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THE TOUCHSTONE OF MODERN JAPANESE CULTURE

Oh, how I hate to say this. The touchstone of modern Japanese culture is not the bold samurai spirit of bushido resurrecting in the nine iron; nor is it the exquisitely varied traditional architecture now being re-sided with imaginatively beige tile; nor yet the multiply subtle cooking now degenerating viscously into double cheeseburgers with max fries, pizzas and extra-large cokes. The true touchstone of modern Japanese culture is: (offtone cowbell, please) the pachinko parlor.

The reason I bring up this tasteless subject (apart from just having visited the Miho Museum) is that right up the road from the new, garish and madly popular pachinko parlor with the huge multilevel, always-mobbed parking lot in Katata, where Basho and Hiroshige used to hang out (not at the pachinko place; back then they had better things to do and better reasons to do them), which parlor is not far downroad from another equivalently garish parlor, and so on all the way north or south to Kyoto or the Japan Sea, or along any other well-traveled highway in Japan-- where was I?

Ah yes: right up the road from the old madly popular pachinko parlor, and right down the road from the new madly popular pachinko parlor: on a prime corner location some daring modern-day entrepreneurs have thrown business caution to the winds, boldly tossed conservatism onto the smoldering bonfire of change, and taken the radical step of opening, believe it or not, a pachinko parlor!!

Only this one is garishly multicolored, as opposed to plain old architectural-flash garish and bright-neon-light garish. Garishness is, as you may have concluded, is the primary characteristic of pachinko parlors, compounded by Niagara noise and unregulated-factory smoke levels.

You see them everywhere now, with more springing up overnight like day-glow mushrooms, these oases of low-grade Vegas (if you win more than, say, 10,000 steel balls you can trade them in for a dozen cigarette lighters or something; it is said that some make a living at it. I say it's sad to call that living.)

As I drove by the newly opening color-garish one, its employees stood outside beneath umbrellas in the pouring rain wearing their gambling establishment type uniforms, screaming at the top of their lungs perhaps the corporate philosophy, more likely invitations to the gambling-prone. When I went by an hour later, they were still screaming. Ah, the price of inventiveness and creative living!!