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Trigger Happy
271
8
THE PLAYER OF GAMES
Tiny silver balls
After the luminous hi-tech orgy of Makuhari’s
videogame exhibition, let’s stop off at a Pachinko
parlor in Akihabara, or “Electric Town,” the Tokyo
district that constitutes a paradise on earth for devotees
of denki seihin, or consumer electronics. In the West,
we have slot machines built around spinning wheels
inscribed with cherries and numbers. In Japan they
have Pachinko, a simple yet intriguing game played
with tiny silver balls. It appeared in Japan in the 1920s,
and is in some ways a forerunner of videogames
themselves.
This particular arcade in Akihabara, one of about
eighteen thousand in Japan as a whole, is nearly full,
over its four floors (nearly four hundred machines), of
Pachinko aficionados: power-suited, black-clad and