LUCK,MONEY,AND A LOT OF BALLS

So how does pachinko, something that is very clearly gambling, and that is widely recognized and advertised as gambling across the country, get away with it? Pachinko parlors have got some serious balls. A lot of balls.

Pachinko is played by firing tiny metal balls up into a pachinko machine in the hopes of landing a jackpot and thereby growing your collection of tiny metal balls. I told you, lots of balls.

So what does this have to do with pachinko being legal? Well, when you hit a jackpot in pachinko you receive balls in return, not money. Yeah, but then don't you just exchange these balls for money? Nope. You trade in your balls for prizes! Prizes? Yes, prizes. These prizes can be anything from a bag of candy to other more valuable “prizes” (commonly made of some precious metal).

And what do you know? There just happens to be a separate building (typically a discrete window) immediately adjacent to the pachinko parlor that will pay you money for your “prizes”. Wow, that is nice of them. Funny how the value of my balls and my prize seem to be precisely in line with one another. Well, it's a good thing I got this money selling my prize and not from gambling, because that would be illegal.

Walking around a pachinko parlor you will see the more dedicated players with (literally) thousands of balls stacked in trays behind their seats. What is the monetary equivalent of each of these balls? This I was unclear on, but I believe that just as with slot machines ranging from the penny slots up to “who-the-hell-plays-those” slots, pachinko balls can be worth anywhere from one yen (~ 1/10 a US cent) up to hundreds of yen (100 yen ~ $1 USD) depending on the machine.

And there are only pachinko machines in these monstrously sized buildings? Yes. Just pachinko.

Talking to people, you would not think pachinko popular. It seems as though nobody has ever played, and if they have it was a “one and done” sort of deal. But this cannot possibly be representative of Japan because these pachinko parlors are everywhere, and they are huge.

Pachinko Parlor

Look at all those colors and flags! It must be fun.Even if you are not at all interested in gambling, I suggest you at least walk into a pachinko parlor to check it out – it is an experience in itself.

The second you cross the plane into the parlor you are on sensory overload. The first thing you notice? It is loud. Like really loud. The noise of the machines is easily enough to make some people end their pachinko experience at the door.

Before throwing my money away on pachinko, I had to know what I was getting myself into.

After completing a series of instructional pachinko videos courtesy of the inter-webs, I felt prepared to attempt playing without drawing too much attention to myself as a novice (however, I don't know that anyone playing pachinko is capable of focusing on anything other than their machine).

I walk into a parlor I have been passing for a couple of weeks now, and I am again astounded by how loud it is. My ears adjust as my eyes would to the dark – slowly and painfully. The air is 90% smoke, but at least the temperature is comfortable, and there is no shortage of things to look at.

Now for the all important decision of many a gambling endeavor: choosing the right seat.Aimlessly wandering the rows of pachinko players glued to the bright and flashing lights in front of them, I attempt to convince myself that my perusing the various machines will have some sort of positive impact on my pachinko playing experience. Finally, I choose a machine adorned with anime characters and sporting a red trim. Red is lucky, right?

The pachinko machine lights up like the Fourth of July, and I reach for the knob, eagerly anticipating my first play. The knob? Yes the knob, your physical connection into the world of pachinko.

The knob (located on the lower right-hand side of the machine) controls how hard balls are fired up into the pachinko machine (like the spring-loaded plunger on a pinball machine). Too soft? The balls are lost forever. Too hard? Same result. The sweet spot is not too difficult to find, but you will burn a few balls trying to find it your first time.

Unlike pinball which requires you to re-engage the plunger each time you wish to fire a new ball, the pachinko machine takes care of reloading automatically. This allows you to just hold the knob in place once you find that sweet spot. Now all that's left to do is sit back and watch your balls (and money) get flushed away.

Sitting in front of the machine, watching the balls bounce their way down into vast uncertainty, I am reminded of Bob Barker. Why Bob Barker? As a child I spent countless sick days watching contestants on The Price Is Right play “Plinko”, a game shockingly similar to pachinko. It would seem that my childhood (previously thought to have been wasted) has predestined me for glory and riches.

