Karaoke and Pachinko
Sunday, May 13th, 2001Well, I must say, my weekend certainly turned out well. First, one Saturday, Matt, Nathan, and I met Nathan’s conversation partner and four of her friends (ours too), and we all went to karaoke. That was an experience! The building was like 4 stories I think, stank of stale beer and cigarettes, but was decently priced (2000 yen / hour I think), and the actual ‘box’ was fairly large. Not quite the karaoke box I envisioned from anime, but not bad. The setup wasn’t bad either: 2 mics that plugged into the system, with a couple decent speakers suspended from the ceiling and either the actual karaoke track or a midi of the song requested with kanji (or hiragana at times) for the Japanese songs, and the American lyrics with furigana for the American ones.
The Japanese song selection was impressive, and the American one was all right, mainly older stuff really. I knew a majority of the Japanese songs the girls sang (and sang well they did!), but didn’t know the lyrics. They were surprised I knew Ayumi Hamasaki and were even more surprised that I knew some of the lyrics, though not well enough to sing when they passed me the mic. For my part, I solo’d a Red Hot Chili Pepper’s song, Scar Tissue. I was nervous, and am a poor singer anyway. I also pitched in for “Mr. Roboto” (Styx), “Sign” (Ace of Base), “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen), “Stayin’ Alive” (Bee Gees), “Tears in Heaven” (Eric Clapton) which was by far and away our best song. Probably because it was in our vocal range for a change! “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), “Cruel Angel These” (Neon Genesis Evangelion, group sing-along), mumbled to the “Cutey Honey Opening”, and “Seventh Moon” (Macross 7) badly, though to be fair, the midi sucked.
It wasn’t quite as embarrassing as I thought though, because the girls didn’t seem to mind our singing, though I think they were busy looking up their next song and weren’t necessarily paying attention.
Afterwards, the girls returned home, and Nathan, Matt, and I hit the mall near Hamano-machi, stopped at a Mr. Doughnuts (for a dinner that had no doughnuts ironically enough), browsed a CD/VHS/DVD rental place (hellloooo pirate city!), stopped at Amu Plaza (Nagasaki Station), and finally went to an arcade (’London Park’ I believe, which I hated because for all the games it had, it has jack squat, and was expensive to boot), and finally returned home.
Today (Sunday), I had resigned myself to a day of primarily sitting around, but didn’t do that at all. Today, my host mother trimmed my hair, and did a decent job at it. Afterwards, we headed to a kimono shop not too far from here. The reason being, I need a kimono for my fine arts class this week (on how to wear a kimono, so kind of necessary!). I assumed we were going to rent one, but was mistaken! So, I wound up walking away with a 9000 yen yukata (summer kimono), as a present. It is a very cheap kimono, but will be good enough for me.
Afterwards, we met up with a friend of my host mother for tea. During the course of conversation, my host mother’s friend asked me the usual questions: how I liked the food, how I liked Japan, etc. When I mentioned that I wanted to play Pachinko before I left, my host mother surprised my by saying I should go with my host father to play Pachinko while she and her friend went shopping. I like my host mother, but she does have some flaws, one being that considering my financial situation, she sometimes grabs onto an idea and pushes it, saying that I’m in Japan and should do stuff like that. She does have a point I suppose, though I don’t know how good of an idea it is to gamble while overseas on a shoestring budget! She had just seen me take out 3000 yen earlier, so knew I had some money on me and pushed it. At any rate, I wound up going down to the “Lucky Parlor” Pachinko parlor.
My first thought upon entering was how noisy it was! As the doors opened, a huge wave of sound burst over me, with the cacophony of beeps, dings, voice over the PA, and sounds of coins dropping into slots! The system for Pachinko was simple enough: you put money into a machine to get a prepaid card to play with. The machine had an option of 2000 yen, 3000 yen, 5000 yen, or 10000 yen. I bought a 2000-yen card, and then followed my host father to a machine and sat down.
The game is fairly simple: insert card, push button, and get 500 yen worth of steel balls, which empty into a feeding tray, then all you do is turn the knob to indicate how hard you want to launch each ball, and hold it there when you find a good spot. Now, not to get into horrific detail on how the whole game works, but essentially, you launch a ball, which bounces around off of steel pegs in the board, and hopefully lands in the proper hole in the middle towards the bottom of the board. I don’t have to mention that odds are not in your favor, as it’s anybody’s guess where the ball’s going to go when it bounces off of a steel peg. Then, whenever you get a ball in the hole, you get a crack at the second part of the game, which appears on a little screen in the middle of the board. At this particular parlor (I guess parlors differ in how the ‘inner game’ works), different fish with different numbers float by, hopefully to stop and line up 3 in a row (and I think some other combo’s too, though I’m not sure). Should you manage this, the confusing part begins!
