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FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE TOUCHSTONE THING

Thoughtful comments on my previous post got me to recalling the oh-so-many years ago when I lived in Tokyo in a big old rambly western style house in a temple garden (nowadays fergeddit). One of the come-and-go residents (there were many), a French-Algerian named Andre, had picked up an old pachinko machine from one of the peripatetic sellers of used discarded pachinko machines you can still see now and again along the roadside, with the big truck open and the pachinko machines spilling out, a few thousand yen apiece or so.

Andre put the machine in the big sun room and in that house full of visitors there was always someone playing it, day or night. To play it was mesmerizing in what I felt to be a gnawingly unpleasant way, like taking time and just flushing it down the toilet. Which in my youth I did quite often in various ways, but happily never at such length.

Nowadays, every time I pass a newly electronified pachinko parlor I remark the packed parking lot (out in the country) or look in through the windows (in the city) at the shoulder-to shoulder crowds, just to purge that itching sense of profound disbelief that rises every time at the imminent sight of all those people sitting there looking at little steel balls rising and falling in smoky thickness for hours and hours on end (they also have automatic machines, that you can just set, then sit back and watch), even leaving their young children in the car or in the parking lot while they do so (incidents of infants dying in overheated cars or disappearing from pachinko parking lots are numerous enough to comprise a distinct news genre).

Mornings as I'm on my way to the office in Osaka I sometimes pass by a big city pachinko parlor where there's always a crowd of futureless and virtually yenless young men, old men and old women gathered early out back in the garage to get the extra-ball coupons the parlor passes out before opening. The players-to-be then sit on the floor in maze formation, coupons in hand, awaiting the opening of the doors to be first at their favorite machines, looking forward to moments that are, sad to say, hopeful enough for them to call happiness.