Pachinko is the national pastime of Japanese men, and most anytime you drive by one of the many pachinko parlors around my house, you’ll see a parking lot nearly filled with cars. The point of the game is to take a bucket of silver balls that you buy from the proprietors and shoot them into a pinball-like machine, hopefully holding the controller at just the right angle that the balls will fall into certain holes in the machine, causing more balls to come out. If you are a “pachi-pro” or a person who’s really good at playing the game, you’ll end up with more balls than you started out with. Since gambling is illegal, you can’t redeem the balls for money, but you can exchange them for valuable prizes like cigarettes, which you take to a smaller business located next door to “sell” to get your money — very silly. Our home prefecture of Gunma is the Detroit of the pachinko world, with several large pachinko makers located here. Right now, pachinko manufacturer Sankyo is advertising a new Star Wars: Attack of Darth Vader pachinko game that looks pretty cool. In the commercial, the Sankyo factory located 1 km from J-List can be seen.
