Step out of almost any station and there is a gym, one where a convenience store used to be, another in the shell of a closed restaurant.

Japan now has 13,876 fitness facilities, and 1,266 of them opened in the past year alone.

Then the numbers turn. Teikoku Databank counted 23 gym bankruptcies from January to July, against 19 a year earlier. At that pace the year reaches 40, the most ever.

The trouble is not that nobody comes. It is that too many gyms chase the same commuters, so they all wave the same discounts, and members quit the moment the regular price kicks in.

One member had paid for 30 sessions up front. On the tenth visit, the shutter was down. That money is gone, and a contract signed inside the shop is not covered by the cooling-off rule.

The boom made the number of gyms fat. What got thin was the business.