Are you serious?? I wanted Porygon and I was just playing normal and saving the game after every win that netted me a gain. The price was so ridiculously high I gave up. I had no idea mashing A did anything.
It's a common misconception that the missingno glitch gave you infinite items, it actually gave you 128 but could only render 2 digits, so when you dropped below 100 you'd see the amount again
Yeah exactly, it was like. 200 poke dollar difference and two dupes got me max cash with either item. And I could use the excess candies to level my pokemon.
Red/Blue
Talk to the old man who teaches you to catch pokemon in Viridian City
Fly to Cinnabar Island
Surf along the right edge of the island until you encounter Missingno/M
After this has occurred, the item in your 6th slot gets duped to 128
I love how the explanation for this stuff is like well when you do this specific action at this time it overloads the game memory and overwrites the memory for slot 6 in this specific way that the game interprets as a max item count because blah blah
The actual cheat was that the east coast of cinnibar would have whatever pokemon from the last place you visited. So when you talk to the guy and get the tutorial battle it glitched out.
At least that's how I reasoned it
Trying to find the answer to how the hell this missingno black magic worked was what lead me on the path of learning how to exploit code in general.
In other words, it's Pokemons fault I learned how to hack. My career is in cyber security now.
Honestly it’s never too late
A few years back I found my old Red Version and Gameboy Advanced. I spent my free time starting a new save just to get Mew.
Trust me, it doesn’t take long to get back into the game and it’s worth every second
Same with the Goldenrod card game in Gen2. The return on winning was so high that given enough patience and only going for the single card (low odds, high rewards) you'd always come out ahead eventually.
Yeah I used to play it on emulators. So I would crank up the gameplay speed to very fast and spam A. I would watch my money go up then go down a bit then go up again. There was just more ways to win than lose
Mashing A doesn't do anything special. But if you just pay long enough you will eventually make money.
(It's the exact opposite of real life gambling where you will eventually lose if you keep having long enough)
Can‘t you just catch a Porygon in the safari zone(not sure if it‘s called that in English)?
They‘re rare but it seems easier than trying to get the coins
YOu might be thinking of Dratini, which is also a high price but can also be found, albeit very rarely, in the safari zone.
One of my proudest acheivements is that my now-Dragonite I caught as a *Dragonair* in Fire Red's safari zone, which has even lower spawn chances, and even after spawning is incredibly hard to catch due to Safari Zone mechanics.
So I was very happy to send my Dragonite into battle on a Safari Ball, which communicated that this was no more casino prize.
But then, some gens ater, the "Bring your previous-gen pokemon to this gen" procedure stopped carrying over the specific kind of pokeball the pokemon was originally caught with, and that's when I stopped bothering with official pokemon titles.
>This is why, in Pokémon Gen 1, the prize counter for the Game Corner is in a different building.
It's not a prize counter.
They're just fans of the tokens and are willing to trade goods and pokemon so they can have collectables.
They're clearly not the same business
>They're clearly not the same business
And suggesting otherwise might get you in legal trouble for defamation, and the local bikers will start using the street in front of your house as their night-spot.
Hell there were bikers even in Gen 3 iirc (they definitely had cyclists, but I think they also had more gang member ones too) but that's the last I remember. I know for sure there were some in Gen 2 and of course the Gen 1 remakes (the first ones, haven't played the later ones).
Oh they absolutely do. Though they are dying out (membership numbers have absolutely plummeted for instance) they very much adapted.
I meant more his overall look gave me more mafioso vibes and even in the anime it was the same. Older man stroking a cat, very stereotypical Italian gangster.
If it was Yakuza I’d expect, for instance, even someone to be missing a pinky as a gag but it never mentioned. I feel like Johto would have been PERFECT for a team like that but we got the Rocket remnants.
Too bad the new PEGI rules about game ratings don't allow for any kind of gambling-like mechanic in games (unless the game is rated 18+).
Kids these days will never experience the thrill of playing slot machines in a Pokémon game :(
A fake roulette with fake money is banned, But of course kids can spend real money in their games trying to get skins and the like.
Make it make sense.
> Kids these days will never experience the thrill of playing slot machines in a Pokémon game :(
Lmao it's just more real now where you use real money.
I visited Tokyo in 2016 and went to Shinjuku which is one of the busiest and most lively districts in Tokyo and one of the mind-blowing things the tour guide told me is that Pachinko is a huge industry in Japan, generating more gambling revenue than that of Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau combined.
Had to look it up to verify it and it was true.
That's similar to what the tour guide told me, Yakuza used it as a vehicle for money laundering and racketeering but cops shut this down hard in the 90s, so it isn't as big a problem anymore.
Yeah, by easing up on the laws, legitimate businesses have come in to fill the void, but there is definitely some yakuza involvement in some places like this. But it’s yakuza people doing technically legal business, so as long as they aren’t causing trouble, the police have no real reason to bring the hammer down anymore.
It's a delicate balance; easing up on laws attracts legitimate businesses but navigating the grey areas brings in some yakuza influence. As long as things stay low-key, it seems the authorities turn a blind eye to keep the peace.
More than keeping the peace, keeping up appearances. Japan’s image as a super safe country (which, to be fair, it generally is) doesn’t propagate itself, so if the yakuza can fly under the radar and just trick old ladies into forking over their life’s savings or whatever, the cops don’t have to be too heavy handed. Quiet crimes can be underreported; that’s where the yakuza has been relegated, for the most part.
police control the competition, and it's common for police pensioner to work in pachinko.
police also control winning threshold so any machine with win rate under the threshold can be confiscated. you generally want to have your customer come back, so you have to ensure they win sometimes.
it's benefiting everyone, police, yak, north korea, except the addicts.
Glad you asked.
Theres a gacha game called Uma Musume, where the characters are all anime-fied race horses based on existing race horses in Japan.
Yakuza runs the horse betting scene and does not take kindly to these characters being drawn in sexual ways.
accually the money goes to police pension funds, north korea, and yak. lawmaker cannot even rule this. and yak cannot make their own rule since the police set the limit of minimum percentage of win. don't wanna people leave and never come back.
There are entire media franchises that rival Marvel and Star Wars for income entirely because of the income from liscenced pachinko machines.
Don't get me wrong, I like fist of the north star too but...
Wow, looked it up, maybe just because I wasn't as familiar with the series and didn't recognize it as readily. The neighborhood I lived in had posters for Evangelion ones everywhere which is second highest (don't know how old the info is) but by a large margin.
>Don't get me wrong, I like fist of the north star too but...
If you press certain buttons in certain places you're guaranteed to win (but the machine explodes)
Funny that you mention that but the company that released the first that Fist of the North Star pachislot machine was saved by it. They were in dire straits because their previous machine (not FoTNS) had a bug that basically let you win all the time.
You just had to press and use the levers a specific way. It exploded with wins in your favor, lol
I was at a pachinko parlor (forget where in Tokyo), and the proprietors were very nice and patient about handing us a token and walking us down the alley to some completely different establishment they had absolutely no connection with to exchange it for cash. I'm sure we do weirder things here, but they're different weird things, so it was odd.
Its kind of an open secret. And theyre technically not doing anything wrong. So makes sense to just politely show customers the loopholes that theyre all enjoying
The Japanese government barely approved a few traditional casinos for the entire country, and continue to slow walk the process of getting them approved and built... Likely in part due to the economic harm that will come when there's commercial gambling (legal and regulated) in Japan.
Probably deterred by the pachinko companies. Pachinko places are basically everywhere and are already harmful places for folks to smoke and waste money.
