Monday, February 6, 2012

$100 - Japanese Gambling Babysitter


This CL ad lured me in shamelessly. Please tell me I'm not the only one who has never heard of Pachinko. Wikipedia (which I trust completely...bad idea?) says that Pachinko is a Japanese gambling arcade/game and accounts for "approximately four times the total profit of world-wide legal casino gambling each year." WHAT THE WHAT?! How could we all be so unaware of a game that holds complete gambling market share in a country where almost all gambling is illegal??

This vintage machine (from the 70s?) doesn't actually work, but apparently the seller uses it as a babysitter claiming that his "little-guy played with this for hours." People are so weird.

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/mld/tag/2837487875.html

1 comment:

  1. List it as a pachinko machine and watch it disappear.

    Anyone who stepped foot in Japan in the '70s saw people parked in front of these babies in orderly rows in pachinko parlors, mindlessly flipping stainless-steel balls with a lever to launch them to the top of the machine and watch as they bounced to the bottom. All you could hear if you stood and watched was the droning sound of thousands of balls clinking against the metal prongs and the click of the lever being flipped. Pachinko players looked like the brain-dead people you see in this country sitting on stools feeding coins into slot machines. Except pachinko is so particular to Japan, such a cultural relic. I hear there are still pachinko parlors in Japan for the nostalgic. Someone will want this machine even if it doesn't work, believe me....

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