UNLIKE PINBALL, that restful, nearly horizontal game, pachinko is vertical, taller than the player, and noisy. While pinball indicates the score with flashing lights and a few bells, the sound of the moving balls itself softened with padded obstacles and rubbered baffles, pachinko is designed to be loud.
The name itself expresses the din. It is an onomatopoetic term imitative of the noisely racketing ball (pachin) and the clack it makes when it hits the bottom of the board (ko). The won balls (there is no score, winners simply receive more balls) swirl into the metal tray at the bottom with the roar of a molten torrent. There are often hundreds of machines within a pachinko parlor and there are over ten thousand such establishments within Japan. The sound is overwhelming. The balls fall vertically against the pins making a cascade of noise; the massed balls falling into the waiting tray create a cacophony.
In this aural inferno sit long lines of patrons, each before his own machine, oblivious of his neighbor. One thinks of the worst of the nineteenth-century factories, humans themselves half machine; the assembly line gone mad. Looking at the busy hands, the empty eyes, one also thinks of some kind of religious ceremony, something vaguely Tibetan with mandalas plainly visible and all the prayer-wheels whirling.
Yet, these people seem to be enjoying themselves. They have paid for the privilege of sitting there and working their levers. Many will thus sit for hours, intent, immune alike to discomfort and to din. Punishment, revelation—the joys of pachinko lie somewhere between the two.
The ostensible reward is material gain, that which seems to motivate all gamblers. The cost of twenty-five pachinko balls is only Y100, same price as a pack of gum, less than a ride on the subway, much less than a pack of cigarettes. With these one has the chance of running up a fortune, it is said.
Certainly it seems to be with these hopes that all of the various techniques and expertise of the pachipro, the pachinko professional, is brought into play: finding the right parlor, the right machine on the right day, knowing when to start, when to quit; being able to tell at a glance the successful potential of one over the other.
Even so, one wonders if the winnings are commensurate with the various investments of time and money. In any event the massed balls are to be legally exchanged only for household goods (toothpaste, soap, towels, etc.) and for cigarettes. It is said that illegal money exchanges are also possible: you are given a marker and present yourself at some closed door at the end of a dark alley, knock, and get cash. Certainly popular is the semilegal maneuver of taking your soap and cigarettes to a small establishment next door which will relieve you of them at a price considerably less than their market worth.
Though the profitability of pachinko in regards the patron is open to some doubt there is none at all regarding the proprietor. Cultural commentator Rick Kennedy discovered that the total annual pachinko revenue is 7 trillion yen—this to be compared with, for example, the total value of all video tape recorders produced in Japan during 1986, which is only 3 trillion yen. Also that 20 percent of all cigarettes produced in Japan—not an inconsiderable number-are given away as pachinko prizes. For pachinko patrons then the attractions ought to be also other than economic.
In the West the charm of pinball is often social. A number of people lounge around the machine. Body English is observed and encouraging monosyllables are exchanged. The machine itself may be hit or otherwise encouraged. Light refreshments are often nearby and an atmosphere of relaxed play is achieved. Though individual pitted against machine may be occasionally observed, more usually a loose group is involved. And, in any event, the pinball hall has other attractions—the bar, many different kinds of playmachines, attractive strangers, and so on. The ambience is a relaxed one, friendly and sociable.
How different the pachinko hall. It contains nothing but row after row of standing machines. There is otherwise only the hand-basin, the toilet, the pay telephone and the cashier’s booth. There are no amenities, only necessities. Nor does one eat or drink or (because of the racket) talk; there is no soft lighting, only overhead glare; no innocuous mood music, only—occasionally heard above the clatter—the most spartan of wartime marches, played over and over again.
Here sit the hundreds, over Japan the millions, each sober in front of his machine, intent, earnest, feeding in the silver balls. There is no talk, no human sound at all. There is not even Body English (or Japanese) since the machines are not to be maltreated—they are equals, not servants. Serious, even dedicated, each person sits before his moving mandala. If it were not for the noise one might think of a church, so personal is each person’s activity. Row upon row the patrons sit, as though in confessional booths. The ambience is closed, solitary, even unfriendly. Pachinko is an intensely private occupation. There is nothing social about it.
