The Birth of Pachinko
In the mid-1920’s a game called Corinthian Bagatelle or “Corinth” table-top games became popular imported entertainment from the United States and Europe. Today, you can find these games at antique stores and flea markets. Around the same time period, vertical tabletop penny games originated in the UK that more closely resembled a very small pachinko machine. These could be found in pubs and often paid out small prizes. They catered more towards the gambling spirit than playing just for fun like Corinthian.
Both games were imported into Japan in the 1920’s and early 1930’s and they quickly started appearing in candy and toy stores for children to play to win small prizes. Both Corinthian and the tabletop penny game machines utilized small balls contained to the playfield by glass. Children in Japan were quick to assign a shorthand name to the sounds of the ball tapping against the glass as it traveled down the playfield, and they called it “pachi-pachi.”
Corinthian and pub-style penny games eventually combined to create the first Japanese pachinko machines in the 1930’s which incorporated brass nails and pay pockets eventually known as “tulips.” Pachinko was quick to gain traction and parlors popped up quickly in various prefectures, but the war effort in WWII quickly put a damper on Japan’s new obsession. The interest in pachinko was smothered just as quickly as it began as the government shut down parlors and banned the use of metals to make the machines and balls.
Following WWII, the Japanese were down on themselves after a devastating loss in the war and they quickly returned to playing pachinko as a way of occupying their time and thoughts. The game had grown to popularity levels never seen before; Millions of people were playing, tens of thousands of parlors offered machines to play, and the Japanese were pumping 11mm steel balls into pachinko machines at an alarmingly fast rate. Nagoya opened the first commercial pachinko parlor in 1948, and the rest is history.
Pachinko Machines Designs – 1940’s
In the late 1940’s, Takeichi Masamura, the “God of pachinko”, developed a brass nail arrangement called the “Masamura Gauge” that transformed the game of pachinko into an exciting game of chance. The Masamura Gauge nail alignment is the foundation of most pachinko machines from the early 50’s onward. Some machines from the 1940’s are variants of the Masamura Gauge design like the example pictured, and others completely predate the Masamura style.
Machines from the mid-late 1940’s were “single shot” meaning that the machines had to be hand loaded by the player for every shot taken. Most of these were made with brass and tin pieces soldered together. There usually isn’t any plastic used on machines from this era. The rear mechanics were designed to be very minimalist and there usually aren’t many pieces. Pay pockets featured fancy hand-painted designs and weren’t typically uniform.
1950’s Machine Designs
1950’s pachinko machines were *mostly* single shot machines. They featured many of the same brass and tin metal pieces on the rear mechanical pieces as the 1940’s designs, and the mechanisms were slightly less minimalist and primitive. Pay pockets also started to have a more uniform look to them.
In the year 1951 a Renpatsu-Shiki (successive shot) style machine was developed for use in 1952. The machine’s ball tray eliminated the hand-fed “single shot” methodology, and it automatically fed prize balls back into the machine one shot at a time. The automatic feeding trays allowed players to shoot up to 150 balls per minute, and paychecks were getting blown faster than ever. After less than a year using Renpatsu-Shiki machines in parlors, the Japanese government stepped in and outlawed them, forcing all parlors to return to single shots.
1960’s Machine Designs
In 1960 the first tulip-style (opening and closing) win pockets emerged along with the first basic electric circuits for win lights. While most machine pieces on 60’s models are made from various metals such as tin, they did start to incorporate more plastic pieces. On the back of this 1960 Daiwa machine, you can see mostly metal pieces, and a handful of plastic pieces.
Manufacturing companies were making competitive efforts to continually innovate their machines to improve playing experiences and drive more traffic to parlors. Single shot style machines remained in parlors for the rest of the 1950’s and into the 1960’s. In 1969 the automatic feeding trays became legal again, and companies either retrofitted existing machines with conversion trays, or made their first automatic feeding tray machines. Since 1969, Japan has never gone back to single shot gameplay.
1970’s Machine Designs
In the mid-1970’s automatic feed trays were the new standard and all machines used them. The rear mechanics of machines from the 70’s are almost entirely made of plastic, though this doesn’t seem to have impacted the durability of the machines considering they are fully functional almost 50 years since their date of manufacture.