I sit watching the madness on the screen unfold in front of me as I hold the knob, shooting balls with flawless precision. There appears to be some sort of animated show going on (none of which I can understand), and occasionally spinning slot reels will appear. When these slots align more things happen (I still have no idea what), and sometimes I get more balls.

When I win more balls and when my balls are eaten I do not know. What I do know is that my supply of balls is rapidly diminishing. I'm losing the pachinko!

All of a sudden a giant “PUSH” appears in the middle of the screen. I panic. PUSH WHAT?! Oh. There is a button with “PUSH” written on it in the middle of the machine. I push (and all while keeping the knob's sweet spot in check – maybe I am finally getting the hang of this).슬롯머신

Something happens on the screen and I get a huge ball payout. I'm winning the pachinko! Well I have to keep playing now. That might happen again. Turns out that was a one time thing. I am soon ball-less.

Well, that was fun.To be honest, I was not impressed with pachinko. Perhaps it was because the story unfolding on the machine's screen failed to draw me in, or maybe my meager ¥1,000 investment failed to meet the rewards threshold. Regardless, I do not think I will be playing pachinko again any time soon.

How to Value a Vintage Pachinko Machine

 

When pachinko parlors decommissioned the machines after about a year of use, they were sold cheap to make room for newer models.  Servicemen and businessmen started to bring them back in the late 1940’s.  There were hundreds of thousands of pachinko machines imported in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and sold by Sears, Montgomery Wards, Target Abroad, Woolwort, Pachinko Palace, Spiegal, Pachinko Imports, The Pachinko Factory, Sutra Import, K-Mart, Meshulam’s, Pier 1 Imports, Osco and others.  The newer pachinko machines are still imported today.  They are sold around the country and online. 

When video games became popular or when enough of the balls were lost to make the game unplayable, the pachinko machines were put into storage and forgotten.  On any given day, there are about 300 to 400 for sale on Craigslist/eBay and other sites in the US so they typically aren’t rare.  Generally, most are valued about $20 to $100 and some of the rarer or more desirable ones can go for over $1,000.00.  The key words here are “rare:” and/or “desirable.”  The price all depends on many factors that can influence how much you can get if you want to sell your pachinko machine, or how much you should pay if you are looking to purchase a pachinko machine

 I would like to say when pricing a pachinko machine to sell, or budgeting while planning to buy one, remember the 4 C’s:  Condition, Completeness, Cleanliness and Commonality.  People don’t pay for sentimental value, and a machine is only worth what someone will pay for it, and sometimes it is best to just walk away.  Here are some other websites that talk about the value of pachinko machines.

Most machines have a main attraction and one or more tulips, as well as pay pockets and spinners.  The different combinations of these can set the value of the machine:  Does the main attraction have a theme, move and/or light up?  Also, how many tulips will open as a ball passes through it?  The more a main attraction does, the more desirable it is.  How many tulips and/or pay pockets are there and what do they do?  Some pay pockets will open tulips, but most will just give you a jackpot.  Tulips, however, will open and close as balls enter them, they may also open other tulips.  Are  there side pockets on the playing field that open and close?  There are also unique machines:  these are machines that are uncommon, such as two main attractions or no main attraction, some will have 9 or 10 tulips on the playing field, other may have 10 or more pay pockets on the playing field.  Also, there are machines with a power shooter knob and a flipper, and there are electric-mechanical vintage machines that came with motors, solenoids and simple circuit boards. Some machines came with extra playing fields so you can replace the playing field, these are called Exchanges.  The more unique the machines are, the more desirable they are to collectors.

1980 is the year that most consider the cross over point from Vintage to modern pachinko, this is when most pachinkos went from a flipper lever to shoot the balls to a control knob for firing the balls on the the playing field.

