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They’re everywhere. In every town and city. In shopping districts and beside remote roads. A modern symbol of Japanese culture recognizable around the world. We’re talking, of course, about pachinko parlors.

Still, thanks to their bright lights, deafening noise, smokey air, and links to organized crime and legal loopholes, pachinko hasn’t exactly taken off among visitors to Japan.

It remains extremely widespread in Japan, even as its popularity is starting to wane. And with the recent introduction of indoor smoking bans, there’s never been a better time to give those balls a flick (as it were). Here’s everything you need to know about pachinko in Japan.

What is Pachinko?

Pachinko is a game similar to pinball, played on machines that look similar to slot machines – many machines even incorporate slots into the game.

Fundamentally, pachinko is played by firing ball bearings up the side of the vertical playing area and trying (with luck or skill) to get the ball to land in certain pockets. Get it right, and you’ll win more balls to play with – the balls are both game pieces and prizes. Let the ball fall down the centre and it’s lost, like in pinball.

After playing, you can exchange these balls for prizes and (in a roundabout way) cash.

While pachinko has often been associated with organized crime and yakuza, police crackdowns from the 1960s onwards have gradually reduced this influence. It’s still an extremely popular pastime in Japan, with nearly 9000 pachinko parlours open around Japan as of 2019, and about nine million players in 2017.

The History of Pachinko

Surprisingly, pachinko shares its lineage with cue sports like snooker and pool. In late 18th century France, the game of billiards was adjusted to involve shooting balls up an incline into holes surrounded by fixed pegs. The game of Bagatelle was born. It was popular around the world, and became known as Corinthian bagatelle in America.

In the 1920s, a children’s version called the Corinth Game made the board smaller and replaced the cue with a mechanical paddle. The Corinth Game was first imported to Japan in 1924, and became popular as a gambling game for small prizes. The name “pachinko” came from the onomatopoeic “pachin pachin” of the mechanism.

The first commercial pachinko parlour opened in Nagoya in 1930, but World War II meant that all parlours and pachinko machine factories were closed. Postwar, though, the pastime truly exploded, especially in heavily industrialised Nagoya. A huge surplus of ball bearings helped.

During the war, a large number of Korean prisoners of war and forced labourers were brought to the city to assist with the war effort. Postwar discrimination led many to work in shadier industries like gambling – including pachinko.

Nowadays, about 37% of pachinko parlours are owned by ethnic Koreans, though some estimates put it as high as 80%. Regardless of the exact number, public perception of pachinko as a slightly grubby, second-class, and Korean-dominated industry continues, and was notably a central theme in the book Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

Classic machines were completely mechanical, with balls bouncing between brass pins to land (or not land) in pockets. In the 1960s, ‘tulip’ catchers started appearing, which put flippers above the pockets to make it more or less likely for a ball to fall in.

Machines were mainly mechanical up until the 1980s, when things started getting a lot more electronic and a lot more flashy. Nowadays, there are usually multiple layers to each game, including slot machines in the centre that lead to increased payout or “fever” modes.

Wait, Isn’t Gambling Illegal in Japan?

Gambling is technically illegal in Japan, outside of a few tightly-regulated exceptions like horse racing and lotteries. Casinos, too, are legal under certain restrictions, but as of May 2020 there are no legal casinos in Japan just yet. Despite this, you can still play pachinko and win money.

This is all thanks to a classic Japanese legal loophole. The law doesn’t cover games played for pleasure, and you’ll notice that cash in pachinko parlours only goes one way: from you to the staff to buy balls.

These balls can be exchanged for all sorts of prizes from bars of soap to bicycles. If you don’t need a new bike, though, you can also exchange them for a “special prize,” – usually an object or small piece of gold in a plastic shell.

You’ll take these special prizes to a different counter, who buys them for cash. These counters are technically separate businesses, even if they’re usually connected to the parlour and may even be in the same building. Still, the point is that you’re never getting money back from the place you paid it in, so it’s not technically gambling.

