This is another picture from my balcony. You can see a little bit of what I mean about the overhead wires.

That's the train station in the front. At the back of the picture is a pachinko parlor, one of two in the immediate area.

The second pachinko parlor across the parking lot from me moved into the ground floor of my apartment building while I was gone in August. The move included various sprucing up of the building - painting, new signs, general remodeling - so it’s not all bad. It does get a little noisy occasionally as the late-night players are removed from the premises so that the place can get cleaned up for the next day’s business. I don’t know why a move of about 20 yards should make the clientele louder, but it seems to have done so.

I’m guessing they moved just because the space is a bit larger. Apparently pachinko parlors aren’t suffering because of the economy the way Las Vegas is. Oh, yeah. Maybe some of you don’t know pachinko is a gambling game... of sorts.

What it is, as near as I can tell, is a kind of pinball game. The way it works is that the players shoot what look like small ball bearings through a vertical pinball-like table that is more the size of a slot machine. Getting the balls to go in the right place triggers a payoff of more balls, the object being to accumulate as many of the balls as you can. That’s it.

This shooting of the balls is rapid-fire, not just one at a time like in a standard pinball game. Now imagine a room full of people throwing a bunch of steel ball bearings into machines made of glass and metal and catching the cascading steel balls in buckets. The noise level is hard to believe. There is some serious sound-proofing going on in pachinko halls that keeps the noise in or else they wouldn’t be able to exist in the residential neighborhoods like they do. Lucky for me, too, being that I’m a mere four floors above one. That’s a positive point of living on the fifth floor, I guess.

I like to take people who come to visit me through a pachinko parlor just so they can hear what it’s like. We usually last about about two minutes before heading back to the quiet, peaceful traffic in the streets. The pachinko patrons, though, spend hours at a time watching those little balls rolling down the boards.

You might wonder, as I did, how these people could stand the noise for such long periods of time. Well, it turns out that the pachinko balls fit perfectly into one’s ears and if you look, you’ll see that everyone in the place is using a pair of them as stainless-steel earplugs.

Often when I’m walking past a pachinko parlor early in the morning, I see people lined up outside waiting for the place to open. It reminds me of when I was working in a pub in London. The legal opening hour was 11 a.m. and every day, people would be lined up outside waiting to get in. If we were even one minute late they would start pounding on the doors and complain quite bitterly to us once they made it in.

I’m sure pachinko has addictive qualities similar to alcohol and gambling. And it is gambling, but in a uniquely Japanese way.

In fact, gambling is illegal in Japan. There are no casinos in the entire country. Online gambling is against the law as well, with no money transfers from banks to gambling sites allowed. So, for pachinko, they give prizes for the number of ball bearings that a customer accumulates. It’s not considered gambling to compete for prizes. BUT then what they do is take the prizes to a little window located somewhere close by outside, in the same building, mind you. There they sell the prizes back to the pachinko parlor and walk off with the cash. I’ve had a couple of students tell me they can make good money playing pachinko.

Good money, eh? And here I am living right over a pachinko parlor. All I would have to do after a hard day of pachinkoing would be to stagger up five flights of stairs. Hmmm...