The pachinko museum
Regine, over at We-make-money-not-art.com wrote this piece about the Pachinko Hakubutsukan (Pachinko Museum) which offer visitors a chance to see 148 machines, including many rare ones.
Pachinko is a vertical pinball game, in which steel balls are released from the top and players try to get them into winning holes to release yet more steel balls… When they accumulated enough of those balls (and they decide not to play them), players are rewarded with small goods, often tiny gold bullions, according to the number of balls they won. Just next to the parlor, a prize buyer will then exchange those prizes for cash. The buyer and parlor being technically two separate bodies, they operate in a legal grey loophole that doesn’t qualify as gambling. Pachinko started with simple wooden-frame machines after WWII, and is now a very high-tech industry involving more electronics than gravity.
She also link to the original article at The Japan Times and to interesting facts about Pachinko (such as the one where one-third of operators being North Koreans, Japanese pachinko business is actually a major source of remittances to North Korea).
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