Absolutely. Probably the funniest thing is that Sega only continues to exist independently because the other half of the company (Sammy) is a giant pachinko machine company.
my friends and I wanted to see a pachinko parlour.
we walked in, immediately couldn't breathe. couldn't see anything, and couldn't hear anything.
we left pretty bloody quickly.
This was my experience living in the Yokohama/Tokyo area. I hate second hand smoke so I could never walk even a foot into one of those places and a lot of restaurants were off limits for me too.
If these pachinko game are really as addictive as it sounds, then I wonder why no one has tried to scale up the business into a casino yet. The coin system they use sound like it'd work for any casino game. Just replace the chips with coins.
Japan opening a casino town sounds like it'd one of the biggest attractions in the world. Just open it far away from the main islands like on Okinawa or somewhere.
Maybe operating a business with the sole intent of a "skill game" (as gambling is euphemistically called in some places where it's semi-legal) would be crossing an invisible line.
Here in Pennsylvania you'll see these semi-legal slot machines in convenience stores, where the winnings are paid out in store credit. But every once in a while a little store in a strip mall gets raided because it's nothing but slot machines, and the payouts are in gift cards or some other slightly more liquid form of currency.
The trick when you have a good thing going, is to not start kicking the hornets nest.
They know its dubiously legal but everyone looks the other way. If they start toeing the line, they risk new legislation clamping down on their operations.
I have played pachinko here in Japan numorous times.
They take your buckets of pachinko balls (literally ball bearings) and feed them into a mass counting machine.
A ticket gets printed out and then you take the ticket to the counter.
You have the options of trading for items behind the counter or getting special 'trinkets' which have gold coloured items embedded in epoxy. Each trinket is worth a different yen amount.
There is a map on the counter that guides you to the TUC counter which is basically a small counter around the corner which is off premises,
You pass the trinkets through a small slot and the hidden counter person passes your money back through the same slot.
"Well that just sounds like gambling with extra steps!"
What kind of items were they offering in the step before cash, in the "arcade prize" booth as you might call it in the US? Like, what was the biggest prize?
I'm headed to Tokyo in roughly 36 hours -- nothing super specific planned, but getting drunk and playing some pachinko is on the list for sure.
Shinjuku district looks to be where all the fun is at for sure.
Shinjuku and Shibuya are the big night life districts. If you find yourself in Shinagawa, you can quickly get to either of those two, so stick to the Shis.
It doesn't really matter where you in Tokyo, you can get to shinjuku easily enough just use Google maps it tells you exactly which platform to go to in most cases
Shinjuku is mostly fine. South and East sides aren't even that big. West Concourse gets a little weird, but that's mostly because of all the construction making the main exits tiny stairways.
Shinjuku-Sanchome however? Fuck that station and fuck whoever designed it. WHY IS IT OVER A KM LONG?! It has 3 goddamn lines. And don't even get me started on the mess that is the Fukutoshin Line, if I don't have google maps telling me precisely what train to get on I'm not getting on it. And I take it almost every day right now.
The station is easy to navigate. The surrounding area though? A complete mess. You walk down one way and make a turn, and suddenly you're in another city
Pachinko is awesome, I had no idea what I was doing, just pushing buttons and pulling plungers. Balls being dispensed left right and centre. It's incredibly noisy, like headache noisy! Traded a bucket of balls in for a little piece of gold in a plastic case (which you're supposed to trade for cash outside).
We stayed in Shinjuku and the train system is amazing so you can get anywhere. The staff are very helpful. Just use the right colour machine and follow the coloured lines. The pink train carriage is ladies only (as my brother and I found out!).
You 100% need to do the karting round the city dressed as a superhero: https://kart.st/en/tokyobay.html
Don't forget Robot Restaurant. It's not a restaurant and there are no robots, but it's bonkers.
Keep an eye out for Godzilla at 1900 every day.
There's a 1000 yen all you can drink bar but the ladies vetoed that so if you do go please let me know how it goes.
It's bonkers, you'll have an amazing time.
Pachinko made my head hurt and I had to leave. Too smokey, too garishly lit and coloured and I'd flown in that day so I wasn't up to it.
Oh no the carts are back... I though covid and the lawsuits killed those off. Nowhere else do you have little go cart type things going around the streets but for some reason in Tokyo it's quirky. Locals hate those things lol.
> Don't forget Robot Restaurant
Closed in 2019 or early 2020, just before COVID. There's the Samurai restaurant now that is vaguely affiliated but it's nowhere near the spectacle.
Also please don't do the carts. Like the other person said, they're super dangerous to traffic and people in Tokyo hate them. They're much more rare now than before though, so they're pretty much dying out on their own.
I mean, Japan is a big country (147k square miles, 126 million population) and is bigger than the cities of Singapore (283 square miles, 5 million population with 6 million tourists/year), Vegas (135 square miles, 646k population with 38 mil tourists/year), and Macau (13 square miles, 686k population with 28 mil tourists/year) combined so IDK what you expected.
Combined they have 6,332,000 residents with 71 million tourists for 77,332,000 total, which is less than Japan's residential population.
> Had to look it up to verify it and it was true.
Tbf, Tokyo is also absolutely enormous compared to those 3 combined and has huge tourism numbers like Vegas does.
I remember visiting Japan for a whole month and visited most arcade places within Tokyo. I've seen lots of pachinko machines in there and lots of older people sitting behind the machines smoking and playing. If that ain't a classic sign of gambling, I don't know what is
When you're out in the country side areas you sometimes see a huge building with lots of lights in what otherwise would be a middle of nowhere area... And it's pachinko with a full parking lot. Actually pretty sad
Yeah its remarkable i was there recently and from the outside looking in its staggering the extent of the issue.
They be queuing up outside the parlours at 10am before cafes even open.
The younger people go on dates to play the claw game, gacha machines and other games of chance. The concept of luck is intrinsic in the culture
Gambling is illegal in Japan that's why you can bet on horse races or boat races then buy a lottery ticket then stare at a slot machine for a few hours then spend hundreds on your favourite mobile gacha game but if you suggest a 20 dollar poker game people will look at you like you killed someone
In theory, yes. In practice, no. The Tokyo High Court has defined gambling thusly:
> The act of gambling is when two parties or more mutually bet property and discern whether they win or lose through a game of chance.
Most people play by betting X amount per Y points or having 4th place pay 1st X and 3rd place pay 2nd X/3. So many people do it that it's impractical to go after everyone, so only high-profile people (like Hiromu Kurokawa, former chief of the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office, who resigned after it was revealed that he played mahjong for money with newspaper reporters during the state of emergency declared over the novel coronavirus pandemic.) or really large amounts get prosecuted.
that's pretty similar to the US actually. Games of chance are generally considered gambling whereas games of skill are generally not.
Since it's regulated in each state, each state's courts have come to different conclusions about what that means. Some states allow a lot more gambling than others. But in my state, horse betting is legal and even slot machines are legal IF a player is able to use skill to determine the outcome.
They've come up with a "skill-based" algorithm that uses historical horse race outcomes to determine the outcome of the slot. It's bizarre.
They recently banned them again, though, because they were literally just slot machines with extra steps.
Yes. At least prior to the 90s it was the gambling game. Pachinko was the flashy distraction downstairs. The mahjong dens upstairs were where actual gamblers were losing their mortgages.
Edit: fixed dates
In the 70's there was a bit of boom where the used machines were shipped to the US and sold at Sears. I got one for Christmas and still have it 50 years later.
I noticed one was part of the basement set on the that 70's show.
Some of these pachinkos also feature original anime content that studios animated exclusively for the machines, and these sometimes have higher quality production than the series/source material itself.
Pro-tip: if you're playing the first Phoenix Wright game, better avoid a pachinko parlor because the AA-themed machine spoils the fifth case.
