Don’t ever forget this. In Japan, people really, really like Pokémon. So today, when the newest Pokémon Center opened in Kyoto, there were massive lines to get into the store.
Yesterday, when I visited the shop to check out its limited goods, I kind of thought, hey, people will come tomorrow. Did they ever.
As pointed out on Hachima, here’s how much of the day has turned out so far.
People starting getting in line before 5am this morning.
This was taken at just before 7am.
Two hours before the shop was to open at 10am, there was about two hundred people in line.
A line was formed inside to get into the shop. This is before 10am, and the Twitter user compares the wait at Universal Studios Japan.
The sign says the wait is “zero minutes.” The staff hadn’t yet started tracking how long the wait was.
Keep in mind, this is for a single shop opening, and this is a weekday.
At 10:15am, the wait was around 210 minutes or 3.5 hours.
This is at 10:20am. Two hundred and seventy minutes.
Geez.
And it’s been so crowded that separate registers were set up outside of the Pokémon Center to process all the sales as quickly as possible.
At 11:44am, the official Pokémon Twitter account stated that the wait time was over six hours and added that the store would be open until 8pm. Meaning? Depending on how the line goes, some people who line up later in the day might not be able to get in to the shop.
That was peak Pokémon Center Kyoto fever. By 5pm Japan time, the wait time had cooled off to between 15 to 30 minutes. Good to know and never forget how popular Pokémon is in Japan. Never.
Top image: gorou12 | marimo6_5_3 | tieela_with_you | water010 | U_Y_0624
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