David Plotz, from Japan. (2) - By David Plotz

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Entry 2

Posted Tuesday, April 9, 2002, at 12:15 PM ET

David Plotz, Slate's Washington bureau chief, is currently on a Japan Society media fellowship in Tokyo.

I skip lunch today and have to make do with a salaryman's pick-me-up. Convenience stores and vending machines stock endless varieties of tiny, potent, and ludicrously expensive vitamin drinks. These potions, packaged in the brown glass bottles that are the universal signal for quackery, promise glorious health benefits in a 3-ounce hit. On subway platforms and street corners, you can usually see a man in a suit pounding one back in a fierce gulp.

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My interpreter Mioko Kaya with Lipo-Vitan 8I buy "Lipo-Vitan 8" from a vending machine near my office at the Foreign Press Center. I don't have any idea what it is, but my interpreter Mioko Kaya translates the label for me later. Apparently, Lipo-Vitan 8 is a concoction of royal jelly, caffeine, a bunch of vitamins, and nicotine (nicotine!) that is supposed to revive me from fatigue, relieve fever, provide essential nutrition, and help me lactate. It tastes like equal parts lemon juice, ginger beer, and cough syrup, and is, surprisingly, rather pleasant. It does not revive me or provide essential nutrition. It does, however, seem to give me a backache.

I chug the Lipo-Vitan 8 instead of lunch because I am late for an interview with Yuzo Washizu, editor of Pachinko Winners Guide, Japan's largest pachinko magazine. I have come to Tokyo on a Japan Society fellowship to study Japanese gambling. This means I spend a lot of time in pachinko parlors. Pachinko, which the Japanese like to pretend is not gambling, is a bit like vertical pinball hopped up on methamphetamine. Essentially, you shoot hundreds of tiny metal balls onto a nail-studded board and win more balls if the balls you shoot fall into the correct holes. If you win enough balls, you can, after an impossibly elaborate series of pretend transactions designed to elude anti-gambling laws, get cash back. Pachinko demands just enough skill for Japanese to pretend it is a game, though it is actually the world's largest gambling enterprise: $200 billion a year dumped in the machines, making it arguably Japan's largest industry.

Pachinko parlors ring every train station and shopping district, and most Japanese (not to mention almost everyone who is not Japanese) find them repellent. The ricocheting metal balls make an incredible racket, the parlors are smoky and crowded, and the game seems mindless. So, why the immense appeal? Pachinko parlors are among the noisiest and most crowded places in a noisy and crowded country, yet they are one of the few places where Japanese can be alone and unbothered. Donald Richie, who writes on Japanese culture, compares pachinko to the exercises performed by Zen practitioners. Pachinko, hypnotic and soothing, empties the mind. It allows people—usually businessmen—who have no other chance to relax to find a moment's peace. (Naturally, pachinko addiction is rampant. Every year, a baby or three dies when a mother leaves them in the car while she goes in to play "a few minutes" of pachinko. "Pachinko bankruptcy" has become a Japanese cliché, and some of the biggest advertisers in Pachinko Winners Guide are consumer credit companies.)

Enough speechifying. The offices of Pachinko Winners Guide (which sells an amazing 400,000 copies every two weeks) are the first Japanese workplace that remind me of an American one. It is like a Silicon Valley company, circa 1999. Someone is sleeping on a pile of cardboard in one corner. The carcasses of pachinko machines are strewn in the corners. A gang of young men—Washizu's writers—each looking more seedy than the next, are joking around a conference table. All of them are smoking, most of them have dyed hair and are wearing T-shirts that have seen better days. They have the air of men who have spent way too much of their youth playing video games.

My meeting with Washizu is a parody of a traditional Japanese interview. Every interview I have done so far has had the same ritual. My translator and I are ushered into a conference room by some young besuited bureaucrat, who then fetches a more senior besuited bureaucrat, who then apologizes for being late even though I am the one who is late. Then an office lady arrives and graciously serves us all hot green tea. Then the bureaucrat politely answers all my fact questions and avoids all my why questions. (When I ask about numbers, they are delighted. The senior bureaucrat whispers to the junior, who races out of the room, then hustles back with a 2-foot-high pile of white papers and policy reports, which he then scours to find exactly the right number.)

Yuzo Washizu with Pachinko Winners Guide Yuzo Washizu with Pachinko Winners GuideBut Washizu turns out to be a young man wearing an oversize khaki shirt plastered with the logo "Playerz 69." When Kaya-san and I sit down with him, it is some guy in a Mohawk who brings us cans of cold green tea from the vending machine. Instead of listing facts about the pachinko industry, Washizu offers me advice on how to beat various pachinko games (or at least play them a little better). This is the principle subject of Pachinko Winners Guide. Washizu advises on how to find the "warp route" in the game Edoko Gensan, which should get me quicker to the "Fever Key" (basically, the pachinko jackpot). Washizu is particularly effusive on the subject of Gladiator, a pachinko game that he played for five days straight in order to learn its tricks. He shows me an 18-step algorithm summarizing the digital functions of the game and explains Gladiator's odds, its payoff table, and the order of the reels on the mini-slot machine game-within-a-game. Washizu is the first Japanese person I have met who's not surprised that some random American is interested in pachinko. As far as he is concerned, everyone should be interested in pachinko.

The lion outside the Mitoya pachinko parlorEmboldened by Washizu, I drop by my neighborhood parlor to try to beat Gladiator. The parlor, the Mitoya, is actually a series of linked parlors that calls itself, with exceptionally misplaced grandiosity, "Casino Drive." Till today, I've been about 4,000 yen ahead in my pachinko playing, but Washizu's algorithm doesn't help me with Gladiator, and neither does knowing the reels. I drop 1,000 yen—about $8—on Gladiator in five minutes.