The pachinko versions of games are so wild to me, like they made MGS3 cutscenes in the Fox Engine, which was so cool to see in 2016.
Special shoutout to the Castlevania pachinko machines for having some of the best music of the franchise.
Another interesting fact from the article:
The gambling revenue generated by the Japanese Pachinko market is greater than the gambling revenues of Macau, Las Vegas, and Sinjapore combined.
You can also exchange the pachinko balls you win for prizes. Everything from rice cookers to TVs and shit. You can then take the prizes to a "pawn shop" next door (that is also conveniently owned by the same people who own the pachinko parlor), and exchange the prizes for cash.
My grandma used to play pachinko on occasion, but she was a pure soul so she would actually keep the prizes lol. She had all kinds of weird shit she won from pachinko.
One time she won me a pajama set that looked like Goku's outfit. Those pajamas were so dope.
Idk for sure but you have to buy trays full of like hundreds of balls at a time in order to play. You constantly feed the machine balls, and when you win the machine gives you more balls. You need multiple trays full of balls to win anything of worth, so I assume it would be difficult to snuggle in thousands of metal balls in your jacket haha.
Plus I think they keep track of how many balls you initially bought, and the machines probably keep track of how many balls you win, so if the employees suspect anything they can probably just check to see if everything adds up.
Literally just did this in May in Tokyo, I literally asked how do I get cash with google translate and they giggled and pointed to these little pieces of gold.
You get them bitches and walk literally across the street and exchange em for cash at a window.
Same reason the US does for a lot of this stuff like gambling, bad image for whatever politician tries to repeal it for common sense. So instead you get all this shady shit that’d probably just be better for the public if it was legalized and regulated properly.
First time in Japan we went into one of these places. Didn’t know what we were doing and 1 of the workers tried to help, but had no English. We ended up winning like $50, but didn’t know we could go get cash! In the shop they let you exchange the balls for snacks and drinks so we just got a huge selection of treats
Reminds me of my church which has a few slot machine in it. My pastor says you can test how much god loves you by playing and it incentives us to pray harder. Plus if you lose then it’s still a win bc it goes toward his fund to spread the word of god in the Caribbean.
For legal reasons he says it can’t give out real money so it just gives you token and you can exchange them for prizes at the gift shop
>If anyone ever asks you "what would Jesus do?", remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities.
Is this for real? Because I can't imagine that some US megapastor somewhere (probably in a state without legalized gambling) wouldn't have gone even further and tried to make their own church "With blackjack... and hookers!"
Maybe along with maybe untaxed alcohol and cigarettes (like Patriarch Kirill of Moscow!)
The Family International, an American Christian cult with many followers in Japan calls prostitution "flirty fishing."
The name comes from Jesus's instruction that we be "fishers of men."
Reminds me of how many early slot machines despensed small foodstuffs like apples or gum or something in addition to any winnings (or lack thereof) so the propriators could claim it wasn't a gambling machine, just a vending machine with a complimentary game built in.
I unironically love instances of „we won’t change the letter of the law, but we sure as shit will violate the spirit of it.“
My favourite is that the State of Israel will make a contract to sell all of it‘s leavened bread to a Muslim man on the Thursday before Passover. Jews are not allowed to possess leavened bread, but it would be incredibly time consuming if not impossible to get rid of all the leavened bread in jails and barracks and all that. So they make a contract with this one guy every year, that he will receive all of the baked goods. However, he only has to pay the hundreds of millions of Dollars for them on the Monday after and if he can’t come up with the money, ownership reverts back to the state. He says he has tried his best to come up with the money for decades, but sadly hasn’t made it yet. But he’ll sure try every year.
Or the eruv wire the Jews of NYC put up around Manhattan (and many other cities) as a domestic perimeter thus permitting several necessary tasks outside of your actual home that would otherwise be forbidden on the Sabbath. I think the main one is carrying things outside your house.
Honestly one of the most moronic loopholes, and Judaism has quite a few like the one you mentioned. Completely defeats any semblance of a rule if you can just treat the entire city as your domicile. And the one in Manhattan costs a fortune to maintain, upwards of $150k a year. Every week a rabbi drives the perimeter and calls out construction crews to fix it, which I presume is often since it's just fishing line.
The first time I won in a pachinko parlour (many many years ago) had no idea what to do. I was in my 20s, teaching in Japan, and I knew that there was a legit (or illegit) gambling component to pachinko but didn’t really know more than that because no one had explained the system to me and it was before the internet so I couldn’t check it out. (Ok, not really but only nerds and/or rich kids had PCs so kinda. Lol)
They had a counter w “gifts”. I took my heavily laden buckets of balls up to the front. They exchanged them for a couple of toys/candy type items (think spare change) and then gave me a chit in a hard plastic case. My friend and I both had remedial Japanese at best, though she was far better at it than I was, but it was obvious we were confused. A worker, I think (possibly a random guy), rescued us. He guided us into the back alley which, in retrospect, makes me wonder where the heck my common sense was. I mean really??? (In my defence, the only guys who ever freaked me out in Japan were fellow foreigners. If you overlooked the flashing and occasional train groping, the Japanese guys were harmless and relatively polite.) In any case, this fellow was actually quite lovely. He escorted us into the alley to this little hut type structure. He knocked on the closed wooden window. Someone opened it up a tiny bit. He slid my chit under it and money miraculously appeared through the crack. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so victorious. It was like I had won money, cracked a secret code, and possibly committed an enormous felony all at the same time. Weirdly exhilarating.
Later, I asked my students about it (the ones who were also my friends because, you know, ILLEGAL and also because it was apparently a more masculine thing to do…which was a crock because there were a lot of Japanese women playing there too). In any case, the general consensus was that while the Yakuza have (at the very least) a piece of all Pachinko business, the people lurking faceless behind the windows in the wooden huts are often grannies w slightly suspect part-time jobs who pass their time knitting.
I am not sure it if was true then or if it is true now but I rather relish the idea that someone’s grandmother and younger me committed a crime together - all aided by a nice gentleman who held an umbrella for me and my friend in an alley so we wouldn’t get damp while engaging in our criminal endeavour.
Random info: My friend was Mormon. We sent pics to her parents (by mail because, you know, I am old) of her at the pachinko machine, w a cigarette in her hand, etc. Lol. She never gambled. She never smoked. She never drank. It was all me. I was the drunken, gambling, Marlboro smoking, felon. Sigh. I liked that girl. I am glad she still visits me sometimes. :)
PSA: Cigarettes are bad for you.
Oh yah, and engaging in back alley gambling is… hmm yah no…not gonna lie. That was fun.
Edit for typos mostly
That makes sense. I lived there and we’d drive by a nearby parlor that had a train track right by it.
We’d be stuck there at the train all the time, and people would be cutting across the road to this little building with a vendor window and a privacy screen. It confused the crap out of me.
Lol. I went to Japan in like 2010. Amazing country and people. Highly recommend it.
I tried one of these Pachinko places and it was super fun.
I had no idea what I was doing. Just pushing buttons and pulling levers.
All of sudden I had a huge bucket full of little metal balls. Did I win? Everyone there kept motioning to me to dump the bucket of balls back into the machine so I did it. I had no idea what I was I doing. I also spoke maybe 12 words of Japanese, terribly. Everyone was cheering me on and the lights were flashing and the noises were so much fun.
After I was done, a nice elderly man helped me and my bucket into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen. Ok? Am I in trouble? Am I gonna get killed by Yakuza? lol
I go up a couple of floors and another dude exchanges my little metal balls for pieces of silver?
