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.