Pachinko - bother.

Pachinko is a very popular gambling game in Japan. There are hundreds of pachinko palours all over place as it is one of the few forms of legal gambling here. The closest thing we have to pachinko are fruit machines, but at least there is some skill involved in these. I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about and spent a couple of hours at a pachinko palour with a few friends.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. Imagine standing right by a waterfall and trying to talk. The sound of a million little silver ball bearings being fired into machines and spilling out of the bottom again (if you're lucky) is deafening.

How it works:
1.You put money into a machine - which then gives you a few hundred balls.
2. You feed the balls back into the machine.
3. If you randonly get the balls in the right places, you win more balls.
4. You can then exchange the balls for gifts. And exchange the gifts for money (but you have to go off the premises to do this as it is illegal to win money).

I was dissapointed to find that the only skill involved is turning a little knob to the left or right. This alters the power at which the small silver ball bearings are fired into the machine. But that's where the skill ends. Within about 15 minutes we were bored, but pachinko is a religion for many japanese people, most often middle aged men.

It was worth checking out, but I doubt I'll return until I'm middle aged.