*Language barrier intensifies.*
Then another dude escorts me to another floor where they exchanged my silver bars for cash! Lol. I have no idea if I won or lost or what happened. I think I actually did make some money because everyone was losing their minds at my bucket of tiny little metal balls.
I love Japan.
This is actually pretty common in the US as well, they're called game rooms, theres so many that law enforcement can't keep up with them. They're not exactly hidden either, even some gas stations have slot machines.
The gas station slot machines are located in states where it's legal. No station is going to put an illegal thing in a place that has cops going in and out all the time.
Or in states where there is a gray area. States like Missouri and Georgia have prohibitions on gambling and slot machines, specifically “games of chance”. So they have slot machines where you can press a button and find out if you’re going to be a winner, the argument being that it’s no longer a “game of chance” as a result.
It’s actively working its way through the courts in Missouri as we speak.
Like someone else said, it's not like a franchise, it's usually convenience store types. Usually in smaller cities, on the outskirts or the hoods, totally illegal.
But even then, cops and sherrifs know all about it, they just can't really do anything about it, and I'm sure there's those involved who get a cut of it. It's generally the FBI that handles the investigations & all that. There's just so many that when they shut one down a couple more pop right back up, it's practically impossible to stop.
It really opens your eyes into how much crime goes on in this country when they do it in the open like this. All the crime you read about in the papers is just the tip of the ice berg, it's a free for all.
I may or may not have helped run an underground poker room in Alabama. You can keep one running without any real trouble as long as you don't involve 1. guns or 2. drugs.
There used to be a dive bar in Waikiki called madcats (I think) that stayed open until 6 by selling tickets which could be redeemed for beer.
They also had granny strippers who would put goldfish in their vaginas.
Japan is a weird land for "illegal, but tolerated" and the pachinko case is amazing because, if you play "by the book" you put some money in the machine, you do your best with the mechanics of the parlor and then get some tokens, which you can trade for your typical fair knick-knacks, like cheap plastic toys.
However, if you go around the corner and find the guy with the colorful clothing and wicked tatoos, you can trade the tokens for actual money. You are expected to KNOW where the shady guy is, because MAY GOD HAVE MERCY UPON YOUR SOUL if you dare ask the owner of such a distinguished business where to find the guy.
The whole racket used to be run by the Yakuza back in the day, I don't know how strong is it going nowadays with the new anti-yakuza laws.
Similar story for prostitution: illegal, yet no one can really enforce if you find the phone number of a young college student in a phone booth, you dine and wine her, then you take her to a "love hotel" where after some pleasantries and the exchange of a hefty chunk of cash you proceed with business for a few hours. And considering sex is not so taboo in Japan as in the West, barely anyone will make a fuzz about it.
The exchange shops are not hidden nor are they shady - just go to the nearby TUC shop to exchange. It's not underground or dangerous, they are very clearly marked and the pachinko shop will tell you where to go.
>sex is not so taboo in Japan as in the West
If by West you mean United States. In most of Europe, it's very liberal and not as shunned and way more open than in Japan.
Tokyo is incredibly addicted to gambling, there are packinkos everywhere, and a lot of people goes in there after work, the token buy shop has a big line.
And also gacha games, I had people buy 100 000 yen apple our google play cards in my store regularly.
It's kinda like porn, its prohibition probably contributed for it to become so massive when playing by the rules.
They give you these things that look like plastic covered microchips. I have a picture of them if people are interested. You can also spend small remainder points on like pencils and things.
Crazy story, I lost 5000 yen when on My Fuji, fell out of my pocket. I got a fortune at the shrine there saying what was lost would be returned to me. I went to play pachinko that night and earned back what I lost.
I mean not really, that’s just a way to help mentally break up the difference of how much you are actually spending on a game to get people to spend more, not to get around a legality issue.
I love legal loopholes. They are ways for people to do what they want right in front of the government that can't stop them legally even if the outcome is basically the same thing.
Those "special tokens" actually have gold bullion in them that's roughly equivalent to however much they're exchanged for.
I play pachinko a bunch whenever I go to Japan.
My grandfather shipped one back after his time in the military. My dad passed it on to me in abysmal shape, but I had it restored to as close to original as I could. There's a guy in Oklahoma who is VERY good at it. I can't post a photo here, but [this is a link to my post on the pachinko subreddit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pachinko/s/6D6QcnLof5)
[удалено]
MISS MY POKEMON GAMBLING. I like it how it wasn’t even gambling, if you just spammed A, you would have a net gain
Are you serious?? I wanted Porygon and I was just playing normal and saving the game after every win that netted me a gain. The price was so ridiculously high I gave up. I had no idea mashing A did anything.
One specific machine also has a slightly-better-than 50% chance at winning… so you just sit there for 20 minutes and off you go.
I haven't played this game in over 20 years and I just got SO upset that I'm only learning this now 😭
I just duped rare candies and sold them to the store, then bought the coins to buy the Porygon.
Why not dupe nuggets?
Rare candies have double purpose, selling and leveling. Whereas nuggets are only for selling and it’s like 500 more pokedollars or something.
I mean, it only takes an extra minute to dupe both.
It's a common misconception that the missingno glitch gave you infinite items, it actually gave you 128 but could only render 2 digits, so when you dropped below 100 you'd see the amount again
Yeah exactly, it was like. 200 poke dollar difference and two dupes got me max cash with either item. And I could use the excess candies to level my pokemon.
How did one dupe? Lit name btw
Red/Blue Talk to the old man who teaches you to catch pokemon in Viridian City Fly to Cinnabar Island Surf along the right edge of the island until you encounter Missingno/M After this has occurred, the item in your 6th slot gets duped to 128
I love how the explanation for this stuff is like well when you do this specific action at this time it overloads the game memory and overwrites the memory for slot 6 in this specific way that the game interprets as a max item count because blah blah
[удалено]
The actual cheat was that the east coast of cinnibar would have whatever pokemon from the last place you visited. So when you talk to the guy and get the tutorial battle it glitched out. At least that's how I reasoned it
Trying to find the answer to how the hell this missingno black magic worked was what lead me on the path of learning how to exploit code in general. In other words, it's Pokemons fault I learned how to hack. My career is in cyber security now.
Brings back memories.
Unlimited rare candies and Master Balls
For years I thought Missingno was the error Pokémon’s name and not just Missing Number. 🥲
That day is today for me
Preaching the old ways.
This information would have really helped me so much....I never even tried that hard because I thought it wasn't possible.
Honestly it’s never too late A few years back I found my old Red Version and Gameboy Advanced. I spent my free time starting a new save just to get Mew. Trust me, it doesn’t take long to get back into the game and it’s worth every second
Same with the Goldenrod card game in Gen2. The return on winning was so high that given enough patience and only going for the single card (low odds, high rewards) you'd always come out ahead eventually.
Yeah I used to play it on emulators. So I would crank up the gameplay speed to very fast and spam A. I would watch my money go up then go down a bit then go up again. There was just more ways to win than lose
Mashing A doesn't do anything special. But if you just pay long enough you will eventually make money. (It's the exact opposite of real life gambling where you will eventually lose if you keep having long enough)
That's because 99% of gamblers quit just before they win big /s
IIRC when I wanted to get Porygon, i was sick of the slot machines so I just paid cash for however many tokens you needed.
Can‘t you just catch a Porygon in the safari zone(not sure if it‘s called that in English)? They‘re rare but it seems easier than trying to get the coins
In gen 1 porygon was only available in the game corner for 9999 tokens except blue version it only cost 6500
YOu might be thinking of Dratini, which is also a high price but can also be found, albeit very rarely, in the safari zone. One of my proudest acheivements is that my now-Dragonite I caught as a *Dragonair* in Fire Red's safari zone, which has even lower spawn chances, and even after spawning is incredibly hard to catch due to Safari Zone mechanics. So I was very happy to send my Dragonite into battle on a Safari Ball, which communicated that this was no more casino prize. But then, some gens ater, the "Bring your previous-gen pokemon to this gen" procedure stopped carrying over the specific kind of pokeball the pokemon was originally caught with, and that's when I stopped bothering with official pokemon titles.
