this is not your grandmother's pinball parlour

(I'm tired of writing everything in the present tense. It's time for plain old past tense)

Oct. 22 cont.

At night we went to some game centres. Holy sensory overload.

We found a game we could all play together: the object was to throw plastic balls at moving targets on a screen. I don't know how it could keep track of who threw what. It was very manic and did a good job of getting our heart rates up.

We watched people play violent first-person shooters, an ultra-mega version of dance-dance-revolution, and a super-intricate network strategy game with some kind of trading cards. Dave and James duelled on Japanese drums to match a rhythm, and we watched a guy who was the Ingwe Malmsteen of Guitar Hero. There were a lot more adults in here than in 'arcades' back home.

It was comforting that bowling was exactly the same in Japan.

Well, almost the same.















We plugged some change into a high-tech photo booth for a little crazy fun. After the shots were taken, we got to use a touch screen to add backgrounds, graffiti and cartoon piles of poo on each other's photos. Good times.

I found Pachinko unsettling. It was everywhere in Japan. Around every corner I saw huge pachinko parlors, clusters of machines in office lobbies, posters plastered in windows. The noise and flashing lights of the regular game centres was nothing compared to what leaked out the door of the pachinko parlors. It's also still ok to smoke in many public places in Japan. I saw row after row of young japanese men and women sitting glassy eyed and slack jawed with cigarettes dangling from their lips, feeding tokens or metal bb's into the machines in a steady blur. How much cash did they blow in a night? Why weren't they having seizures? It seemed like this was considered a normal way to spend an evening out.

We used up our handful of tokens and called it a night. In contrast, the cool night air and muted rush of traffic seemed tranquil.