Bringing outside pachinko balls into a parlor is forbidden, but how would a pachinko parlor know if another establishment’s pachinko balls were making their way into their parlor?
During pachinko’s prime in the 1970’s there were hundreds of thousands of pachinko parlors for millions of people to play. It wasn’t just a game, it was part of Japanese culture. Men played routinely after work and prizes ranged from grocery food items to a pack of cigarettes.
Some Basic Math…
Let’s figure for each parlor a minimum of 100 machines were available for play and each machine needed 3,000 balls for one 30 minute-long session of pachinko. That equates to a bare minimum 300,000 pachinko balls needed for seamless operation for ONE parlor. I can’t stress enough how under-calculated 3,000 balls per machine is.
By the end of 1953 there were over 387,000 parlors and over 600 manufacturing companies. If my math is correct, this means there were over (remember…bare minimum) 116 billion pachinko balls trickling down machine playfields in Japan in the year 1953. How did any one parlor keep other parlor’s balls from infiltrating their establishment, you ask?
Unique Designs for Every Parlor
Think about an American casino as an example. Each casino has its own style and design of poker chips they use for their table games. Every poker chip is a little bit different so a player can’t simply walk into a different casino and use another establishment’s chips. The concept is no different for pachinko parlors. It’s forbidden to use balls from another parlor and they monitored players by watching the designs.
Some parlors today don’t use engraved balls as they once did, but most (if not all) parlors from the 1940’s-1970’s used engraved pachinko balls for their machines to make sure people were paying the house before playing. If you’re curious about how a steel rod turns into dozens of small 11mm pachinko balls, satotekkou.co.jp offers a great visual representation of how they’re manufactured and engraved.
In my time restoring pachinko machines I’ve run across A LOT of different engravings on these balls. Some of them are cooler than others, but when I started this business I made a habit to keep one of every ball I’ve never seen before. As you can imagine, I’ve amassed a large bag of pachinko balls with different designs through the years.
Photos…
These are tricky little things to photograph, but I tried my best so I could share some of these unique engravings with the world. If you have a unique engraving you’d like to see featured, please get in touch with me and I’ll happily add it to my gallery!
