Trigger Happy
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
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