The Yen Arcade

JAPAN

Pachinko-byo is an ailment new to the annals of medicine and peculiar to Japan. Its symptoms: blistered fingers, a sprained thumb and eyeballs that jiggle in their sockets like popcorn kernels tossed on to a hot griddle.

The cause of pachinko-byo is pachinko, a sort of poor man's pinball game. It has swept Japan like a virus in the last three years and brought the neon pallor of the penny arcade to the land of the rising sun.

The pachinko machine (cost: $20) stands upright to save space. From the owner the player buys a handful of small steel balls at 2 yen ( 1/2-c-/) apiece and drops them one by one into a small hole on the right side of the machine. With a spring-driven lever he flicks the ball upward; if it happens to fall into one of several nail-fenced cavities in the face of the machine, the player wins 10, 15 or 20 steel balls. Those he can trade for cigarettes, candies or a variety of other inexpensive prizes (law forbids prizes worth more than 27-c-). A devotee who has taken home 600 yen or more in prizes may call himself a pro-pachinker, or professional.

Dull Device. To U.S. pinball players, accustomed to a machine which does everything but sing Yankee Doodle, the pachinko machine may seem a dull device. But by last week, Japan was speckled with at least 900,000 pachinko machines; Tokyo alone has 7,900 arcades, 170 of them reserved for children. The Japanese last year spent 100 billion yen ($277 million), or the equivalent of 11.7% of the national budget, on pachinko. Competition is so fierce among Tokyo parlors that one, the Heaven & Earth, hired a stripteaser to provide "relaxation for the players' eyes," only to find that the players preferred the machines.

Angry Solace. "The passion of the common people for pachinko" a professor solemnly decided, "seems to be a sort of resistance against the misadministration of the government . . . Their fingertips flipping steel balls are filled with some sense of anger." Sometimes the anger gets the better of pachinko players. Recently a 72-year-old woman fan lost her temper, smashed the glass of the machine, cut her self and bled to death.

A fortnight ago in Tokyo's Popeye pachinko parlor, an employee stopped one Kaichi Daijo in the midst of a winning streak. Outraged, Daijo stabbed the employee to death. Daijo was in jail last week, charged with murder. At the vic tim's funeral services appeared a large wreath of paper flowers inscribed: "An inch of our heart goes with you." It was from the boys at the Popeye parlor.

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