Frustrated groans and whoops of excitement echo around the ninth floor of a Shibuya game center. Surprisingly, there's not a video or arcade game in sight.
In fact, the cacophony of virtual madness that would seem more appealing to Shibuya's youthful clientele is receiving relatively little attention on the ground floor. It is replaced on the ninth by a game generally associated in Japan with bored "onsen" (spa) goers and spotty, baseball-card collector types -- ping-pong.
Table tennis is enjoying a boom in Tokyo, particularly in Shibuya, where the ephemeral lingo of local trendies refers to the game as "Shibutaku" -- an abbreviation of Shibuya and "takkyu," Japanese for table tennis.