Side by side, elbow by elbow, these people are, one might think, nevertheless in a kind of social situation. Perhaps, but there is no talk, no meeting of eyes, no indication from anyone that he is other than alone. Even those who come in together are shortly lost to each other, each sitting solitary, each facing his own and, for the moment, private machine.
If winning itself is the object, winning not for the sake of goods or money, but for its own abstract self, then either skill or luck should be the means. It seems, however, that neither is. There is no skillful way to catapult the clattering balls. Likewise, sheer luck, that happy combination of chance circumstances, seems unsought.
What is sought out is the proper machine. One of the mystiques of pachinko is that some machines are better than others and one must find one’s proper mate. In this pursuit the player will initially try several machines until he locates one that feels right to him. This accomplished, he will remain faithful, unless disillusioned, in which case he will transfer his balls to another.
Veterans claim that the feel of a machine can be evaluated and appreciated after only a few tries. Others say they can just look and tell that somehow—as in falling in love—this one is the right one. As in the case with true love, however, unkind life creates many difficulties. Concerning this there is a whole body of folk belief.
The proprietors tamper with the machines, to make them give more or less. Just before payday, for example, the machines are said to give more. It is said that sudden rain after a hot spell can warp the back of the machines to the advantage of the players. Also, since broken machines are so tagged by the management, it is best to arrive at those hours when these machines are newly repaired. Also there is the kugishi (or nail-” doctor”) of whom to beware. This is a specialist called in to tilt certain pins in certain machines. This operation, which always occurs at night, prevents the rightness of a single machine from becoming notorious. Yesterday’s winners will again repair to the right machine and find it wrong.
This belief in the ultimate rightness of certain machines lies in a faith that a slight tilt from the vertical will affect the performance. Seasoned players, believing this, try to counterweight their machines with loads of balls in the tray beneath. The perfect balance will, if the kugishi has not appeared overnight, result in a greater winning average.
But what is won? Not the goods—they are often cheaper outside. Not the prestige—no one is watching. Not a supposed skill or an imagined luck. Something more is involved, since even the most successful locating of the right machine cannot be considered an end in itself.
The true purpose of the player would then seem to have little to do with the ostensible aim of his efforts. Though some have explained the attraction as constituting an articulated allegory of life itself—peculiar allegory, peculiar life—the answer would seem to lie in some less intellectual, some more spiritual direction.
An indication is that the game is addictive. One either plays pachinko a lot or one plays it very rarely if at all. There are to be sure occasional players waiting for a train or a late friend, but the majority are addicts. One goes to pachinko as one goes to the bottle. That millions thus addicted give rise to no national concern would indicate that the effects are found either benign or necessary.
In searching for a reason why anyone should become habituated to sitting in the cold or the heat, assailed by noise, watching thousands of balls fall through pins, and with no hope of even symbolic reward, one might look first into the origins of the game.
There was no pachinko in ordered, prewar Japan. It is a postwar development and sprang directly from defeat. Even before the ruined cities were fully reconstructed pachinko parlors had sprung up. The press referred to them as inexpensive places of pleasure, certainly innocently so in an otherwise pleasureless and poverty-stricken land. And even today there is an air of the immediate postwar era about these places: their often spartan if tawdry interiors, the bare necessities and nothing more, the long gray lines, the wartime marches. It was here that the thousands sought and found.
It was not pleasure they found, but oblivion. And this rewarded search has continued because the conditions which created it have continued. In the decades following the war, Japan has vastly improved in all ways except one. No substitute has ever been discovered for the emotional and spiritual certainty that this people enjoyed—almost alone in the world—until the summer of 1945.
A tightly-knit people, the largest single family in the world, Japan suffered an inner trauma, one which might be compared to that of the individual believer who suddenly finds himself an atheist. Japan lost its god, and the hole left by a vanished deity remains.