How to Play Pachinko

If you want to play pachinko properly, you’ll need a venue. Pachinko parlors tend to be loud in every sense of the word, with bright lights, blaring music (indoors) and banners with パチンコ (pachinko) or パチスロ (pachi-suro, pachinko and slot machines) outside.

Once you enter, head to the counter or machine near the entrance to buy some balls. These are usually priced per ball in sets of 250. They’ll come in a big plastic tub for you.

Choose your machine, take a seat, then tip some of your balls into the machine. Some machines have an ‘in’ tray and an ‘out’ tray where you can rest an empty tub, while others come with a single tray.

Now you’re set! Pachinko machines come in all sorts of varieties, many with their own gimmicks, so we can only cover the basics here.

With balls loaded, press the button or spin the wheel in the bottom left corner to fire one (or many) balls up and onto the play area. As we said, the aim is to land balls in the pockets, rather than the gutter at the bottom.

On simple games, pockets will pay out a fixed number of balls. For more complex ones, hitting the right pockets will trigger slot machine spins, which can lead to a payout and/or ‘fever’ mode, with huge bonuses or small wins regardless of where the balls land.

Ready to stop? Take your winnings (hopefully more than you started with!) to the counter, or call an attendant using the button above your machine if it’s available. They’ll count your balls and give you a voucher.

Take this voucher to the prize counter and choose what you want. If it’s cash you’re looking for, exchange your voucher for some special prizes (特殊景品, tokushu keihin). They’re usually small pieces of gold or silver in plastic casing.

You’re not allowed to ask where the cash exchange desk is – remember, it’s supposed to be a completely separate business. It’s almost always very close to the pachinko parlor, though. In Tokyo, this desk is run by the Tokyo Union Circulation, or TUC – look for their name and yellow signage.

Pachinko Etiquette

Pachinko is usually a pretty solitary game – a lot of people (for better or worse) play it as a form of escapism. This means you won’t usually be expected to interact with other players around you, and should be considerate of their personal space.

It’s common to leave something on the machine or seat if you need to leave for a short time. Don’t sit down at a machine that’s got a packet of cigarettes or something similar left on it!

The most important rule, though, is to never touch another player’s balls. Not only is it effectively the same as fiddling with someone’s chips at a casino, it’s considered extremely bad luck, and even insulting to some.

Pachinko might not be the top of many tourists’ bucket lists when coming to Japan, but it’s undeniably an institution in Japanese society. And as its popularity continues to dwindle, who knows how long the parlors will remain. Fancy giving it a go with expert advice? Try this tour!

Header photo by Cory Denton / CC BY 2.0

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Pachinko. My thoughts.

In one word: Addictive

Pachinko is like a completely luck-based pinball machine minus the flippers, but with a few buckets thrown in to the mix instead.

Note: if you’ve ever watched Play Your Cards Right, it’s a lot like Plinko.

Apparently, Pachinko is all the rage in Japan. It’s one of the limited forms of gambling available to the Japanese people, which explains why it’s so popular. I’d imagine that Pachinko machines in Japan are about as common as the fruit machines we have in the UK.

So aside from Sushi and an abundance of electrical goods, it looks like we’ve got something else to thank the Japanese for.

More information.

Overall rating - 82%.

Thankfully, Pachinko makes an impressive transition in to the world of online games. The balls and the machine could act a little more realistically from a Physics perspective, but overall it’s enjoyable to watch the balls bounce around and toward the money-making buckets.

The best part about the whole game is the fact that Pachinko is amazingly good fun to watch. There is very little in terms of interaction, but that’s the way a Pachinko machine is meant to play, so I can’t really complain there.

Pachinko is a very unique and enjoyable game (not to mention addictive), which means that the fun rating of 82% is thoroughly deserved. I’d highly recommend checking online Pachinko out, as I’m sure that you haven’t played anything else quite like it.

How to play Pachinko.

A simple guide.

1. Choose the number of balls you want to play with and how much you want to wager on each ball.
2. Release the balls in to the Pachinko machine and hope that they land in the buckets.
3. Collect your winnings or continue with the balls equivalent of your earnings at the end of each round.