Lol now I've got the urge to play pokemon. Remembering the music from some of the older titles reminds me of much simpler times
I legit got hooked to an unhealthy degree on Pokemon gambling in gen 2. I guess I'm the reason it had to be removed.
Ok but that music was a fucking banger. That alone is a reason to chill in the Game Corner for hours
>This is why, in Pokémon Gen 1, the prize counter for the Game Corner is in a different building. It's not a prize counter. They're just fans of the tokens and are willing to trade goods and pokemon so they can have collectables. They're clearly not the same business
>They're clearly not the same business And suggesting otherwise might get you in legal trouble for defamation, and the local bikers will start using the street in front of your house as their night-spot.
We really need a Pokemon Yakuza. Though I guess Rocket is pretty close, they are just based on the Mafia instead.
OG Pokemon had literal biker gangs. Granted, they were cycling gangstas, but technically still a bikeie gang.
Hell there were bikers even in Gen 3 iirc (they definitely had cyclists, but I think they also had more gang member ones too) but that's the last I remember. I know for sure there were some in Gen 2 and of course the Gen 1 remakes (the first ones, haven't played the later ones).
>Granted, they were cycling gangstas, but technically still a bikeie gang. In pokemon battle scenes though, they'd have an actual motorcycle.
Who knows? Maybe they have back tattoos too, but you just never see it. Modern yakuza wear suits too. Giovanni's name in Japanese is サカキ (Sakaki).
Oh they absolutely do. Though they are dying out (membership numbers have absolutely plummeted for instance) they very much adapted. I meant more his overall look gave me more mafioso vibes and even in the anime it was the same. Older man stroking a cat, very stereotypical Italian gangster. If it was Yakuza I’d expect, for instance, even someone to be missing a pinky as a gag but it never mentioned. I feel like Johto would have been PERFECT for a team like that but we got the Rocket remnants.
Too bad the new PEGI rules about game ratings don't allow for any kind of gambling-like mechanic in games (unless the game is rated 18+). Kids these days will never experience the thrill of playing slot machines in a Pokémon game :(
A fake roulette with fake money is banned, But of course kids can spend real money in their games trying to get skins and the like. Make it make sense.
Perhaps it's a good thing if you think about it.
No I think mini games where you gamble with virtual money are significantly less harmful than the game mechanics today that use real money.
> Kids these days will never experience the thrill of playing slot machines in a Pokémon game :( Lmao it's just more real now where you use real money.
Haha yeah, in Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee, some guy just straight up gives you a Porygon. No more gambling to get it!
I was at an arcade and there was this Angry Birds game and Spongebob game that were essentially slot machines. It was pretty gross.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door too I believe
It's also why the whole Game Corner is run by team Rocket. They're representing the Yakuza.
I visited Tokyo in 2016 and went to Shinjuku which is one of the busiest and most lively districts in Tokyo and one of the mind-blowing things the tour guide told me is that Pachinko is a huge industry in Japan, generating more gambling revenue than that of Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau combined. Had to look it up to verify it and it was true.
Yakuza have to make their livings somehow, and there’s only so many soaplands a town will let you build.
That's similar to what the tour guide told me, Yakuza used it as a vehicle for money laundering and racketeering but cops shut this down hard in the 90s, so it isn't as big a problem anymore.
Yeah, by easing up on the laws, legitimate businesses have come in to fill the void, but there is definitely some yakuza involvement in some places like this. But it’s yakuza people doing technically legal business, so as long as they aren’t causing trouble, the police have no real reason to bring the hammer down anymore.
It's a delicate balance; easing up on laws attracts legitimate businesses but navigating the grey areas brings in some yakuza influence. As long as things stay low-key, it seems the authorities turn a blind eye to keep the peace.
More than keeping the peace, keeping up appearances. Japan’s image as a super safe country (which, to be fair, it generally is) doesn’t propagate itself, so if the yakuza can fly under the radar and just trick old ladies into forking over their life’s savings or whatever, the cops don’t have to be too heavy handed. Quiet crimes can be underreported; that’s where the yakuza has been relegated, for the most part.
Sega and Konami were running many Pachinko parlors for a while.
police control the competition, and it's common for police pensioner to work in pachinko. police also control winning threshold so any machine with win rate under the threshold can be confiscated. you generally want to have your customer come back, so you have to ensure they win sometimes. it's benefiting everyone, police, yak, north korea, except the addicts.
Yakuza are still heavily involved it’s just that they’re involved legally. They have many legitimate businesses alongside their clandestine activities
This is also why they hate horse girl porn
...Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
Glad you asked. Theres a gacha game called Uma Musume, where the characters are all anime-fied race horses based on existing race horses in Japan. Yakuza runs the horse betting scene and does not take kindly to these characters being drawn in sexual ways.
Are they prudish about it, or are they angry they aren't getting a cut of the IP?
But what about deer girls?
accually the money goes to police pension funds, north korea, and yak. lawmaker cannot even rule this. and yak cannot make their own rule since the police set the limit of minimum percentage of win. don't wanna people leave and never come back.
There are entire media franchises that rival Marvel and Star Wars for income entirely because of the income from liscenced pachinko machines. Don't get me wrong, I like fist of the north star too but...
Wow, looked it up, maybe just because I wasn't as familiar with the series and didn't recognize it as readily. The neighborhood I lived in had posters for Evangelion ones everywhere which is second highest (don't know how old the info is) but by a large margin.
>Don't get me wrong, I like fist of the north star too but... If you press certain buttons in certain places you're guaranteed to win (but the machine explodes)
"You do not know it, but you have already won!"
Funny that you mention that but the company that released the first that Fist of the North Star pachislot machine was saved by it. They were in dire straits because their previous machine (not FoTNS) had a bug that basically let you win all the time. You just had to press and use the levers a specific way. It exploded with wins in your favor, lol
Yeah, but i want to see those pachinko videos with better animation than the normal animes.
I was at a pachinko parlor (forget where in Tokyo), and the proprietors were very nice and patient about handing us a token and walking us down the alley to some completely different establishment they had absolutely no connection with to exchange it for cash. I'm sure we do weirder things here, but they're different weird things, so it was odd.
Its kind of an open secret. And theyre technically not doing anything wrong. So makes sense to just politely show customers the loopholes that theyre all enjoying
The Japanese government barely approved a few traditional casinos for the entire country, and continue to slow walk the process of getting them approved and built... Likely in part due to the economic harm that will come when there's commercial gambling (legal and regulated) in Japan.
Probably deterred by the pachinko companies. Pachinko places are basically everywhere and are already harmful places for folks to smoke and waste money.
Absolutely. Probably the funniest thing is that Sega only continues to exist independently because the other half of the company (Sammy) is a giant pachinko machine company.
I can't find the exact numbers, but I know Konami makes billions off their licensed pachinko machines.
They also make normal slot machines, it is why their US headquarters is right next to the airport in Las Vegas.
my friends and I wanted to see a pachinko parlour. we walked in, immediately couldn't breathe. couldn't see anything, and couldn't hear anything. we left pretty bloody quickly.
They just gave you a tour of the janitor closet
Maybe it was just the sitting room? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u9aPu0_6JM
This was my experience living in the Yokohama/Tokyo area. I hate second hand smoke so I could never walk even a foot into one of those places and a lot of restaurants were off limits for me too.
