Pachinko!

"Ok, everybody, let's close our books, yah?"
The usual groans from the students who live under the mistaken impression that learning English simply involves reading off the page.
"Yep, that's right, it's time for some practice, people... Ok, let's make a menu for the role play, let's start with appetizers" I said. We were practicing how to order food in a restaurant.
"Corn soup!" one college-aged young woman called out. I involuntarily made a face indicating the deep revulsion I have towards this, the only non-Japanese soup my students know and love. "You do not like a corn soup?" she said, with genuine puzzlement. "No, I don't really get it. I don't think anybody eats it in America. Perhaps because it bares such a striking resemblance to vomit".
The puzzled look continued, unbroken.
"Ok, corn soup it is. But lets do some others, too. Like minestrone. Or chili".
The deer had been caught in the headlights, and was unable or unwilling to move. Clearly, Kaori's idea of western soup revolved around that odious yellow-brown sludge that the Japanese adore.
"Ok, well, corn soup, then. It'll be the soup of the day".
Kaori was satisfied by this and we continued making up a menu.

Later that day, I sat in a dirty little bar and restaurant in Matsudo with some coworkers. I bought a ticket for a 24 ounce bottle of beer and a bowl of miso ramen. There are no waiters at this kind of restaurant, just a pair of machines that take your money, dole out change and print out a ticket, which you then take to the kitchen window.

Halfway through my beer, the ramen arrived, complete with a mound of corn on top.
If it's possible to develop an animosity towards a vegetable, the corn and I have reached that point. I didn't care for it much in the states, but it's a national obsession here, and I've only grown to find it less and less appetizing. You can find corn on pizza, ninety percent of salads, egg salad sandwiches (an unpleasant suprise, I can say from experience), and of course, pureed in soup, arguably its most repugnant form.

I ate around the corn, and by the end of the beer, we were all three vacantly watching a TV news program that none of us really understood. We had run out of Irish jokes, and were approaching the tale end of our repertoir of jokes that begin with somebody walking into a bar.

"We gotta do something, you guys" I said, my attention divided between a news segment about the north korean misslie tests and the general sluggish atmosphere that generally prevails when it's 80 degrees with 80% humidity and you're drinking at 5:30 in the evening.
"LIke what?"
"I dunno... Let's try pachinko", I suggested.
".... Ok, yeah, why not."
Slowly breaking free of ennui's gravity, we gathered our things and set out to find a pachinko parlour.

Pachinko, it should be explained, is a Japanese game involving an arrangement of pins and buzzers, like pinball, but vertical. LIke pinball, it uses steel ball bearings, except in pachinko, the balls are smaller, the size of a blueberry or so, and come in quantities of hundreds and thousands instead of one or two. The balls are controlled by a knob about the size of a tennis ball. To be exact, the balls aren't really controlled, the knob simply controls how strongly they are propelled out of the chute. The balls then fall down, bouncing off pins and buzzers, and the idea is that they ideally land in a little hole, curiously marked "start". The idea is to get the balls to be thrown at a consistent velocity that is mostly likely to send it to the hole and just hold it there. The trick is wedging a 10 yen coin in the knob so it doesn't go anywhere.

If you are wondering where skill comes in to this, the answer is that it basically does not.
"Where's a pachinko place?" Asked Eleni. I looked around. "There's gotta be one within a block or so, we're next to the station.... Yeah, over there, check it out". Sure enough, in glaring luminous neon letters, was a pachinko parlour. Total time spent searching: Under one minute. They're everywhere here.
The doors slid open, and the clamor of hundreds of machines accosted us, all of them projecting ultra perky, hyperactive techno music. It had the volume of a rock show, but none of the cohesion. Rows upon rows of people sat, staring at ball bearings, smoking and feeding money into the machines, accumulating baskets of balls won over a span of hours. Pachinko is an essentially passive activity. Unlike pinball, the only things you can do to influence the result of the game is to either change the velocity of the balls, and add more money to the machine to buy more balls. It ought to be mentioned at this point also, that this is what a lot of Japanese people do to unwind. One of my students once spent twelve hours at a pachinko parlour (showing up 30 minutes before it opened, as well) because they had just released a new machine.

As we walked down the narrow aisles between rows of seated players, the occasional head raised and made double takes in our direction. It's not that foreigners aren't welcome in pachinko parlours. It's just most of us have enough sense to not go in them in the first place.

The staff were more than happy to help us out, I think they were mostly curious to see what it would be like to watch a bunch of gaijin try their hands at pachinko. I didn't really know how it worked, so I asked (All dialogue is in a rough approximation of Japanese) over the caterwauling techno music from a couple hundred machines:
"EXCUSE ME! WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY!"
"AHH, WELL, FIRST YOU _______ IN THE ______, AND THEN YOU SEE, THE _____ COMES FROM HERE AND THEN THEY _____ LIKE THIS, SEE, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA, UNTIL THEY _____ AND THEN ________ HERE ______ BUT YOU HAVE TO _______ OR ELSE _______."
All of this was accompanied by a lot of gesturing with the cigarette held between two fingers on the left hand of the staff.
"RIGHT. BUT, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. WHAT'S THE POINT? HOW DO YOU WIN?"
He either didn't understand the question, or there is in fact, no point. My instinct leans toward the latter more than the former. He gestured towards the bill slot to my left. 1000 yen dissappearned, replaced by a cascade of ball bearings into a molded black plastic tray in front of me
"PRESS THIS BUTTON! SEE! PRESS IT LIKE THIS AND THEN _____ SO _____ RIGHT? DO YOUR BEST!"
I pressed the indicated button, and the balls dissappeared through a hole, and were propelled up and out of the chute, and I realized I may in fact be the worst pachinko player in recorded history. I turned the knob like the staff showed me, but failing to see any point to it, gave up, and began to turn it wildly, hoping something interesting would happen, and at some point I would become something less than a passive spectator to my loss of 1000 yen. Meanwhile, the staff were standing behind us, pissing themselves laughing at the three foreigners playing their infernal game.

I think pachinko may somehow relate to the fatalistic attitude the Japanese seem to live by. "Shou ga nai", they say, which roughly translates to "what can you do". In a society where people are expected to make personal sacrifices for the larger social circle, dreams are deferred, and dreams deferred become dreams denied. So, what can you do, right?

We left after dropping 2000 yen to watch ball bearings fall, in the vain hope that it would somehow make sense, that we could somehow divine some deeper significance out of this national phenomenon. Or at least have a little fun. Shou ga nai, ne?