The game in more detail.

If you’ve ever seen The Price Is Right, Pachinko is a lot like Plinko. I guess that’s why Plinko sounds so similar to Pachinko.

But anyway, balls are fired up in to the Pachinko machine and fall through it thanks to gravity. As the balls fall, they can hit pins, bumpers and turbines on their way down, altering their path as they go.

Scattered throughout the Pachinko machine are small buckets. If a balls lands in one of these you win money according to the bucket’s win multiplier. The win multiplier varies depending on the round in the game and how difficult it is to land a ball in that particular bucket.

Pachinko rounds.

• There are a maximum of 8 rounds in one game of online Pachinko.
• Winnings can be collected or rolled over on to the next round.
• The win multipliers of buckets generally increase from one round to the next. Therefore, rounds become progressively more valuable.

The round is over after all of the balls have fallen through the Pachinko machine. You can choose to collect or continue at the end of each round.

As you progress through the game, each round will become more valuable than the next. The buckets provide greater win multipliers, which means that you can win much more money as you go along.

However, with every round you play you run the risk of losing all your balls without winning or winning very little, so continuing (instead of collecting) is a calculated risk.

Online dark rounds.

Every other round in Pachinko online is called a 'dark round', and they are simply 'evil' versions of the previous round.

In these dark rounds, the buckets are worth much more and the standard steel balls are replaced with fiery balls. In genereal, you should expect to see a bigger payout from dark rounds over the standard rounds.

The likelihood of balls falling in to buckets is exactly the same for both types of rounds, the only difference is the dark rounds tend to provide much bigger wins if you get lucky.

Note: If the next round is a 'dark round' it’s almost always worth your while to play it.

Central slot bonus feature.

Along with the buckets, there is a mini slot machine in the centre of the Pachinko machine with 3 holes in the top. If a ball lands in any of these holes it will set the slot reels in motion.

If you get 3 of the same symbols on the slot machine, you win a pretty decent multiplier for that one ball that entered the slot. The payout ranks for matching symbols are as follows:

1. Featured symbol/animal.
2. Bells.
3. Melons.
4. Lemons.

The payouts for the mini slot vary and increase from one round to the next. The featured symbol also changes as you progress from round 1 up to round 8.

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Gorilla, Panda and Merry-Go-Round slot symbols.

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If you are lucky enough to get 3 featured symbols on the mini slot you will activate the featured Gorilla, Panda or Merry-Go-Round depending on which round you are playing at the time.

Once any one of these has been activated it will become receptive to balls. If a ball enters the Gorilla, Panda or Merry-Go-Round it will result in much bigger wins. These have the biggest multipliers out of all of the buckets in the machine.

Auto shoot option.

Pachinko has a handy auto-shoot function. If this is turned on, the balls will automatically be fired in to the machine one after another on your behalf. You can also control the rate of fire using the auto shoot control bar.

If you have few balls in play, it’s more fun to shoot each ball manually. However, if you have 20+ balls in the game, it will be worth your while to make use of the auto shoot function to speed things up (and save that clicking finger from exhaustion).

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Pachinko payout tables.

As mentioned, the payouts for the buckets and mini slot increase and vary as you progress through the game.

The payout tables can be found by clicking the 'PAYTABLE' button in the bottom-left corner of the Pachinko game window.

Is there a strategy?

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Online Pachinko is pretty much all luck. You can’t tilt the machine or give it a cheeky kick to help you get the desired result, so the best you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best. However, there are two small strategical aspects of Pachinko that are worth considering:

1. Choose carefully when selecting whether to continue or collect your winnings. Don’t fall in to the trap of feeling compelled to play through all 8 rounds. If you like the look of your current winnings, collect them and move on.
2. Firing the balls in to the machine slowly can be beneficial. If you fire the balls rapidly, a lot of balls will travel through the machine whilst the mini slot reels spin. If the feature is unlocked, you will have lost the opportunity for these balls to fall in to the recently opened Gorilla, Panda or Merry-Go-Round.

Aside from these two quick tips, good luck!