Bar and Pachinko

Here is some random bar I stopped at. I was given peas and a spoon along with my beer, and I am pretty sure that they over-charged me.

This is a pachinko parlor. It is a huge rip-off.

You put in about 8 dollars into the machine and then you are given so many metal balls. You then control how quickly these metal balls are fed into the machine.

After being fed into the the machine, the balls bounce around on pins and are usually lost. If, however, you are lucky and the balls bounce into a very small slot in the center, the machine then acts like a slot machine, and if you win, you are given more balls.

(I should not have used the flash right here)

I couldn't stop playing soon enough. The circular knob on the lower right-hand side controlled the flow, and a series of pink buttons controls the slot-machine game and the cash-out function. No one spoke English so this I learned through the pantomimes of the frustrated pachinko attendants as I kept repeating "I do not understand." I cashed out as soon as possible. That process was pretty strange, first the balls were counted and I was given a receipt. Then, I took that receipt to the back where an old man gave me two pieces of candy and a couple small plastic slides with yen inside. I was then led outside to an adjacent building where a chubby woman's hand behind a small window gave me 400 yen for those slides. (I gather that this is all an elaborate scheme to circumvent the laws against gambling in Japan.) All in all, I ended up losing 600 of the 1000 yen I paid into the machine. So, basically I paid about 5 bucks for two small pieces of candy and a lesson in avoiding pachinko parlors.