I was out drinking the other night with Fred, and I asked
him if he had seen any statistics on pachinko fatalities.
Fred immediately understood that I was not talking about
people who played pachinko, but the small children who
suffer because of their parents' gambling problems. Every
summer at least a few of the babies and small children left
in cars parked in parking lots with the engine running and
the air conditioning on die from the heat. The car engine
stops, the air conditioning stops, temperatures in the car
rise to over 100, and the heat kills the children. Almost
every year, we hear the news of a fatal accident when some
parent leaves children alone at home to go and play
pachinko. Sometimes it is a fire and sometimes it is
something else.
Fred said that he had not seen any statistics but that it
was not that many, especially compared to the hundreds of
thousands who died from smoking and drinking and the tens
of thousands who died in car accidents. I said that was
true, but it just defies reason to leave your children like
that. Fred agreed, but pointed out that gambling is an
addiction.
Pachinko started out as a pinball game in the United States
but never became popular. Introduced to Japan, the game was
modified and spread like wildfire. Basically, the idea is
to shoot little balls into the right places and get more
little balls. One reason that pachinko spread so quickly in
Japan is that it is gambling. The pachinko parlors
themselves do not give out money, only giving out prizes.
Near almost every pachinko parlor, however, is someplace
where you can convert your pachinko winnings to cash.
Research has shown that when gambling is illegal, many
people gamble and approximately 1% of the population have a
serious gambling problem. When gambling becomes legal, more
people gamble, and the number of people with serious
gambling problems doubles.
Parents in Japan who become addicted to the game can't
control themselves and some children pay the price with
their lives.
Fred asked me to think of a modern country without
problems. I could not. Japan may have problems with
pachinko fatalities, deaths from overwork and more. Still,
these problems pale when compared with gun deaths and drug
problems in America.
I asked Fred if he had ever played pachinko. He said he had
never tried and asked me if I had. Remembering my one and
only foray into a pachinko parlor, I nodded my head and
said I tried it once.
I remembered stepping inside a smoke filled room where
grim-faced men sat in dark clothes chain smoking and
shooting balls into machines. The image was sadder than
blank-faced senior citizens feeding slot machines in Reno.
The room was full of noise of pachinko machines and
incredibly loud music. I stepped up to a machine to buy
some balls, popped 100 yen in, and some balls came out.
Scooping them up in my hand as 100 yen worth of balls was
not enough to need a bucket, I stepped to a machine, fed
them in and pushed the button again and again and again.
They were gone in a minute or two.
I never played again.
----------------------------------------------------
You can find Aaron Language Services on the Web at
http://www.aaronlanguage.com/ . We provide translation from
Japanese to other European languages and back to Japanese,
edit English and other European languages, and offer online
English coaching to a primarily Japanese client base. If
you can't read Japanese, you can always reach us via our
personnel page.
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