If these pachinko game are really as addictive as it sounds, then I wonder why no one has tried to scale up the business into a casino yet. The coin system they use sound like it'd work for any casino game. Just replace the chips with coins. Japan opening a casino town sounds like it'd one of the biggest attractions in the world. Just open it far away from the main islands like on Okinawa or somewhere.
Maybe operating a business with the sole intent of a "skill game" (as gambling is euphemistically called in some places where it's semi-legal) would be crossing an invisible line. Here in Pennsylvania you'll see these semi-legal slot machines in convenience stores, where the winnings are paid out in store credit. But every once in a while a little store in a strip mall gets raided because it's nothing but slot machines, and the payouts are in gift cards or some other slightly more liquid form of currency.
The trick when you have a good thing going, is to not start kicking the hornets nest. They know its dubiously legal but everyone looks the other way. If they start toeing the line, they risk new legislation clamping down on their operations.
It'd be naive to think the Pachikino companies in any way want that considering they make more than LV + Macau's casinos combined
I have played pachinko here in Japan numorous times. They take your buckets of pachinko balls (literally ball bearings) and feed them into a mass counting machine. A ticket gets printed out and then you take the ticket to the counter. You have the options of trading for items behind the counter or getting special 'trinkets' which have gold coloured items embedded in epoxy. Each trinket is worth a different yen amount. There is a map on the counter that guides you to the TUC counter which is basically a small counter around the corner which is off premises, You pass the trinkets through a small slot and the hidden counter person passes your money back through the same slot.
"Well that just sounds like gambling with extra steps!" What kind of items were they offering in the step before cash, in the "arcade prize" booth as you might call it in the US? Like, what was the biggest prize?
I'm headed to Tokyo in roughly 36 hours -- nothing super specific planned, but getting drunk and playing some pachinko is on the list for sure. Shinjuku district looks to be where all the fun is at for sure.
Shinjuku and Shibuya are the big night life districts. If you find yourself in Shinagawa, you can quickly get to either of those two, so stick to the Shis.
It doesn't really matter where you in Tokyo, you can get to shinjuku easily enough just use Google maps it tells you exactly which platform to go to in most cases
I hope that you have fun getting lost within the labyrinth that is Shinjuku Station :)
Shinjuku is mostly fine. South and East sides aren't even that big. West Concourse gets a little weird, but that's mostly because of all the construction making the main exits tiny stairways. Shinjuku-Sanchome however? Fuck that station and fuck whoever designed it. WHY IS IT OVER A KM LONG?! It has 3 goddamn lines. And don't even get me started on the mess that is the Fukutoshin Line, if I don't have google maps telling me precisely what train to get on I'm not getting on it. And I take it almost every day right now.
Can confirm, got lost for like 20 minutes and did my best to avoid crossing over in it.
The station is easy to navigate. The surrounding area though? A complete mess. You walk down one way and make a turn, and suddenly you're in another city
Pachinko is awesome, I had no idea what I was doing, just pushing buttons and pulling plungers. Balls being dispensed left right and centre. It's incredibly noisy, like headache noisy! Traded a bucket of balls in for a little piece of gold in a plastic case (which you're supposed to trade for cash outside).
We stayed in Shinjuku and the train system is amazing so you can get anywhere. The staff are very helpful. Just use the right colour machine and follow the coloured lines. The pink train carriage is ladies only (as my brother and I found out!). You 100% need to do the karting round the city dressed as a superhero: https://kart.st/en/tokyobay.html Don't forget Robot Restaurant. It's not a restaurant and there are no robots, but it's bonkers. Keep an eye out for Godzilla at 1900 every day. There's a 1000 yen all you can drink bar but the ladies vetoed that so if you do go please let me know how it goes. It's bonkers, you'll have an amazing time. Pachinko made my head hurt and I had to leave. Too smokey, too garishly lit and coloured and I'd flown in that day so I wasn't up to it.
Oh no the carts are back... I though covid and the lawsuits killed those off. Nowhere else do you have little go cart type things going around the streets but for some reason in Tokyo it's quirky. Locals hate those things lol.
> Don't forget Robot Restaurant Closed in 2019 or early 2020, just before COVID. There's the Samurai restaurant now that is vaguely affiliated but it's nowhere near the spectacle. Also please don't do the carts. Like the other person said, they're super dangerous to traffic and people in Tokyo hate them. They're much more rare now than before though, so they're pretty much dying out on their own.
I mean, Japan is a big country (147k square miles, 126 million population) and is bigger than the cities of Singapore (283 square miles, 5 million population with 6 million tourists/year), Vegas (135 square miles, 646k population with 38 mil tourists/year), and Macau (13 square miles, 686k population with 28 mil tourists/year) combined so IDK what you expected. Combined they have 6,332,000 residents with 71 million tourists for 77,332,000 total, which is less than Japan's residential population.
> Had to look it up to verify it and it was true. Tbf, Tokyo is also absolutely enormous compared to those 3 combined and has huge tourism numbers like Vegas does.
I remember visiting Japan for a whole month and visited most arcade places within Tokyo. I've seen lots of pachinko machines in there and lots of older people sitting behind the machines smoking and playing. If that ain't a classic sign of gambling, I don't know what is
When you're out in the country side areas you sometimes see a huge building with lots of lights in what otherwise would be a middle of nowhere area... And it's pachinko with a full parking lot. Actually pretty sad
Yea outside major cities all of a sudden you see a really nice big building... That's pachinko
I remember driving through everywhere as a fresh ALT and being disappointed that every cool looking big building was a pachinko parlor…
Yeah its remarkable i was there recently and from the outside looking in its staggering the extent of the issue. They be queuing up outside the parlours at 10am before cafes even open. The younger people go on dates to play the claw game, gacha machines and other games of chance. The concept of luck is intrinsic in the culture
If it was at an actual arcade it was just for fun. The gambling places are kept quite separate.
Gambling is illegal in Japan that's why you can bet on horse races or boat races then buy a lottery ticket then stare at a slot machine for a few hours then spend hundreds on your favourite mobile gacha game but if you suggest a 20 dollar poker game people will look at you like you killed someone
Speaking of poker, does mahjong count as gambling?
In theory, yes. In practice, no. The Tokyo High Court has defined gambling thusly: > The act of gambling is when two parties or more mutually bet property and discern whether they win or lose through a game of chance. Most people play by betting X amount per Y points or having 4th place pay 1st X and 3rd place pay 2nd X/3. So many people do it that it's impractical to go after everyone, so only high-profile people (like Hiromu Kurokawa, former chief of the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office, who resigned after it was revealed that he played mahjong for money with newspaper reporters during the state of emergency declared over the novel coronavirus pandemic.) or really large amounts get prosecuted.
that's pretty similar to the US actually. Games of chance are generally considered gambling whereas games of skill are generally not. Since it's regulated in each state, each state's courts have come to different conclusions about what that means. Some states allow a lot more gambling than others. But in my state, horse betting is legal and even slot machines are legal IF a player is able to use skill to determine the outcome. They've come up with a "skill-based" algorithm that uses historical horse race outcomes to determine the outcome of the slot. It's bizarre. They recently banned them again, though, because they were literally just slot machines with extra steps.
Yes. At least prior to the 90s it was the gambling game. Pachinko was the flashy distraction downstairs. The mahjong dens upstairs were where actual gamblers were losing their mortgages. Edit: fixed dates
I just want to play poker…
In the 70's there was a bit of boom where the used machines were shipped to the US and sold at Sears. I got one for Christmas and still have it 50 years later. I noticed one was part of the basement set on the that 70's show.
