PACHINKO, a vertical pinball game, is said to have originated in Nagoya during the bleak
days after World War II. It is not difficult to imagine why Japanese flocked to the glittering
noisy shops to spend hours feeding metal balls into the machines. A winner could exchange
the balls for cigarettes, candy, and a variety of other goods that were hard to come by in those
days. Since that time pachinko has grown into one of the most popular forms of personal entertainment. As of 1996 there were nearly thirty million avid players across the country.
Why it continues to attract so many Japanese every day is another question.
It is possible to compare pachinko to the slot machines of Las Vegas which cater to the
same kind of addicts, require the same kind of mechanical ritual to play, and are surrounded
by the same kinds of superstitions involving "lucky" machines and "lucky" days. But
pachinko, from a strictly legal point of view, is not a form of gambling. Though one pays for
the metal balls, it is more like borrowing since the balls one wins are exchanged for goods.
However, leaving these legal niceties aside, the Japanese game is not confined to one or two
special places but can be played anywhere in Japan, near almost any train station, in shops
often lined up four or five in a row.
Though the element of chance and the various prizes one can win are part of the lure of
the game, it is probably the place itself, the pachinko parlor, that first attracts the curious
visitor. Hundreds of multicolored electric and neon lights rival the largest advertising billboards
as visual attractions. Yet the exterior merely hints at the sensory experience that lies within.
Pachinko takes its name from pachin, the sound the ball makes as it ricochets through
the machine. Multiply one pachin by thousands of balls rushing through hundreds of machines
and you have quite a din. But add the ever present John Philip Sousa-style martial music
played at eardrum-shattering volume and you have an auditory environment that even the
most hardened riveter would find intolerable. Yet the patrons, like monks lost in meditation,
seem oblivious to the racket. A psychologist might describe the condition as sensory overload:
overwhelmed, the mind stops its normal functions and all that is left is the one circuit
that connects the thumb, holding the firing knob, to the eye following the bouncing ball.
It must be this kind of hypnotic experience that the real pachinko addict seeks time after time.
The latest automatic machines relieve the player even of the necessity of moving his
thumb; he merely turns a knob to fire the balls. Other recent improvements include TV sets
placed in the center of the machine itself and shops that look more like gaudy hotel lobbies
with chandeliers, mirrors on the walls, and attendants at a front desk.
The popularity of the most recent challenge to pachinko's supremacy, the arcades filled with video games, has been unable to overtake pachinko's number-one spot, and it is easy to
understand why. Though the sound of a "hit" produces a hair-raising burst of electronic noise,
a video-screen image can hardly compare to the colorful face of the pachinko machine with
its sizzling yellow and chartreuse designs, And of course a video game eats up 1 00-yen coins
and gives the player nothing in return but an occasional high score.
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