Word: pachinko
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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...cause of pachinko-byo is pachinko, a sort of poor man's pinball game. It has swept Japan like a virus in the last three years and brought the neon pallor of the penny arcade to the land of the rising...
...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...