Pachinko: Ruining Lives For Several Decades And Counting

If Satan has a summer home, away from the fiery confines of earth’s dark entrails, it is surely in a pachinko parlor somewhere in Japan; a home away from home for any practicing sadomasochist with a thirst for gambling induced pain. But even Beelzebub himself might get a little freaked out from time to time by these warrens of modern gaming and the automatons that they attract.

Pachinko, Japan’s upsetting contribution to the oh so respectable world of gambling, is pinball’s loathsome cousin; that extended family member that knees you in the balls, kicks you when you’re down, steals your money, and then convinces you to keep coming back for more. The machines, which combine the innocent, childlike-joy of pinball with the addictive, blood-thirsty trickery of slot machines, are scattered across Japan, congregated in pachinko parlors; boxy, colourful buildings, dazzling in their neon brilliance and shocking in contrast when planted amongst the most rural of rice paddies like misplaced, deceiving beacons of hope; attracting desperate Japanese gambling addicts like flies to a rotting opossum carcass on a hot strip of Florida asphalt.

Pachinko parlor parking lots, even in the most rural of settings, will often be full at 11 a.m. on any given day of the week; an achromatic sea of cars, backed into the narrow parking spaces and surrounded by the welcoming colours of tacky neon signposts, festive, feathered banners, and raffish posters of bikini-clad manga cartoon girls. But these tawdry, circus-like attractions - like a drug dealer offering to throw in free Ju-Jubes to entice a crack addict who is looking to score - are unnecessary in order to draw-in compulsive gamblers with an itch to lose some money.

When stepping through the electronic sliding doors of a pachinko parlor, you are instantly bitch-slapped across the face by the deafening hum of the machines; the ping-pang beeping of the flashing consoles and the incessant rattling made by thousands of small, pre-purchased steel balls. Players drop these tiny spheres into the money-stealing apparatuses in hoping that they will pass through a range of pins, and fall, not straight through to the bottom as is the norm, but into certain gates that in turn pay out more balls for you to squander away. The gamblers do so with repetitive, mind-numbing persistence, and often have plastic crates, piled full of the small steel balls, stacked at their feet. They play until they are left broke and destitute, and willing to sell their first born child for a chance to redeem themselves. The decibel level within these havens for the dim-witted of society is greater than that of the loudest nightclubs, preventing players from being able to converse with one another, and hence causing them to continue gambling away their children’s dental-funds uninterrupted.

As you clutch at your bleeding ears to try to block out the clattering rumpus, you can’t help but notice that you are nearly suffocating from the dense clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. The smoke is so thick in fact, that you can eat it with a spoon – and I have on several occasions. Like most Japanese establishments, pachinko parlors seem to be un-ventilated; a thick haze of death looming over the heads of the expressionless gamblers like a rain-filled cloud sitting lazily over a depressing village, about to dump its weight on the unhappy people below. Every hour spent in a pachinko parlor is another year of your life taken away. Some of the gamblers staring passively at their machines are in fact dead, just going through some sort of post-mortem arm twitching, allowing them to continue inserting the steel balls. Creatures of habit, they are.

Despite the fact that pachinko parlors are spread across Japan like fleas on a rabid dingo, gambling in this country is actually illegal; cash cannot be paid out. Thus, players take the steel balls that they are left with after hours of monotonous gambling, and they exchange them for a cheap prize, ranging from shoddy pencils to plastic watches or handbags, depending on the number of balls that one has amassed (if they are left with any at all). They then take that stingy prize outside to an adjacent cash booth and exchange it for cold hard cash-money. Ahhh… a gambling loophole. This ‘pseudo-cash’ gambling is also illegal in Japan, but obviously ignored by authorities.

One possible reason why the police don’t enforce the gambling laws may lie in the fact that pachinko parlors are largely controlled by organized crime; both by the Japanese and Korean mafia. Yes, organized crime and gambling; forever hand in hand like Michael Jackson and vulnerable children.

Regardless of who is running the pachinko parlors, their endeavors have been successful. Watching the pathetic people squander away their time, health and money while sitting inside the smoky gaming rooms is more painful than having a botched vasectomy; their burning cigarettes hanging from their half-open mouths while ash falls onto their crotches; staring at the flashing lights, their eyes un-blinking. It reminds me a bit of Christmas dinner with my family.

One of my cherished past-times during these past few months has been to go to the local pachinko parlor to watch the enraptured gamblers – sometimes for hours on end. I’ll park myself at my favourite machine, buy several hundred dollars’ worth of steel balls (I’m there anyway so I might as well play, right?), and try to strike up conversation with the preoccupied people at the neighbouring consoles – trying to pick their brains; wondering what makes them tick. They rarely say more than a few words to me, responding in un-enthusiastic grunts and smoky exhales of emotional pain. I usually end up talking to my blinking machine instead, shoving steel balls into the greedy bitch until she’s devoured the remaining money from my previous paycheck or until I’ve fallen asleep, my face pressed up against the beeping console, woken by a security guard blowing smoke in my face at closing time.

As I stumble outside into the early morning light, broke and hungry, I tell myself ‘never again’ - but that segment of society is just so intriguing to me – I can’t help but return for another look – just a little bit more sociological research. Now I’m battling a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, the ping-panging machines are constantly echoing in my tired mind, and I’ve never felt so unhealthy since taking up smoking. Mom, send more money please.

Further Pachinko Facts Taken From ‘Japan Zone’:

-it employs a third of a million people in Japan, three times more than the steel industry

-it commands 40 percent of Japan's leisure industry, including restaurants and bars

-and, 30 million regular enthusiasts coughed up almost 30 trillion yen in 1999 (a higher turnover than the car industry)