My annual check in - Happy Holidays and some pachinko stuff

[rupan777]

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to all of you. Hope everyone's been well.

I happened to be writing an article about pachinko and thought it'd be good to stop by for my annual visit (and, admittedly, a little research - don't worry, I won't steal anybody's words). Glad to see that PT is going as strong as ever, although the conversation seems a little more technically oriented than ever before.

Speaking of writing (and pachinko), I got an article published about everyone's favorite noisemakers (and several other non-pachi ones) in a book entitled World Film Locations: Tokyo. The assignment was to write about a scene of my choice in Lost In Translation, so I chose the one in which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson run through the small parlor in Shibuya to talk about the ever-presence of pachinko in Tokyo. The article is very broad so it probably won't interest the majority of you, but the book is on Amazon if you're so inclined to pick it up.

On the subject of Tokyo, I went back for my first time in several years (those who know me might remember that I joined the board soon after I returned from living there for about seven years) to meet my future in-laws among other things. Besides all of the changes from my own experience there, I was surprised at how much pachinko has changed since I left. I'm not going to document everything here since you guys probably all know already, but the trend towards more gizmos, buttons, and I saw machine with a joystick, not to mention the proliferation of pop culture-licensed machines (including films, musicians, TV shows) made me realize that I was initially in Japan during a time of transition in the pachinko world. Without sounding too dramatic, it really felt like a new era had begun since I last played. Speaking of playing, I couldn't help but play a few times - I mainly stuck with the latest edition of Umi Monogatari (aka Sea Story) for nostalgia's sake, but also tried out several of the newer machines including the latest version of Hissatsu Shigotonin (not sure what you guys call the series here, but it's this machine) which was just released a week after I'd arrived. In all, I won myself a few hundred dollars (US), so I guess there are some things that never change. lol