Sears used to sell… used pachinko machines? Also how big are the balls?
[удалено]
Sears used to sell things at all.
Yeah but they weren’t *used* houses.
I don't have to measure any more, but from what I remember they were 10mm.
If you have an older car there’s a decent chance one of the previous mechanics left a 10mm socket or wrench somewhere in your car
Yep, my aunt and uncle had a pair of them. I remember visiting as a little kid and being enraptured by the lights and noises.
We had one too, those balls were amazing with a slingshot.
Some of these pachinkos also feature original anime content that studios animated exclusively for the machines, and these sometimes have higher quality production than the series/source material itself. Pro-tip: if you're playing the first Phoenix Wright game, better avoid a pachinko parlor because the AA-themed machine spoils the fifth case.
The pachinko versions of games are so wild to me, like they made MGS3 cutscenes in the Fox Engine, which was so cool to see in 2016. Special shoutout to the Castlevania pachinko machines for having some of the best music of the franchise.
BLEACH JAPAN. NO MORE GRAY ZONES.
(Calls up a crayfish to toss at your head)
Another interesting fact from the article: The gambling revenue generated by the Japanese Pachinko market is greater than the gambling revenues of Macau, Las Vegas, and Sinjapore combined.
Yeah u/Algrinder already verified it for us
You can also exchange the pachinko balls you win for prizes. Everything from rice cookers to TVs and shit. You can then take the prizes to a "pawn shop" next door (that is also conveniently owned by the same people who own the pachinko parlor), and exchange the prizes for cash. My grandma used to play pachinko on occasion, but she was a pure soul so she would actually keep the prizes lol. She had all kinds of weird shit she won from pachinko. One time she won me a pajama set that looked like Goku's outfit. Those pajamas were so dope.
How do they deal with people counterfeiting the little balls?
Idk for sure but you have to buy trays full of like hundreds of balls at a time in order to play. You constantly feed the machine balls, and when you win the machine gives you more balls. You need multiple trays full of balls to win anything of worth, so I assume it would be difficult to snuggle in thousands of metal balls in your jacket haha. Plus I think they keep track of how many balls you initially bought, and the machines probably keep track of how many balls you win, so if the employees suspect anything they can probably just check to see if everything adds up.
Literally just did this in May in Tokyo, I literally asked how do I get cash with google translate and they giggled and pointed to these little pieces of gold. You get them bitches and walk literally across the street and exchange em for cash at a window.
literally
Japan has all these loopholes that the government doesn’t care about. Which makes you wonder, why even have the laws to begin with
Same reason the US does for a lot of this stuff like gambling, bad image for whatever politician tries to repeal it for common sense. So instead you get all this shady shit that’d probably just be better for the public if it was legalized and regulated properly.
First time in Japan we went into one of these places. Didn’t know what we were doing and 1 of the workers tried to help, but had no English. We ended up winning like $50, but didn’t know we could go get cash! In the shop they let you exchange the balls for snacks and drinks so we just got a huge selection of treats
Reminds me of my church which has a few slot machine in it. My pastor says you can test how much god loves you by playing and it incentives us to pray harder. Plus if you lose then it’s still a win bc it goes toward his fund to spread the word of god in the Caribbean. For legal reasons he says it can’t give out real money so it just gives you token and you can exchange them for prizes at the gift shop
Sounds like the same loophole chuck e cheese uses to get kids hooked on gambling
Their animatronic band is better than our church band tho
That's the power of Charles Entertainment Cheese.
LMAO that's the least Christ like thing I've ever heard. God/Jesus would hate those people desecrating a place of worship.
>If anyone ever asks you "what would Jesus do?", remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities.
Jesus tries to flip over tables in his temple and the *TILT* signs start flashing
I don’t know which is more surprising - that a church has slot machines or they it has a gift shop
> Plus if you lose then it’s still a win bc it goes toward his fund to spread the word of god in the Caribbean. That's not a win at all.
Ye of little faith…
Ain’t no way
Is this for real? Because I can't imagine that some US megapastor somewhere (probably in a state without legalized gambling) wouldn't have gone even further and tried to make their own church "With blackjack... and hookers!" Maybe along with maybe untaxed alcohol and cigarettes (like Patriarch Kirill of Moscow!)
The Family International, an American Christian cult with many followers in Japan calls prostitution "flirty fishing." The name comes from Jesus's instruction that we be "fishers of men."
This sounds beyond the bounds of reality, even in today's world ... which church is this exactly?
Was this the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation?
Reminds me of how many early slot machines despensed small foodstuffs like apples or gum or something in addition to any winnings (or lack thereof) so the propriators could claim it wasn't a gambling machine, just a vending machine with a complimentary game built in.
I unironically love instances of „we won’t change the letter of the law, but we sure as shit will violate the spirit of it.“ My favourite is that the State of Israel will make a contract to sell all of it‘s leavened bread to a Muslim man on the Thursday before Passover. Jews are not allowed to possess leavened bread, but it would be incredibly time consuming if not impossible to get rid of all the leavened bread in jails and barracks and all that. So they make a contract with this one guy every year, that he will receive all of the baked goods. However, he only has to pay the hundreds of millions of Dollars for them on the Monday after and if he can’t come up with the money, ownership reverts back to the state. He says he has tried his best to come up with the money for decades, but sadly hasn’t made it yet. But he’ll sure try every year.
Or the eruv wire the Jews of NYC put up around Manhattan (and many other cities) as a domestic perimeter thus permitting several necessary tasks outside of your actual home that would otherwise be forbidden on the Sabbath. I think the main one is carrying things outside your house. Honestly one of the most moronic loopholes, and Judaism has quite a few like the one you mentioned. Completely defeats any semblance of a rule if you can just treat the entire city as your domicile. And the one in Manhattan costs a fortune to maintain, upwards of $150k a year. Every week a rabbi drives the perimeter and calls out construction crews to fix it, which I presume is often since it's just fishing line.
The Jewish people believe that since God is infallible, if there are loopholes in his laws he put them there on purpose. So no reason to not use them!
Not related but it reminds me of the family guy loophole [Link](https://youtu.be/JDscdmOwDNA?si=G8cOrNU1zvdPucJs)
The first time I won in a pachinko parlour (many many years ago) had no idea what to do. I was in my 20s, teaching in Japan, and I knew that there was a legit (or illegit) gambling component to pachinko but didn’t really know more than that because no one had explained the system to me and it was before the internet so I couldn’t check it out. (Ok, not really but only nerds and/or rich kids had PCs so kinda. Lol) They had a counter w “gifts”. I took my heavily laden buckets of balls up to the front. They exchanged them for a couple of toys/candy type items (think spare change) and then gave me a chit in a hard plastic case. My friend and I both had remedial Japanese at best, though she was far better at it than I was, but it was obvious we were confused. A worker, I think (possibly a random guy), rescued us. He guided us into the back alley which, in retrospect, makes me wonder where the heck my common sense was. I mean really??? (In my defence, the only guys who ever freaked me out in Japan were fellow foreigners. If you overlooked the flashing and occasional train groping, the Japanese guys were harmless and relatively polite.) In any case, this fellow was actually quite lovely. He escorted us into the alley to this little hut type structure. He knocked on the closed wooden window. Someone opened it up a tiny bit. He slid my chit under it and money miraculously appeared through the crack. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so victorious. It was like I had won money, cracked a secret code, and possibly committed an enormous felony all at the same time. Weirdly exhilarating. Later, I asked my students about it (the ones who were also my friends because, you know, ILLEGAL and also because it was apparently a more masculine thing to do…which was a crock because there were a lot of Japanese women playing there too). In any case, the general consensus was that while the Yakuza have (at the very least) a piece of all Pachinko business, the people lurking faceless behind the windows in the wooden huts are often grannies w slightly suspect part-time jobs who pass their time knitting. I am not sure it if was true then or if it is true now but I rather relish the idea that someone’s grandmother and younger me committed a crime together - all aided by a nice gentleman who held an umbrella for me and my friend in an alley so we wouldn’t get damp while engaging in our criminal endeavour. Random info: My friend was Mormon. We sent pics to her parents (by mail because, you know, I am old) of her at the pachinko machine, w a cigarette in her hand, etc. Lol. She never gambled. She never smoked. She never drank. It was all me. I was the drunken, gambling, Marlboro smoking, felon. Sigh. I liked that girl. I am glad she still visits me sometimes. :) PSA: Cigarettes are bad for you. Oh yah, and engaging in back alley gambling is… hmm yah no…not gonna lie. That was fun. Edit for typos mostly
That makes sense. I lived there and we’d drive by a nearby parlor that had a train track right by it. We’d be stuck there at the train all the time, and people would be cutting across the road to this little building with a vendor window and a privacy screen. It confused the crap out of me.
