Pachinko– Popo Ott

I call this series "Just Vignettes" because that's what they are, just short snapshots of things that have happened to me or have been told to me. I can vouch the stories you read here are mostly true.

One of my Navy friends in Japan had recently acquired a Japanese girlfriend. Through her, he was picking up little tidbits about Japanese society which may have escaped me. Returning to the Navy base late one night, my friend asked me, "Did you ever wonder why pachinko parlors seem to be packed with customers late into the night?" Gambling for money was illegal. After a long night of feeding pachinko balls into their machine, all players could hope to win were a few small stuffed animals.

He was right. I had wondered. Most customers seemed to be elderly and would sit at the same machine for hours, puffing away at their Mild Seven or Golden Bat cigarettes. The regular clientele could not have been so enamored with little teddy bears to spend so much time and money trying to win them.

The pachinko machines were a bit like American pinball machines. The balls were smaller than those used in pinball, and rather than being released for play one at a time, they were released copiously. Pachinko machines do not have big flippers like pinball machines, so the player has less control of the balls than in pinball, making the outcome basically random. The pachinko machines looked like miniature pinball machines but played with minimal player input, more like playing a slot machine. The flashing lights, clanging sounds of dozens of balls rolling, and electronic sound effects were mesmerizing.

A game could produce buckets of steel balls which could be fed back into the machine for replay or brought to the counting machine near the front of the parlor at the end of the night.

"Did you ever notice," my friend continued, "that close by every pachinko parlor, there was another nondescript storefront that keeps basically the same hours as the pachinko parlor?" Late night, every store on the block would be dark and shuttered except for the busy, brightly lit pachinko parlor and the nearby, quiet storefront whose business was not obvious.

He told me this other store was a place that bought used stuffed animals. Not just any stuffed animals, but only the stuffed animals which the pachinko parlor offered as prizes to its patrons.

Why would a store want to buy a bunch of used stuffed animals? To sell them to pachinko parlors to be reused as prizes, of course.

He assured me both businesses were run by the same Yakuza gang.