Pachinko (パチンコ)

My first view of Japan from the air was of the forested hills beyond Narita. Most of Japan is covered in forests; a much higher proportion than in New Zealand, where most of the hill country has been turned into pasture, and only the bits that are steep or inaccessible have been left.

We were met at the airport by the father of Yukio, who was one of Y’s friends from Italy. Mr. G. had recently retired from the Ministry of Health, but still worked there part-time. He was there with a chauffeur-driven Nissan Cedric-- a sleek, black limo with lace covers on the seat backs.

We zoomed along the “expressway” in the kind of Wodehousian, foppish extravagance suggested by the car’s name. A little bell pinged cheerfully from the direction of the dashboard. Y explained that it was there to warn you that you were over the speed limit. There was obviously little danger of a cop indulging in the lèse-majesté of pulling us up.

In the genkan (entrance?) of Mr. G’s house, I was startled by the array of footwear lined up before me. (It’s hard to translate genkan. It’s almost never as grand as a hall, and is usually just a place where you can leave your shoes, before stepping up into the slipper-only zone beyond.)

I knew Mr. G and his wife were the only occupants of the house, but there were at least six pairs of shoes in the genkan. One pair had the word Jacket embossed in loud letters on the uppers.

This was my first taste of the decorative use of foreign words in Japan. Even those Japanese people who understand English do not read such “design” words, and find it hard to understand the disorientation (sic) of Westerners when they see slippers in a supermarket branded Jesus Christ, or a sign over an ice-cream stand reading “Dipper Dan’s Bum Pancakes”.

Even after our motorway journey from Narita, we were still only halfway into central Tokyo, and the next day it took us more than an hour and half to negotiate the bus and train which got us to Ueno, the big station linking Tokyo to the North East.

And it seemed to take us almost as long to get out of the station, even though Ueno is not nearly as vast as some of the other big stations like Tokyo or Shinjuku. When we finally emerged from a labyrinth of tunnels, we were at the entrance to a kind of street market. Two shops into the market, I saw what is usually translated as a Pachinko parlour. Nothing could be more remote from the image of calm elegance conveyed by the word parlour than the clattery cacophony produced by hundreds of electronically souped-up pinball machines, surrounded by hundreds of glazed-eyed aficionados, and clouds of cigarette smoke.

Pinball too is an inadequate translation for these high-tech creations which bore no more resemblance to the machines I’d fed pennies into at Caroline Bay in the fifties than a DVD player does to an old valve radio, or an AK47 to a breech-loading musket.

The parlour is rather like a third-world, ball-bearing factory, with gamblers instead of workers.

If you decide to have a go, you buy hundreds of steel balls in a basket, feed them into a trough and they are automatically spewed out in a seamless, clattering trajectory into the complex maze of the machine’s front panel. If the balls find their way into winning holes, they get returned to be used again. If they find one of the “Jackpot” holes, the machine seems to suffer a nervous breakdown, and a cascade of ball-bearings pours out, to be gathered by the delighted punter into more plastic baskets.

On that first visit to the parlour near Ueno, we bought no more than a few hundred yen worth of balls. It still seemed expensive when converted into New Zealand dollars.

We almost immediately hit a minor jackpot, and I wanted to stop while my beginner’s luck still held. We went to the counter at the back of the parlour, and were given some plastic tokens, rather like the ones we used to get in a cornflakes packet in the fifties. Y was given some kind of explanation, and we headed out of the parlour, crossed the street, and went down a dingy alley, until we reached a little booth, which was literally a hole in the wall. Y handed the woman the tokens and received about 3,000 yen in cash. This was about ten times our initial investment.

Y told me that the elaborate procedure we had just negotiated was the result of the fact that playing Pachinko for money was illegal, and we were doing what millions of Japanese people were doing every day to avoid the legal prohibition. It seemed a pretty transparent way of getting around the law, especially when you think that the yen equivalent of billions of dollars are paid out each year by pachinko parlours, in what is the most popular form of recreation in Japan, after television. It’s as if all the TABS in New Zealand were giant neon-encrusted palaces, often as big as the Civic Theatre in Auckland, and all were being run as illegal operations by syndicates of bookmakers.