The loss was not the emperor, nor his sudden humanization. It was, however, everything which he and his whole ordered prewar empire stood for. It was certainty, no matter how disagreeable that certainty might become, that was lost. And this is something that the new postwar world did not replace. Indeed, the social fabric was even further rent. The individual, never allowed or later taught any individual reliance, was eventually deprived of any real emotional kinship with country, with town or city, and finally with family. And all of this occurred in three decades—a change which traditional Japan could have accomplished in only three or more centuries.
The various pressures of city life are consequently very strongly felt in Japan, and pachinko is a big-city phenomenon even now that every country crossroads has its parlor. It even first appeared in the grayest of all the industrial cities, Nagoya. Originally the patrons may have been the jobless and the hopeless. Now it is for those whose jobs are not enough. They repair to the pachinko parlor as others go to other places of addiction bars, for example.
Like people in bars, those in the pachinko halls are feeling no pain. They are, rather, experiencing a kind of bliss. This is because they are in the pleasant state of being occupied, with none of the consequences of thinking about what they are doing or what any of it means. They have learned the art of turning off.
In this attainment boredom is requisite. Yet some activitythe droning of prayers or the monotone of machines, the telling of the beads or the clicking of the balls—is also necessary. The ritual may seem empty but it is not. It is filled with nothing. Oblivion is achieved.
Pachinko is thus, like all important distractions, only ostensibly about itself. Its true aim is far greater—this being nothing other than annihilation. The annihilation of self, a most pleasant state, may, for those successful, be indefinitely prolonged. Necessary for this is the location of the right machine, the one which seems to respond—the silent friend. This wordless communion between man and machine is just enough to offer an edge to oblivion, to keep the patron partially conscious of what he is doing, to keep him aware of his ostensible purpose in being there while, at the same time, gratefully surrendering his real reason. The pachinko parlor patron emerges refreshed, renewed.
One is reminded then of a religious exercise because the pachinko hall is, in its way, a kind of shrine or temple. One thinks of droning chants, and is reminded of zazeH meditation, one of the aims of which is a liberation from the self through a stilling of that very self.
When one meditates one does not think. Expressly, the aim of meditation is to prevent the normal grazing pattern of the leashless mind. In meditation one is expected to curb the activities of this organ which is so solely responsible for any idea of self.
An aid to this is the ambiguous. The teacher may give the adept a seemingly meaningless riddle or koan to turn over and over in his mind. This keeps the brain busy but prevents its once more wandering through the rut-like patterns which it has established and which it calls self. Any answer to the riddle is arbitrary, but this arbitrary quality is not even recognizable until a degree of liberation from the mind and its ways has been achieved.
The pachinko machine may thus be seen as such an arbitrary object. One does not in any sense win with it. Rather, it occupies the attention and hence the mind. Both eyes and brain fastened to its noisy, shiny surface, the intelligence is blessedly stilled. Its enigmatic face merges with one’s own. Lulled by the racket, fascinated by the glitter, one is alone, a community of singularity, and the familiar and contradictory self is allowed to rest. Pachinko in this way resembles not only drink, but also drugs, sex, fast driving, religion. It affords relief from self now that self, constricted, conscribed, yet denied both security and certainty, turns upon itself to create the state we call alienation. No wonder pachinko is habit-forming. It is respite.
That it is nothing more remains its limitation. Zazen begins only after the mind is properly stilled. Pachinko does nothing more after this stillness is properly accomplished. Zazen is a true medicine; pachinko, only a palliative.
Still, pachinko palace or pachinko barracks, the game has become an institution-like the public hospital. Pachinko therapy, offered at a most modest price, has never, of course, been openly recognized. The game is officially thought a harmless pastime and is ignored if not encouraged. And if you ask a player why he is there he always says that he is merely killing time.
Actually, he is killing much more than that. He is smothering the importunate and dissatisfied self. This he is doing—and again a Buddhist parallel is discernible—by living in the present moment, the instant now, his mind focused. He is calm, at rest and at peace. Cut off from the world by his magical machine, he regards the flow of the balls as saints are said to regard the ebb and tide of the world. The resulting illumination is not lasting but it is—as the continued and enormous popularity of pachinko indicates—better than none at all.
—1980/86