More electronics, lights, motors and sounds are used on the machines, as well as video screens. Makes for more exciting play and higher payouts.

These machines that are produce now are more video game then the mechanical machine they started as.

Draw backs on modern Pachinkos They require electricity and more care in storage of the machine. More balls are needed for continuous play, also a higher level of maintenance is needed for the machine to continually work properly.

It is hard to find somebody to work on them as there is no technical information or parts available. This makes the resell value low, when a break down happens most likely they are only good for part to repair other machines.

 Is the machine clean or dirty?  This has a lot to do with where it was stored.  Machines stored in a closet are cleaner than the machines stored in an attic, shed or barn where insects and rodents made it their home.  You may get less for a dirty machine because cleaning it takes a lot of time, and a dirty machines sometimes means the mechanical parts and levers may stick and not move property, or balls may not flow smoothly through the machine.  Is the chrome on the front nice and shiny, or rusty?  Rust on the front of the machines isn’t attractive and rust or corrosion on the metal mechanical parts of the machine can cause the machine to not always function property.  Too much rust or damage and it is a parts machine.

Is it operational, can put balls in it and start playing, not that it was working 25 years ago before it was put in the barn for storage!  Work-ability is a key factor in the price of the machine, as most buyers don’t want to buy something to work on. Nonworking machines can be fixed if you know what you are doing. More severe damage nonworking machines are considered “parts machines.”  Buyers may buy these just for the parts to get another machine working.  Parts machines are only worth what can be salvaged off of them, and a nonworking, high end machine with a lot of usable parts can bring more than a low end common working machine.

I've just recently discovered the world of vintage Pachinko machines and my new interest is dangerously close to turning into something “I absolutely have to start collecting right now”. For those that, like me just a few days ago, had never heard of “pachinko” before, prepare to be dazzled by a far more fabulous, Japanese version of the old American pinball machine– with a Las Vegas, pool-hall twist.

Looking like something between a slot machine and a vertical pinball machine, the pachinko actually differs in several ways from their western counterparts. First of all, they’re absolutely gorgeous objects– just check out that artwork, those colors and the vintage streamline design. And they have a pretty interesting story too…

Each machine is a little different, but the play is pretty much the same for all of them. There are signs in various languages stating that pachinko is not gambling and that no money is awarded to winners. And while gambling for cash is illegal in Japan, when it comes to pachinko– things aren’t so black and white.파칭코

It’s important to remember that the house advantage of pachinko parlours is astronomically high and more than 99 percent of players lose money. At the counter, you purchase a stash of small, steel balls, like pellets and pick a machine– which operates mostly on gravity, which means you pretty much watch your metal pellets fall from the top of a weird maze, through a series of pegs, and down toward the bottom of the machine and lose them forever– until you buy more. If luck is on your side however, your pellets might land in the winning pockets along their downward descent, which will win you … more pellets!

Now, at any time, you can “cash-out” on your pellets, but of course, as the parlour signs state, pachinko is not a gambling game. So instead of cash, you can claim some cheap and useless merchandise from the front of the hall like key chains, poorly made electronics or “special prizes”, typically small silver or gold novelty items encased in plastic. Sounds like a pretty sour deal, unless you know about the small establishments located nearby, where players can “sell” their prizes for cold, hard cash. These establishments operate as “separate” units to the parlours, although often in the same building.

Pachinko regardless of what the signs say, or in what language they say it, amounts to gambling. The Japanese mafia, known as the yakuza, used to run the pachinko prize exchanges until the police stamped out their involvement in the 1990s around the same time that Japan’s blanket anti-gambling law was passed in the 1990s.

The Children’s Game That Became a Billion-Dollar Industry in Japan

Pachinko  is a type of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device, filling a Japanese inline games niche comparable to that of the slot machine in Western online games.This is a mixture of slot machine and pinball. The player is quite passive while playing pachinko and mainly controls the speed with which many small steel balls are thrown into the machine.

