Walking around Jakarta or Manila, I keep spotting young people in Japanese anime T-shirts and Japanese restaurants with lines out the door. Anime, food, games. Japanese culture is spreading overseas faster than I ever expected. As a Japanese person, I find it a genuinely happy sight.
Within that culture, there is one thing I have always felt hasn't fully reached the world yet: the game center. Dropping in on the way home from work, getting strangely serious in front of a claw machine, stuffing the plush toy you won into your bag. That space feels ordinary to Japanese people — but after living abroad, I realized it is actually a very particular, very rich piece of culture.
So today, let me tell you about a new product. KAZENA Amusement: a system that lets people operate real Japanese arcade machines — starting with claw machines — remotely from a phone or PC. The video arrives with low latency over a technology called WebRTC, and when you press a button, a real arm moves on the other side of the screen. We develop and sell this to operators, software and hardware as one package.
The greatest thrill is that the real thing moves. This is not a simulated game built from CG or graphics. A machine really moves, a prize really sways, and it really drops. What you win exists as a physical object. That feeling of reality responding to your fingertips is something no graphics, however beautiful, can replace. I believe it is also the reason online claw machines have been loved in Japan for so long.
The people we want to reach with this system are owners in Indonesia, the Philippines, and across Southeast Asia — and the users across the region who will get to play. Take Japan's game-center culture and launch it as a new business model under your own brand. Arranging the prizes into things local customers genuinely love sounds like great fun too. If we can help make that happen, nothing would make me happier.
Let me be clear about one thing. KAZENA Amusement is sold as a system only. What we provide is strictly for game-center (amusement) use — we do not develop, sell, or cooperate with anything gambling-related, in any form. That is a line our company has drawn, and we do not intend to bend it.
That game-center excitement, delivered into someone's everyday life across the sea. If you are an owner looking for the seed of a new business, or an operator who got curious reading this — please feel free to get in touch.
Tell us what you think
How the KAZENA apps feel to use, what we should fix, features you wish existed — if you run a small or medium business or work freelance in Indonesia or the Philippines, your voice is exactly what we want to hear. Messages in Bahasa Indonesia or English are answered by teammates who know your market from the inside. KAZENA Books is already set to launch in the Philippines and Indonesia — and if your company would like to bring it to other countries as a partner, or is interested in acquiring the system, we would love to hear from you too. We also take on new system development. We are a small team, so we cannot always start right away — but what we build carries made-in-Japan quality and stays close to how business really works here, one project at a time.
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