of the energy it had during the early 2000s, when it enjoyed a reputation as a fashionably trendy part of town. In particular, the losses of Oedo Onsen Monogatari and Venus Fort took a lot of the buzzing excitement with them, since there were both adjacent to the plaza in front of Tokyo Teleport Station. Instead of having a lively central hub, visitors to the neighborhood are now funneled off in different directions to venues several blocks away from each other, so there isn’t the same cohesive fun atmosphere there used to be.
That said, once you get closer to those currently active venues, the mood brightens up considerably. However, the drawing power of Toyota Arena Tokyo is going to vary significantly depending on whether or not there’s an event going on that day, as well as by what the event is. Also, while the Tokyo Big Sight convention center is technically in the Ariake district that’s across a canal from Odaiba/Aomi, major events held there can also draw more people to Odaiba, since it offers more dining/shopping options than Ariake does, but again, it doesn’t have things going on seven days a week.
So it’s still too early to write Odaiba off, but it does seem like its visitor numbers are going to fluctuate more than they did in the past, especially with the upcoming loss of another every-day attraction when the Unicorn Gundam is removed.
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