Word: pachinko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even the men unable to afford the geisha house often will not go home to their wives, but stay downtown in all-male sake bars, lingering over a single drink, or in pachinko parlors playing pinball machines. "Why do they do this?" asks a girl indignantly. "Because they want their wives to think they are big shots. They want the world to believe they are out chasing women. An average Japanese wife is ashamed if her husband comes home at 6 or 7 at night. The neighbors will then say he must be only a humble clerk...
...pachinko machine (cost: $20) stands upright to save space. From the owner the player buys a handful of small steel balls at 2 yen (½?/) apiece and drops them one by one into a small hole on the right side of the machine. With a spring-driven lever he flicks the ball upward; if it happens to fall into one of several nail-fenced cavities in the face of the machine, the player wins 10, 15 or 20 steel balls. Those he can trade for cigarettes, candies or a variety of other inexpensive prizes (law forbids prizes worth more than...
Dull Device. To U.S. pinball players, accustomed to a machine which does everything but sing Yankee Doodle, the pachinko machine may seem a dull device. But by last week, Japan was speckled with at least 900,000 pachinko machines; Tokyo alone has 7,900 arcades, 170 of them reserved for children. The Japanese last year spent 100 billion yen ($277 million), or the equivalent of 11.7% of the national budget, on pachinko. Competition is so fierce among Tokyo parlors that one, the Heaven & Earth, hired a stripteaser to provide "relaxation for the players' eyes," only to find that...
Angry Solace. "The passion of the common people for pachinko" a professor solemnly decided, "seems to be a sort of resistance against the misadministration of the government . . . Their fingertips flipping steel balls are filled with some sense of anger." Sometimes the anger gets the better of pachinko players. Recently a 72-year-old woman fan lost her temper, smashed the glass of the machine, cut her self and bled to death...
...fortnight ago in Tokyo's Popeye pachinko parlor, an employee stopped one Kaichi Daijo in the midst of a winning streak. Outraged, Daijo stabbed the employee to death. Daijo was in jail last week, charged with murder. At the vic tim's funeral services appeared a large wreath of paper flowers inscribed: "An inch of our heart goes with you." It was from the boys at the Popeye parlor...