When I got to what I call the “big game mode” (for lack of a better term), I had a girl swim up and smile at me, then give me a little victory sign, and onto Level 1, and then a lot of balls started shooting into my ‘winnings’ tray. I was confused and had no idea what was going on because the machine started beeping, clanging, and dropping enough balls for me to think I had broken the machine! Anyway, I kept firing balls toward the hole, which apparently was the right thing, because I got to Level 15 before the girl smiled again, said “Ganbatte!” and swam away, and the machine assume a more normal attitude.
My host father had walked away before this, and so was rather surprised when he returned and saw my one very full bucket of balls. Oh, I should mention that I almost never reached that point. True to form, I blew through my 2000 yen very quickly, but then my host father swapped out my card for the remainder of his, which had another 2000 yen on it, and headed upstairs as he wasn’t having luck with the Pachinko machine. It was at the very tail end of that card that I struck gold.
Anyway, I had the girl visit me again on the screen twice more (and had my machine jam up a number of times while it tried to dispense a flood of balls). The first time, I wondered why my machine was beeping, clanging, but no balls were coming out. An attendant noticed, stopped by, fiddled, with something in the machine, and a stream of balls came out. He stopped by periodically to fix the machine (as the thing seemed determined to jam up), and even had to swap out a part, but I wasn’t about to switch machines! Anyway, when the girl seemed to not want to visit me anymore, I gave up and discovered something: these are steel balls, and thus having 3 baskets of them can be extremely heavy! Luckily, a burly attendant walked by and saved me the hassle of carrying them and trying to figure out where to go.
Now, I digress a bit, but I should mention that it really isn’t through any great skill on my part that I seemed to win quite a bit, but rather, luck was on my side. I have walked by the pachinko parlors any number of times in my wanderings, and noticed on several occasions people sitting at a machine, with a rubber band around the knob, and the other end hooked onto the tray, and just sitting at the machine happily smoking and drinking some coffee during which the game happily spit out steel balls occasionally. I have even heard that there are people who making a living off of doing this sort of thing, which I guess doesn’t surprise me.
Back to the story. After the attendant had taken the balls and poured them into a machine to count them, and it spit out a receipt to me, and I handed it to woman nearby, who then gave me a box of chocolate candy and what looked like 14 gold colored mechanical pencils! Wondering if I had just made a huge mistake, I wandered upstairs to find my host father. When he saw me with my ‘treasure’, he said “wow!”, and I wondered what the heck he was impressed about, because I had expected to walk away with cash, not school supplies! When he noticed my confusion, he took my pencils and went out to cash them, which is apparently at this tiny hut outside I found out later. While he was gone, I munched on my candy bar, which on reflection probably wasn’t a great idea. For all I know, I could have just eaten 3000 yen. I later found out that it is illegal to gamble for money; so instead, you win these little prizes, which are then “traded” in for money. Talk about barely legal!
My host father soon returned with the money I had been expecting, and then I sat next to him to watch him play some Japanese slots. An interesting thing about the slot machines is that you put in your 1-3 coins, and then pull a lever to set the reels spinning. Then, while the reels are spinning, you hit the button underneath each reel to stop it. One thing I noticed when I decided to try my luck on them, is that the slots seemed ridiculously easy! If you get the right combo to get the “Big game mode” (again, for lack of a better term), which isn’t easy mind you, which is usually 3 bars, 3 of this other icon (a flag maybe?), or 2 bars and a flag thingy, you go into the “Big game mode”. Once you’re at this part, it seems easy. If you have a sense of timing, you just hit the buttons at the same interval apart, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get 3 rhinos, and you get 15 credits each time (that’s the easy part). I think when you’re in the “Big game mode”, you can get up to 7 chances at getting the rhinos. All in all, I thought it was fairly easy.
When my host father and I finally finished, we collected our cash and headed out to meet my host mother. All said, I think that I walked away with about 18000 yen, and my host father with 20000 yen. Not bad!
We then headed to a little French restaurant. I think I surprised everyone by ordering in French, surprising even myself that I remember enough from my high school days. The food was really good, though I was slightly taken aback by having my fish come out to me in whole! Head, tail, fins, everything was still there. So, I picked around the not so appealing parts, and had some wine. The restaurant had me worried at first, because there were no prices for anything, and everyone knows that if that’s the case, the place is expensive! I think my wine came out to 2000 yen, and my dinner another 8000. My host parents had roughly the same amount. Afterwards, I offered to help pay for the dinner, but my host mother wouldn’t let me, instead saying I should save the money for later. So, all in all, it was a really good day!
) It was also interesting to watch the kids during the lunch. They put on a little dance for us, which was amusing to watch. It essentially consisted of a verse, then the chorus, during which a body part was mentioned with which to use while dancing. It started with the hands, then the legs, then the head, the behind, and finally the whole body! Quite amusing! Next, all the kids put their dishes away, and two of the kids were responsible with cleaning up any mess around the serving area, then taking the dishes away to be cleaned.