Tokyo Game Show finally went five days and the weather said no
Japan's biggest game show spent 30 years working up to its most ambitious edition ever — and then September in the Pacific did what September in the Pacific does.
You have to appreciate the comedic timing. For its 30th anniversary, Tokyo Game Show expanded to five days for the first time in its history, under the official theme — I am not making this up — "The Longest Five Days of Nonstop Play." The play stopped on day four. Organizers canceled the entire final day, Monday, September 21, as Typhoon Dujuan bore down on the Tokyo region, and are refunding every Monday ticket.
The show's own commemorative artist had described this year's edition as
"the longest in history, packed with '5 DAYS of non-stop gaming,'"
in an interview with VGC about the anniversary key art. Somewhere, a typhoon took that personally.
Everything was going so well
And it really was the big one. This wasn't a modest anniversary lap; CESA built the largest TGS ever assembled:
- A record 1,138 exhibiting companies from a record 53 countries and regions, spread across 3,999 booths at Makuhari Messe — plus a whole additional venue, TKP Tokyo Bay Makuhari Hall.
- Three public days instead of two, the entire justification for the five-day format, with CESA expecting around 300,000 visitors — a figure that would smash 2025's total of 263,101.
- A commemorative 30th Anniversary Ticket that came with an actual pure gold medal engraved with game art, because when Japan celebrates a round number, it commits.
Days one through three went off as planned. Then the forecasts turned.
Enter typhoon number 25
Dujuan — the 25th named typhoon of 2026 — was projected to dump nearly 16 inches of rain on the Kanto region, with the worst arriving Sunday afternoon into Monday. All Nippon Airways started canceling flights; East Japan Railway began fully or partially suspending lines. Sunday's show went ahead with modifications, but the organizers pulled the plug on Monday entirely, citing intensifying wind and rain and the not-small matter of
"prioritizing the safety of all attendees, exhibitors, and related parties"
— along with everyone's ability to physically get home, which in a country where the trains stop for typhoons is not a rhetorical concern.
The unglamorous math of a canceled public day: attendees get refunds, but hundreds of exhibitors paid for five days of floor space and got four. As of the announcement, there was no word on how — or whether — that gets made right.
The final-day cancellation hits the smallest exhibitors hardest — the indie booths in Halls 9 and 10 that budgeted for a record crowd on a national holiday. TGS has run four-day shows for decades and knows exactly what they're worth: last year's four days drew those 263,101 people. The five-day experiment will have to wait until 2027 for an actual verdict. Assuming the Pacific signs off.
Earlier we wrote: What Castle in the Sky is based on, in Miyazaki's own account of the film's origins