By 1972 Japan had built almost as many bowling lanes as the entire United States, and more per person. Two years later a third of its bowling centers went dark. This is why.
At its peak Japan was the second-largest bowling nation on earth and closing on the first. It held 121,021 lanes across 3,697 centers against America’s roughly 130,000, and for a country half America’s size that worked out to nearly twice as many lanes per person. Ten million people were bowling. Tokyo’s World Lanes stacked a nine-story, 252-lane tower into a single building; Nagoya Grand Bowl ran 260 lanes across two buildings. The whole boom ran on open play, not the American league system, an
Full documentary: youtu.be/TsVRMuFZYns