How is play represented in Japan? For more than 60 years, the most popular leisure activity among the Japanese has been pachinko, so it is no surprise that pachinko has been represented in the arts from cinema to novels. Notable cinematic works include Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) and Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952). But what do these representations show us about the play in pachinko? Do the representations and culture of pachinko change over time? This chapter will look at a selection of Japanese representations of pachinko as a way to understand how pachinko becomes a metaphor for Japan.

Pachinko, as a game of chance, is one of the most popular games in Japan. The entire size of the leisure industry in Japan is about US$672 billion in 2019, and pachinko accounts for a third of that. However, it is rarely discussed in game studies in the West. For that matter, it is also ignored by the Japanese academic community, largely because it is an embarrassing form of gambling. Thus, the study of pachinko is not deemed to be serious. Media representations of the game then are one of the few ways to understand how the game is represented in Japanese culture.

In this chapter we will give an overview of how Japanese representations of pachinko changed and we will contextualise these changes in terms of the changing socio-economic environments. We will look at a selection of Japanese and Western representations of pachinko as a way to understand the history of the culture of this neighbourhood amusement. To do this we will begin with a short introduction to pachinko, and then look specifically at how pachinko was represented in three economic periods: (1) the 1950s and 1960s when the first parlour boom took place and the economy was taking off; (2) from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the period of the economic bubble; and (3) the latest pachinko related films after the economic bubble burst.

What is pachinko?

Any visitor to Japan will almost certainly notice the pachinko parlours. Pachinko is related to pinball in that the player fires steel balls that arch over a vertical playfield to then drop through pins and other obstacles.