Most notably the first electro-mechanical and special electric machine models were developed such as the Circuit Racer, PowerFlash models (Chinaman & Thunderbird), Boxing, Hockey, Roulette and the UFO just to name a few. The addition of fancy circuit boards and solenoids made gameplay more interactive and interesting and paved the way for more electrically complex machines in the 1980’s. The electro-mechanical and special electric machines from the 1970’s were the first of their kind and are fairly collectible models to hobbyists.
1980’s & 1990’s Machine Designs
As we enter the 1980’s, a new era of pachinko was born called “Hanemono” or “Fever” machines. These were electrically complex machines full of programmed circuit boards, flashing lights and sounds and they were all the rage in the 1980’s. You’ll notice the manual flippers disappeared in favor of an electrical flipper motor that shot balls into the machine much more quickly than any manual flipper could. These machines marked the end of what I refer to as “vintage pachinko.”
These machines are incredibly addicting to play with even more interactive center features and fever mode gameplay that wins you more balls and makes the machine explode with lights and sounds. If you’ve never had one, I highly recommend trying one – I wish I had never sold both of mine! The Sankyo machine below made a racket, and actually generated noise complaints when I still lived in an apartment (whoops, sorry!) Can you imagine a parlor full of these?
How Was Pachinko Played?
Each ball was worth about 3-4 yen, and typically you started with about 50-100 engraved pachinko balls. Every parlor had different engravings on their pachinko balls to keep players playing honestly. At the end of your playing session, your balls were dumped into a counting machine or tray, totaled up, and then you could select your prize if you had enough winnings. A hot machine one day could be cold as ice the next, as parlor attendants adjusted the nails on every machine overnight while the city was sleeping. No pachinko ball would run the same course as the day before.
It’s well known that gambling in Japan is illegal. The pachinko parlors were able to circumnavigate the anti-gambling laws by not offering cash as winnings and instead offer grocery items, liquor and cigarettes as prizes. If none of those prizes suited your fancy, a slip with your ball count on it would be handed over to you and they pointed you in the direction of another separately owned business around the corner or down the block that would pay you cash for your winning slips.
How Did my Pachinko Machine Make it to the United States?
Since the late 1940’s, parlors have been required by law to replace old pachinko machines with new models annually. Not only would the machines become quite dirty from all the cigarette smoking and daily wear and tear, but the machines were designed to be disposable. As it turns out, these machines were manufactured QUITE well and have lasted MANY decades beyond what their original useful lives were meant to be. This annual replacement requirement kept manufacturing jobs alive and assembly lines rolling with new machines constantly being made.
What happened to the hundreds of thousands of machines being replaced every year you ask? Sadly, most of the machines not sold out the back door to customers found their way into landfills. I’ll link to a gut-wrenching image of used pachinko machines piled sky-high in a landfill. The image is copyright protected – picture of landfill HERE. This dumping practice was tremendously wasteful, and it’s awfully sad to think about all of the cool machines that went to waste.
The Japanese had noticed deployed American servicemen were fond of pachinko and when the Americans realized the old machines could be purchased from the parlor and saved from a landfill, they often were. Many pachinko machines made their way to the United States via American military service members as a token of their time spent in Japan.
After the Japanese realized there was a market for their old machines, they struck deals with American department store companies and importers like Target Abroad Ltd, Sears and Pachinko Palace that began importing reconditioned machines by the thousands for eventual resale in the United States. These machines were fixed to be operational if they weren’t already in the back rooms of parlors, washed with a large scrubbing brush and a garden hose (yes that’s exactly how your machine got water stains on the playfield) and then they were stacked onto pallets for eventual shipping to the United States.
After the machines made it to America, they were an immediate hit; the same love for pachinko that struck Japan spread all over the United States. Machines could be found in many American homes as they began their new lease on life.
Flash forward decades later, and many of these once-loved machines have been neglected in basements, attics and closets. They’ve been packed away and haven’t seen the light of day in years. This is when some machines meet the unfortunate fate of being thrown out because “they are broken”, when actually there’s just a misunderstanding of proper machine operation. This is where I try to step in and give as many pachinko machines as possible their third lease on life with a restoration or refurbishment.