Myoden and Pachinko

Before i came to Japan i knew it was famous for a few things (Samurais, bullet trains, kimonos, sake, you can probably make your own little list) but there’s one other thing that seems to be more ubiquitous than all of the above and only becomes obvious after you’ve been here a while. It’s a game that is present near every train station and along almost every road. They’re a visual and audio abscess on the urban landscape of the county. The buildings that house them are almost always gaudy, sometimes angular, boxes that shout out colours, lights and a waterfall of sound to anybody within listening distance all day, every day. It is a game that i’ve only ever seen in Japan. It’s a slot machine arcade game that divides the country and causes the end of relationships, jobs and even lives. It is, of course, Pachinko.

Pachinko is an arcade game that, to my foreign eyes, looks utterly unfathomable. It appears to be some kind of pin ball slot machine hybrid created by somebody who was both hard of hearing and colour blind. The basic premise of the game might be, i think, to fire some pinballs around a circle and see how many fall through some pins and make it to the bottom. It constantly makes lots of noises and lights flash and you win some money and suffer from sensory overload. Perhaps. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was only one of these weird machines sat in the corner of a shit pub but Pachinko has become so popular that they have Pachinko parlours custom built to house row after row of the blinking, flicking, singing, pinball shitting idiot machines. The Pachinko parlours are always painted orange or green or sky blue or a combination of all of them and they have slogans in English such as Entertainment Heaven or Pleasure Land or Enjoy Kingdom. So, a nice, modest, welcoming, understated business then.

I normally treat Pachinko parlours like a disease but i went in one for the first time the other day to see if it was as bad as it seemed. It was worse. There were hundreds of the slot machines in rows with zombie looking people sat in front of them watching pinballs flick around, oblivious to the volume level and cigarette fumes. It was difficult to hear, hard to concentrate through the colours and not that nice to breathe. Still, the zombies seemed to enjoy themselves as the machines vomited sounds, colours and, occasionally, money at them so who am i to judge? One of the Pachinko attendants (who, i assume looks after all the balls) asked me a question that i could only guess was, “Can i help you?” I thought for a second, shrugged and said, “Hmm, sorry, no” and left.

Apparently Pachinko started as a children’s game at fun fairs before World War II and after the war became a game where you could win prizes such as food or gifts and has since morphed into a slot machine that couldn’t be more uniquely Japanese if it was made out of raw fish and was the shape of Mount Fuji. It has spawned professional Pachinko players who know how to spot a machine that has better placed pins and therefore more chance of paying out money and can earn themselves 10,000 yen a day. Or bankruptcy. People queue outside waiting for the doors to open at 10 o’clock to rush in and sit at the best machine that has the biggest chance of a payout. There’s a whole slot machine gambling subculture here that seems to live for Pachinko and nothing else. I’ve been told by more than one person of a story where a woman left her kids in the car and went to play Pachinko. It was a hot summer day and the car windows were shut. She sat playing for hours and when she came back outside the kids had suffocated and died (i think it’s an urban legend or a crazy one off story but i’m told this happens every year).

It seems to divide opinion among Japanese themselves. It’s either a fat waste of time and money or you’re addicted to it. Nobody ever says, “What? Pachinko? Yeah, s’alright i guess. I’ve played it a few times.” It’s abhorrence or addiction. But, then again, why wouldn’t it be popular? Japan loves games. This is the home of Mario and Nintendo. There are arcade centres filled with racing games, shoot ‘em ups, grab-a-cuddly-toy-you-don’t-even-want games and those things where you bet on small plastic horses running a computerised race that appear massively out of place in a Japanese city, as if they’ve been nicked from an English seaside town and dumped here by mistake. If a sizable minority of the population weren’t addicted to Pachinko it would be Tetris or PacMan or Virtua Cop 3. And then it wouldn’t be unique and famous, would it?

Myoden and Yakult

I’ve just had a holiday as the past week has been Golden Week in Japan. I’m not sure why it’s called Golden Week (i haven’t seen any gold in the past seven days) but everybody gets a three day national holiday and if you’re lucky, like me, you can join up the dots, connect the weekends and get nine days off work.

Golden Week is, apparently, pretty mental in a normal year with people travelling here there and everywhere in search of fun, friends and family. This year is a little different though as a lot of people didn’t want to have too much of a good time after March and April and so Japan, at times, is a bit sombre at the moment. I think it may take a while to fully get its mojo back.

I did some hiking for the first time here at a place called Tsukuba and climbed the cute little mountain of the same name on a hazy Monday which was all a train ride and small bus journey north east of Tokyo. It was a nice hike, the mountain peppered with trees, rocks and old people as well as a cable car that slugged the sluggish to the summit. I’ve been hiking a bunch of times in different countries but realised something for the first time on this one. People always say hello to each other and smile and seem friendly when they’re on the mountain but then when everybody gets back to the bus stop and the train station people don’t even make eye contact with the same hikers that they smiled at amongst the trees and the sweat. We all just sit in silence, plug the headphones in, push buttons, re-read text messages and generally avoid everybody as soon as we get back to busy streets, buildings and transport.

I went to Doki Doki Flea Market the next day which was definitely not the kind of place where you can say hello to complete strangers. There were too many of them. Thousands. It was the biggest car boot sale second hand flea market thing i’ve ever seen. I saw more random crap being hawked than ever before. It's only held once a year during Golden Week and it seems some of the traders selling stuff had spent the previous twelve months not throwing anything away but saving it for the first week in May. One man was selling, amongst other things, an inflatable sofa, a surfboard, a sword, some roller skates and a Mickey Mouse alarm clock. I always feel the same at these kinds of places. I never want to buy anything. I just want to stop and ask the owner of the car boot or stall to tell me the back story of how they came to own such a random collection of objects.

I also went with a few mates to my first game of baseball in Japan which quickly made me realise that there’s one thing that Japanese baseball is very good at. Names. No other sport i know of has such amazing names. Take, for example, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Hiroshima Toyo Carp or, the team we went to see, Tokyo Yakult Swallows. I like the way they’ve done these names with a quick Place Name-Sponsor Name-Random Animal or Noun combination. You can make your own. It’s easy. Edinburgh Tesco Elephants. Moscow Shell Oil Pirates. Islamabad Del Monte Pineapple Tornadoes. See? Thankfully, i quite like Tokyo, Yakult and Swallows and i also like what the Tokyo Yakult Swallows fans do when their team scores. From nowhere and without any kind of warning thousands of people all open small pink or green umbrellas and dance with them and start singing. I would love to know the back story to that as well but as we were surrounded by people and not trees we didn’t really strike up a conversation and ask anybody. The Swallows lost by the way, heavily beaten by the Dragons from Nagoya sponsored by Chunichi.

I think i’ll go back to watch the Swallows play again. It’s on a list called Stuff To See And Do In Japan that gets ever longer and will probably never be conquered. The more you see, the more you want to see more. When’s the next holiday?