One of my most asked questions is “How old is my pachinko machine?” so I thought I’d write out a detailed post showing how you can find the date on your machine.
To start, you’ll want to open up the front door of your machine to expose the shooting lane and inside ball tray. What you’re going to be looking for are registration stickers put on during the machine’s use in the Japanese parlors. The registration stickers are usually in the bottom left or right side of the playfield.
Now that you’ve located the stickers, you’ll want to scan the small Japanese kanji characters for two different numbers. The first number will be a two-digit number (usually between 30-60) and the other number will be 1-12. The first number denotes the Japanese year in the Showa Period, and the second number represents the month. Lucky for us, these numbers represent expiration dates.
To get the year of installation:
Add 1925 to your first number and that will give you your expiration year. Subtract 1 from that expiration year, and you have your install/build date. Most pachinko machines were only registered for one year and then they were shipped off to the western world or more commonly tossed in a landfill. That may seem wasteful, but I didn’t make the rules!
Examples:
As an example, you will find the numbers about halfway down in the middle rectangle. The first number reads 51 and the second number is 3 (March.) To get the installation date: (1925+51) -1 = 1975. This machine was installed in March of 1975.
In the sticker below you’ll want to focus in on the green rightmost box. The first number reads 50 and the second number is 12. Thus, (1925+50) -1 = 1974. This machine was installed in December of 1974.
Conversion chart:
Alternatively, you could just use this conversion chart I made in Illustrator. Just remember to subtract one year from your conversion result to get your install date.
