Wii no Ma

» see wiinoma.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This one was region-locked at the hardware. You needed a Japanese Wii, because the channel would not install on any other, and then you needed enough Japanese to navigate a menu that was not a menu. I have never owned a Japanese console. Everything below is reconstructed from Nintendo's own pages and the archive, and I am writing it because it may be the strangest interface anybody ever shipped to 8.81 million people, almost none of whom lived outside Japan.

Wii no Ma means Wii Room. It arrived on 1 May 2009 as a free download from the Japanese Wii Shop Channel, 121 blocks, operated by a joint venture between Nintendo and Dentsu, by a wide margin the largest advertising agency in Japan. On paper it was video on demand with rentals and, later, a shop. In practice you opened it and were looking at a drawn living room.

Up to eight Miis lived in that room, and they were your family's Miis. They vacuumed and read manga. They ate lunch and played on their DSi. The room changed with the season and with the hour of the day, so an evening in November did not look like an afternoon in July. There was no list of programs to scroll. You pointed the Wii Remote at a part of the room and that took you somewhere, and pointing at the posters on the wall started whatever the poster was advertising.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the tea table ~

Iwata's own developer interview about the project is titled with where the idea came from, and it was the chabudai, the low table a Japanese family sits around. That table sat in the middle of the room and became the channel's icon. The design brief was not "how do we build a video app" but "what does the room look like when the family is in it", and everything else followed from that answer.

It filled up fast. By 26 October 2009, less than six months in, the service had been used by 2.48 million people across 930,000 households. The programming was original and family-shaped, and it went in unusual directions: you could filter the catalog the ordinary way, by category or by genre, and you could also filter it by blood type, which is a search field that tells you exactly which country this shipped in. After you watched something you rated it by dragging your own Mii onto one of four marks, from a double circle down to a cross.

Two updates changed it. On 21 November 2009 the Theatre arrived, a home cinema room with adjustable lighting where the Miis sat and ate, selling rentals paid for in Wii Points. The Muppets were in there, and so was Sesame Street, alongside the Pokemon series and Kirby: Right Back at Ya!. Then on 1 November 2010 came the shopping update, built with the catalog retailer Senshukai, selling groceries and DVDs of the channel's own shows. You could pay by card or in cash at a convenience store, and you could phone the order in if you did not trust the internet with it. That was the last update it ever got.

~ the thank you room ~

Nintendo posted the closure notice on 21 February 2012, three years after launch. No reason was given in it. The Wii U was nine months from release and the Wii was being wound down around this thing, and a video channel that only existed in one country was never going to make the crossing.

What they did with the remaining ten weeks is the part worth recording. On 3 March a new room was added to the parade of rooms, called Arigatou no Ma, the Thank You Room. On 28 April, two days before the end, a goodbye message from the staff played on the television inside the drawn living room. The companion DSiWare title, Dokodemo Wii no Ma, which let you carry videos out of the house on a DSi, was delisted on 30 April 2012 as well, so that nothing was left running by itself.

~ the deletion schedule ~

The site stayed up afterward as a single page of Japanese text, and the archive has it. It thanks users for three years of patronage and apologizes for the inconvenience. Then it does something companies almost never publish: it gives the dates on which it will destroy your records. Information from anyone who had entered a prize draw or written in with a question would be erased by 31 July 2012. Information from anyone who had ordered from the shop would be held one more year for support purposes and deleted on 1 May 2013. The copyright line at the bottom reads Wii no Ma Co., Ltd.

That company did not dissolve immediately. It was renamed Nintendo Network Service Database and carried on inside Nintendo until it was liquidated in 2018, six years after the thing it was named for stopped existing. The room itself came back in April 2020, rebuilt by Wii homebrew developers who have been translating and reviving Japan-only channels ever since, and on 5 December 2025 they got the DSi companion working with it again. Somebody outside Japan can finally sit at the tea table, thirteen years late.

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