Pachinko

The lack of movement, the fixing of the self, butt on seat, hand on knob, elbow in air, while the silver balls flurry around with crashing, tortured constancy is a unique experience. Fixing a coin into the crevice of the grip reduces the last hint of tactile control. You watch. The balls fly, drop, and bounce -- gravity endlessly repeated. It's bland, unskilled, repetitive to the point of idiocy, but all of that is perhaps the point, the frisson, the kick behind the kick. In Tokyo with its myriad expensive pleasures, pachinko is the simplest and most concrete.

Of course that's what makes it so complex and otherworldly.

The silver balls shooting up and splashing down over the array of pins is the central sensual pleasure of pachinko. The flashing, flickering lights; the rippling, splashing bulbs; the bells, ringers and cartoon noises all blur into an overload of input that glues you to your seat.

The whole operation is a mini-carnival -- loud, flashy and enlivening. The senses are taken captive. The presence of other people, packed in shoulder to shoulder, passionately smoking, drowned into wordlessness is just noticeable above the ceaseless rush of mechanical whirling, hitting, pumping, tapping. No hint of human voice ever rises above the din, only ecstatic bursts of rhythmic patter, then a crashing reverse in direction, a rapid modulation of pitch, a jump in tone, the brutal severing of melodic connection, the intentional disruption of coherence.

It is the experiential sound of an infinite number of inexperienced musicians playing an infinite number of primitive instruments. The ping, plink, plunk of the balls on the pins combine into waves of in-phase and out-of-phase noise -- noise in the purest sense: noise for noise's sake. You contribute to the irritating cacophony without being responsible. The noise you create at your own individual machine combines with the noise of everyone else in the place. The height of the machines keeps everyone from seeing over them to the next aisle, while the walls echo the noise perfectly and relentlessly into an unfocused but potent wall of glaringly white noise.

The colors of the lights are bright, distinct and varied. Reds, oranges and yellows predominate, but blues and greens also leap out from the machines. The colors offer a garishly shocking contrast with the subtle colors common in most Japanese homes, restaurants and neighborhoods. The colors are drawn from the same symbolic color schemes as the colors of shrine festivals, young girls' kimonos, animation, fast food restaurants, and other sites given to the quick allocation of eyeful pleasure.

The visual and aural collide in circles of cascading on-and-offs, pinwheels of yellows, bright-pink flashes, and exploding reds. The distorting reflections of curved, polished pillars at the ends of aisles, sheets on overhead sidewalls, and bars along counters shout their gleaming silver alloy. They act like funhouse mirrors, contorting all motion caught in their reflective surfaces.

Thick smoke hangs like clouds of barely contained impatience, muting all colors. The cheap, burning tobacco inflames the nostrils and invades your being with every breath. Tears form, but unlike the balls, never drop, re-emphasizing pachinko's essential, choking melancholy.

The most erotic aspect of pachinko is the opening wide of small, stubby, loin-like levers. They coyly spread, and then tighten back up, so that only a perfect hit can enter and produce, or reproduce, more balls from the spout below. The missed hits fall wasted into the sad, little, draining hole at the farthest bottom of the machine.

The density of the balls is equaled in perfection by their slippery, constant flow. They are just the right size to move just right. The plastic handle that launches the balls, though, is over-large, reinforcing the infantilizing qualities of the entire experience. You can grip it only with a full pterodactyl spread of your hand.

Pachinko obsesses over the illusion that repetition will lead to mastery. There seems to be a kind of control over the ball, but not really. The balls go where they want to, in a mechanical parody of self-will. It is the repetition compulsion taken to its obvious conclusion. The little bit of imprecision, the slightly different bounce of the ball hitting the same pins, captivates. Why did that one bounce over there? Then there? The different weight of the ball? The different propulsive force of the mechanism?

Pachinko demands an unusual mixture of patience, optimism and compulsiveness.

The tedious attention to the set patterns of pins, the subtle positioning of the handle, calculating the exact pop and bounce to hit the big pay-back hole right in the middle, and the print-out of numbers on the counter above the machine form a self-contained sphere of meaning. Pachinko is a meaning-defying, wordless production, silent in its noise, an inversion of the highly predictable sounds, colors, patterns, experiences of everyday life. It is a reversal of the surface of life, a kind of exposure of the interior Brownian motion, a topography of random motion.

Though pachinko seems meaningless, incessant and loud, the crudest of leisure activities, it has its soothing, meditative aspect as well. The rounded vault of the machines surrounds faces, figures, and geometric shapes composed in themes of movies, jungle animals, horse racing, and detective mysteries. These images whirl by on tiny, just-out-of-focus screens, stopping to taunt with potential point values, then move on quickly.

These flowing images form an extensive iconography devoted to the representation and worship of chance. In these days of computerized video games, pachinko stands as an ancient ritual of gaming.

It's that that's most honest about pachinko -- that money, work, time, the whole vertical layout of life is simply a gamble after all, a bounce of the silver ball.

- Michael Pronko