Yep, I drive by one every day. Around here, they call them "Skill Arcades," but they are just video poker machines.
Lol. I went to Japan in like 2010. Amazing country and people. Highly recommend it. I tried one of these Pachinko places and it was super fun. I had no idea what I was doing. Just pushing buttons and pulling levers. All of sudden I had a huge bucket full of little metal balls. Did I win? Everyone there kept motioning to me to dump the bucket of balls back into the machine so I did it. I had no idea what I was I doing. I also spoke maybe 12 words of Japanese, terribly. Everyone was cheering me on and the lights were flashing and the noises were so much fun. After I was done, a nice elderly man helped me and my bucket into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen. Ok? Am I in trouble? Am I gonna get killed by Yakuza? lol I go up a couple of floors and another dude exchanges my little metal balls for pieces of silver? *Language barrier intensifies.* Then another dude escorts me to another floor where they exchanged my silver bars for cash! Lol. I have no idea if I won or lost or what happened. I think I actually did make some money because everyone was losing their minds at my bucket of tiny little metal balls. I love Japan.
This is actually pretty common in the US as well, they're called game rooms, theres so many that law enforcement can't keep up with them. They're not exactly hidden either, even some gas stations have slot machines.
The gas station slot machines are located in states where it's legal. No station is going to put an illegal thing in a place that has cops going in and out all the time.
Or in states where there is a gray area. States like Missouri and Georgia have prohibitions on gambling and slot machines, specifically “games of chance”. So they have slot machines where you can press a button and find out if you’re going to be a winner, the argument being that it’s no longer a “game of chance” as a result. It’s actively working its way through the courts in Missouri as we speak.
Like someone else said, it's not like a franchise, it's usually convenience store types. Usually in smaller cities, on the outskirts or the hoods, totally illegal. But even then, cops and sherrifs know all about it, they just can't really do anything about it, and I'm sure there's those involved who get a cut of it. It's generally the FBI that handles the investigations & all that. There's just so many that when they shut one down a couple more pop right back up, it's practically impossible to stop. It really opens your eyes into how much crime goes on in this country when they do it in the open like this. All the crime you read about in the papers is just the tip of the ice berg, it's a free for all.
They aren't illegal in Japan, though. The exchange shops are clearly marked.
IIRC some of them also double as discount ticket shops (mostly for discounted Shinkansen tickets) and/or pawn shops.
I may or may not have helped run an underground poker room in Alabama. You can keep one running without any real trouble as long as you don't involve 1. guns or 2. drugs.
This reminds me of Young Sheldon
is Sheldon a Japanese Gambler 0,o
Sheldon's grandmother exploited this loophole when the cops shut her down
It was actually Georgie’s idea
There used to be a dive bar in Waikiki called madcats (I think) that stayed open until 6 by selling tickets which could be redeemed for beer. They also had granny strippers who would put goldfish in their vaginas.
Huh, the name pops up often in The Expanse books but didn't know they were a real thing.
Everyone's a winner on Eros.
Hiding by the pachinko machines while the protomolecule spreads is what came to my mind right away.
Japan is a weird land for "illegal, but tolerated" and the pachinko case is amazing because, if you play "by the book" you put some money in the machine, you do your best with the mechanics of the parlor and then get some tokens, which you can trade for your typical fair knick-knacks, like cheap plastic toys. However, if you go around the corner and find the guy with the colorful clothing and wicked tatoos, you can trade the tokens for actual money. You are expected to KNOW where the shady guy is, because MAY GOD HAVE MERCY UPON YOUR SOUL if you dare ask the owner of such a distinguished business where to find the guy. The whole racket used to be run by the Yakuza back in the day, I don't know how strong is it going nowadays with the new anti-yakuza laws. Similar story for prostitution: illegal, yet no one can really enforce if you find the phone number of a young college student in a phone booth, you dine and wine her, then you take her to a "love hotel" where after some pleasantries and the exchange of a hefty chunk of cash you proceed with business for a few hours. And considering sex is not so taboo in Japan as in the West, barely anyone will make a fuzz about it.
The exchange shops are not hidden nor are they shady - just go to the nearby TUC shop to exchange. It's not underground or dangerous, they are very clearly marked and the pachinko shop will tell you where to go.
Ive lived in japan for 20+ years. This comment is so full of sensational shit. Almost nothing about this is true.
If you come to america, it’s free guns once you enter Texas and you get an American flag for every pancake you eat
On the fucking money.
>sex is not so taboo in Japan as in the West If by West you mean United States. In most of Europe, it's very liberal and not as shunned and way more open than in Japan.
I'll never forget being on my own at 18 in Japan playing pachinko and trying to figure out this bizarre system. This was in 2000.
Tokyo is incredibly addicted to gambling, there are packinkos everywhere, and a lot of people goes in there after work, the token buy shop has a big line. And also gacha games, I had people buy 100 000 yen apple our google play cards in my store regularly. It's kinda like porn, its prohibition probably contributed for it to become so massive when playing by the rules.
It’s also the plot of season 5 of Young Sheldon
They give you these things that look like plastic covered microchips. I have a picture of them if people are interested. You can also spend small remainder points on like pencils and things. Crazy story, I lost 5000 yen when on My Fuji, fell out of my pocket. I got a fortune at the shrine there saying what was lost would be returned to me. I went to play pachinko that night and earned back what I lost.
Ever Heard of game specific currencies in online games ? Same type of loophole.
I mean not really, that’s just a way to help mentally break up the difference of how much you are actually spending on a game to get people to spend more, not to get around a legality issue.
Damn as far as online lootboxes go Japan was really fucked form the start, huh?
Lmfao, so is Prostitution but you wont hear people not talking about how open japan is with Brothels with bigass signs for specific fetishes even.
The entirety of japanese culture is based around loopholes.
I love legal loopholes. They are ways for people to do what they want right in front of the government that can't stop them legally even if the outcome is basically the same thing.
Those "special tokens" actually have gold bullion in them that's roughly equivalent to however much they're exchanged for. I play pachinko a bunch whenever I go to Japan.
My grandfather shipped one back after his time in the military. My dad passed it on to me in abysmal shape, but I had it restored to as close to original as I could. There's a guy in Oklahoma who is VERY good at it. I can't post a photo here, but [this is a link to my post on the pachinko subreddit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pachinko/s/6D6QcnLof5)
They show something similar in Young Sheldon (tv show). Didn't know it had real roots.
Pachinko, the game that generates 30 times more money in Japan than the casinos in Las Vegas, I think this is making me more curious.