Pachinko machines can be found in pachinko parlors across the country. Many parlors also offer a corner with slot machines. One can recognize parlors easily because of their bright and colorful exterior. Inside, they tend to be extremely noisy. Pachinko is popular among men and women, and it is said that there are even a few pachinko professionals.

Balls can be purchased at each machine using cash or prepaid cards. When propelled into the machine, most balls will simply fall down the machine and disappear, but a few find their way into special holes that activate a kind of slot machine. When this happens (and this is relatively rare), you can win countless new balls. Note that if you play only with a few hundred yen, your balls are likely to all disappear within just a couple of minutes.

The balls can be exchanged at any time into goods at the parlor's gift shop. But you can also bypass the law that prohibits gambling in Japan by exchanging the balls first into some special goods and then exchange the special goods for cash at a small window just outside the parlor.

you’ve never been to Japan, you’ve certainly never heard of “pachinko”. If you’ve ever been to Japan, it’s impossible not to know the word.

Today, the pachinko industry makes $200 billion per year. That’s more than 30 times what is spent in Las Vegas and Macau combined each year. Pachinko parlors only exist in Japan but have grown to be a large part of the culture. So much so that it now accounts for 4% of the Japanese GDP.

So how can this 90-year-old industry have grown so much without ever succeeding abroad? It’s the story of a foreign game adapting to the times and becoming part of the Japanese culture.

What is pachinko?

In simple terms, pachinko machines are complex pinball games. Pachinko parlors are filled with these loud machines that you can hear from far away. The noise coming from each is beyond imagination, as you can observe in this short video below. Even before doors open, it feels like we’re inside already.

The concept is simple. You throw a ball on the board and it bumps into pins, altering its trajectory. Based on how much power you put the ball is thrown more or less far at the top of the board. The goal is to make it reach certain reward spots.

As the years passed, the game evolved from a wooden game to using metal balls and pins. Now, all pachinko machines have integrated games within the board.

Pachinko presented itself as a way to win money in the absence of other legal ways to gamble. Today, there are 7.8 million players in the archipelago. This means 6.2% of the population or 1 out of 16 Japanese citizens.

Most players are veterans of the game, playing it for decades, often daily. Some even make a living out of it. They analyze the different patterns and line up in the morning to get the machine that they believe works best.

To many, Pachinko isn’t just a game. In fact, some might say that the industry survives on the addiction it procures its players. It accounted for nearly half of the country’s leisure activities in 2016, despite its small player base.

In the 1990s, mothers holding their baby on one lap and playing the game with the other was a common sight. Some children even died suffocating the car while waiting for their mother.

Some believe pachinko would have never grown that much had casinos not been banned. I disagree. Pachinko didn’t start as a gambling method. It started as a simple game in candy stores.파칭코사이트인포

In 1920s America there was a wide range of “marble games” or bagatelle games. These were essentially pinball machines before the term “pinball machine” was coined. But unlike the history of pinball developing into what it is known as by most people today, Pachinko took a different turn.

During this time Japanese people had also gained an interest in these machines, specifically the Corinthian Bagatelle. This game had a vertical field that would shoot balls into circular formations with metal pins instead of wood pins.

Pachinko then became its own game, taking ideas from the Corinthian and the “Circle of Pleasure” game. The Circle of Pleasure was a British game from 1910 that was simpler than Corinthian and smaller too. Pachinko would even be called Corinth Game in the candy shops of Japan.

The Japanese Bagatelle would eventually evolve into the Pachinko game and these machines had spring loaded launchers (like a modern pinball machine). On normal bagatelle tables, you would hit the ball with a cue stick like you would in a game of billiards. Kids would play the game to try and win candy from the shop.

They were a form of amusement that allowed kids to try and win a chocolate bar. These machines usually printed out tickets or coins that would be exchanged for a gift at the shop. This quickly drew attention from older crowds too for the wagering of money. By 1936 there were an estimated 35 Pachinko parlors in Kochi alone.