A game to make billions a year
Coming all the way from Japan and highly popular among gambling aficionados, Pachinko is an interactive mechanical game that uses metallic balls.
According to the statistics, 246 billion dollars were played here, in 2009. Most of the pachinko parlors are owned by ‚Zainichi’ Koreans who have been living in the Rising Sun country for very many generations.
The exact number of the pachinko shops in Japan is not yet known – an estimation made two years ago, in 2011, was saying that there would be somewhere around 11 – 15,000. The pachinko machines were initially built during the 1920s to be a toy for children, similar with the Corinth game. A decade later, the first ones emerged in Nagoya, as an adult pastime, and they just boomed on the market.
How to play
A pachinko machine resembles a vertical pinball device, without flippers and with a large number of balls. A better description would be that it is a mixed breed between a standing flipper and a slot machine.
At first, the pachinko machines were strictly mechanical, but the modern ones incorporated electronic features. The new ones also have numbers and the player will get prizes in balls should he hits three identical numbers or symbols.
The player would purchase a certain number of balls. The price for 250 balls is around JPY1,000. The balls are then inserted into a tray and shot out of there by means of a manually activated speed regulator. When the ball falls into a winning hole, additional balls will be added to the initial ones.
The objective of this game is to win as many balls as possible. The total average payment for a jackpot is circa 1,250 balls or the equivalent of 5,000 yens.
The fact that gambling on money is illegal in Japan, the balls that are won cannot be exchanged for money in the parlor. They are replaced with tokens or prizes, which are taken outside and cashed out. Here, gambling in the private industry is illegal, but the pachinko shops are tacitly tolerated by the Japanese authorities and considered as ‚semi-gambling’, thus they do not fall into the category of illegal activities.
An impressive turnover
A number of 2 billion pachinko machines are operated today in Japan. One in four Japanese plays pachinko on a regular basis. The game turnover is considerable and places on a third place within the Japanese entertainment industry, after hospitality and tourism.
Nakajima Kenkichi, Heiwa’s owner and manager of circa 30% of the pachinko parlors in Japan, was named the richest in this country in 1989 by ‘Nikkei Venture’ magazine. The famous publication ‘Fortune’ placed him on the 11th among the worldwide richest in 1991.
