Remember when we could walk for about a block and find an awesome Arcade to spend countless hours and money playing cutting edge games.
Japan Does, it was practically yesterday. For us, it was a different story.

Around the Dreamcast days, consumers and game makers in general knew that they didn't have to go away from their living rooms to experience the best in gaming. But in every person who lived through that era, we loved and missed those days.
Japan, until recently, got to hold on to this piece of video gaming youth a lot longer than the west. That is, until recent economics kicked in.
Kotaku.com
Oil Prices keeping the masses away from the malls and arcades, time, and the fact that any PS3 or X360 can play Virtua Fighter 5 as good as any arcade cabinet, is causing Sega and Namco to shut down Branded Arcades buy the hundreds.
Namco has a different place to put the blame, though.
EnGadget.com
Because the Wii is, well, freaking awesome and let's you play a historic amount of Nintendo back catalog plus some other past consoles. Namco thinks that that the game library is undermining to the content arcades in Japan provide.
With more services like WiiShop, XBL Arcade, and even Steam, maybe Japan is starting to see the reality of the situation: Home is where the Games are.