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While you may not think of malls when Japan comes up, there certainly are a lot of them. Odaiba in Tokyo is probably the most famous place in the country for shopping malls, though nearly every prefecture has at least one.

Shiga Prefecture is no exception and Biwako Cruising Mall, Pieri Moriyama, located on the shores of beautiful Lake Biwa is a mammoth mall with a grand opening in 2008 that saw 30,000 visitors on the first day. Packed with 200 shops and a ten-screen cineplex, it was a veritable shrine to consumerism for a couple of years.

However, Pieri Moriyama is now known for a different reason…

Thanks in part to a shrinking population and the economic downturn, only about 14 of the 200 stores (including ATMS) are still open today, leaving massive swaths of the enormous building almost entirely empty. Take a look at the mall’s guide map to put it in perspective.

▼ We’ve added red boxes around stores that are still open.

In case you’re having trouble believing what you’re seeing, that’s a nearly empty mall. Nothing but ghost stores remain. While the mall from Dawn of the Dead might be the scariest ever, Pieri is all the creepier for the lack of zombies–or anything else for that matter. And it’s even creepier for how clean and well-lit it is!

The mall has been under the management of various groups and an effort was made in 2010 to try to revitalize Pieri, but it obviously hasn’t worked yet. Just how they manage to keep the lights on in the entire building leaves us baffled.

Fortunately for those of us who don’t live in Shiga Prefecture, numerous photos of the nigh vacant mall have appeared online, giving us a “haunted” tour of the building.

▼ “I like this atmosphere,” one Japanese commenter wrote, “I kinda want to go.”

▼ “They should open a brothel,” suggested one less-than-helpful commenter.

▼ “It looks like the mall from Postal 2,” wrote another Japanese commenter.

▼ “Looking at their website is really depressing. You can search by different types of stores…but there’s almost nothing there!”

▼ “Wouldn’t this be a good place to hold a comic convention?”
asked one geeky commenter.

▼ “In five years, this is going to be a big hit among urban exploration
enthusiasts,” another Japanese commenter pointed out.

▼ “They should turn some of the empty stores into
30,000 yen a month (US$300) apartments!”

▼ “It’s just like a zombie movie!” added a Japanese commenter.
“They should rent it out to those kinds of film studios!”

▼ “The declining population in these rural areas is insane!” a commenter wrote.

▼ “Seems like a good place to use as an emergency shelter,”
one person suggested.

▼ Perhaps the freakiest part is the food court. It just looks…wrong somehow.

▼ “Yikes! The Pieri food court is too lonely!” this Twitter user commented.

▼ Uh, oh, looks like they’re attracting listless youth.
Better call in a specialist to deal with them!

In case you think we’re making this up and these pictures were actually just taken at night, here’s a video of someone taking a walk down one wing of the mall. It was filmed at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday!

We’re thinking that there are two different options for how to get this mall back on track: Either turn it into the most awesome paintball course ever or the most horrifying haunted house (haunted mall?) ever. Or what about…both?

Either way, this must be a spooky place to work after the sun goes down and the lights start getting turned off for the night.

Sources: Itai News, Naver Matome, Biwako Cruising Mall Pieri Moriyama
Image sources: Itai News, Naver Matome