Who wants to spend money playing with tiny balls when you can buy fish bladders and throw them at people instead. It’s much more fun.

Boring. Takes all your money. Never gives you any thing in return even though you keep giving in the futile hope that your consistent efforts will be rewarded. Spend enough time and you’ll surely go insane. And yet many people seem to flock, and somehow, thrive in an environment that cultivates such cruel things that, one might say, could be seen as an instrument of torture. Such a place, with such evil machinations, is accepted with open arms? It’s quite surprising the effect that corporations can have on a given populace as to make them eager to accept such treatment. Next stop: boot licking.

Ok. That was interesting. Anyway, we’re not being serious (we can’t be), this is a blog about Japan and such things are only rarely allowed; usually this is because I am hopped up on chuhai. However, not so today. The only boots we will lick will be ones with candy shells and chewy centers! This chewy center is not bubble gum, nor is it a tootsie roll, but something a little harder and more metallic, Pachinko. I have no idea how many of you have actually heard of Pachinko, so you can go over to the land of incessant retarded fights about minutiae of Henry Kissinger’s pant size. Then again, you don’t really need to do that cause it’s not very hard to explain it.

It’s a gate to a world of pain and cute bunnies.

Gambling (with money as the prize) is illegal in Japan and yet we have a game that, for all intents and purposes, is pretty much gambling. Furthermore, somehow it is not only able to exist, but thrive. How can this be in such a country? They don’t give you money when you win, just some other type of prize that isn’t actual currency. It doesn’t seem to matter that you can easily redeem these things for money or even use the things as a money substitute (gift cards, coupons, etc). However, what do you have to do to get these prizes?

This is the (not) fun part. What you do is the following. Take some money that you decided you really didn’t want (don’t take it from the jar of coke money, your nose need that coke more) and go to your nearest pachinko parlor. You probably won’t need to go to far as there are over 16,000 pachinko parlors (parlors every sq. mi., 9.1, every sq. m, 23.6) and since Japan is mostly uninhabited (the conservative estimate is 70%), you might not even have to hop on your bike (taking just the habited areas of japan, parlors every sq. mi., 2.7, every sq. m, 7.1).

He’s trying to win his honor… and sticker of Mew

You hand over that money that you didn’t want and get a huge number of small silver balls; we are going to be using these to try and win… more balls, that’s your goal. Now, don’t think that because this game has silver balls that it has anything to do with
pinball. Pachinko is what you get if you take pinball, remove the fun, and replace it with the Japanese anthem of 頑張って (you heard this one already. it’s only kind of an anthem really); no flippers, no bouncy things, no round bumpy things that give you points when you hit them. However, do not despair as you do more than just sit there while you shit your money down a machine that silently hates you, you get to turn a knob. Don’t get too excited. Most of the time you won’t actually be turning this knob, just holding it in one position once you find the optimal spot.

Now you sit, wait, and cry. You’re not going to win and all you can do is watch what is happening in front of you. You might get the feeling that you’re winning since so many things are happening on the screen in front of you, but you’ll be out of your metal balls of prosperity (+2 against hobos and spendthrifts) pretty soon. If you actually manage to tempt fate and win more balls you can trade them for something you might actually want (but probably not. remember ticket machines in arcades? were you ever able to win anything that you actually wanted? didn’t think so).

They’re lying to you.

That is how the game works. Seeing as how there are so many of these bastions of hell over here, I guess some people seem to like them. I don’t really understand how. It’s unbelievably loud and you go through so much money so quickly without really having much fun at all. If there are people that are having fun there, it doesn’t really look like it from their facial expressions.

You might get a festering case of curiosity if you ever come over here, but don’t listen. You can spend that money in many other places and it will last you a lot longer than in one of these yakuza fronted money suckers.

Here’s a video of the madness, which seems to have been filmed in Osaka: