After our allusion in Episode 90 to an addictive but seemingly pointless Japanese ball-bearing-based arcade game, several of you have been in touch to enlighten us about its mechanics and objectives. Firstly, a simple synopsis from Mike from Coventry:
Buy ball bearings
win ball bearings
weigh ball bearings
get pointless gift based on the weight of won ball bearings
go to pawn shop owned and normally next door to gambling place who exchange pointless gift for money.
It’s all something to do with gambling laws in Japan.
Keza from Nagoya elaborates:
I might be able to go some small way towards explaining the madness, as I’ve been living in Japan for a year or so and am exposed daily to this sort of nonsense. It’s called Pachinko, and it’s massive. They have department-store sized floors of pachinko in even tiny towns, full of Japanese salarymen pouring endless ball-bearings into endless rows of incessant noise-making machines.
Anyway, the reason that you an only win ball-bearings is that gambling for money is illegal in Japan. You can, though, exchange a few thousand ball-bearings for disproportionately small plastic objects and teddy bears in some parlours. The trick is that there is usually a small, distinct shop in close proximity to the pachinko parlour that just happens to buy said items for extremely large sums of money. Aha!
Mostly, though, people genuinely just seem to be playing to earn more ball bearings and be able to play for longer.
We read that pachinko addiction is a growing problem in Japan, although apparently not for Leo from West Sussex:
I recently came back from a week in Japan in February and I went to one of those very places you were just talking about! It’s absolutely insane, there are row upon row of these really boring pachinko machines which are sometimes inanely themed with hideously manga-fied Star Wars characters! After the working hours are finished they are packed with really bored-looking people poking buttons. We had a go at them, and I lost miserably, or at least I think I did, my Japanese is shit.
Pah! It sounds like my grandparents’ home-made bagatelle board, only with added manga. We’d rather stay in with a lovely jigsaw…
*UPDATE*: Kevin in Osaka adds:
There is one minor point that your authoritative source got wrong though – that when you’ve finished your session, you exchange all you accumulated metal balls for cash, or for sweets if you were not so successful. One of my former students at Kyoto University figured out the machines so well that he used to do pachinko instead of a part-time job, and made enough to support himself with a regular Saturday session.
Man cannot live on sweets alone, surely?
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