The korinto gēmu, as it was called in Japan, was imported from Chicago by an Osaka trading company shortly before the beginning of the Showa Era, probably around 1924. The game is said to have first been developed in Detroit, but its exact origin is not clear. Adults as well as children soon took to playing the game, which was easy and could be enjoyed by anyone at any time.
Shortly afterward, the korinto gēmu came to be applied to more practical ends. Candy-store owners began keeping them in their shops to attract and entertain their young clientele. Children could come in and play for a sen or two. (The sen, one-hundredth of a yen, has been out of use for several decades, but the term is still used to describe fractions of yen amounts.) If the children attained a sufficiently high score, they won sweets, fruit, or other prizes. This proved so popular among the kiddies that by the mid 1920s, nearly every candy store had a korinto gēmu. The game was commonly called pachi-pachi, in imitation of the sound of the ball as it rolled down the board and hit the nails.
As the game's popularity spread, adults wanted to get in on the action. A few enterprising folks took advantage of this by setting up roten (open-air stalls), or yatai (moving stalls that were set up at night). Inside a roten would be a number of korinto gēmu boards that adults, like the children at the candy stores, could play for a few sen. The prizes, however, mostly tobacco and detergent, were oriented more toward adults.
This predecessor of pachinko grew so quickly in scope and scale as to almost kill itself off. The problem was that the korinto gēmu had to be laid horizontally, which took up an undue amount of space, especially in the narrow, tentlike roten. Then, as now, space was a real commodity, and only so many boards could be squeezed into one candy store or roten. With the ever-increasing number of people wanting to compete for prizes, demand started to overwhelm supply. This precipitated the first major innovation in the korinto gēmu. The board was set upright to help conserve valuable space. This put it on the road to becoming modern-day pachinko, and assured that the korinto gēmu in Japan would evolve quite differently from its parent game which underwent a alternate development in the United States.
In America, with no such lack of room, the Corinthian Game grew larger and larger, the nails gave way to bumpers, targets, and magnets. The steel ball gradually increased in size, and flashing lights and ringing bells were incorporated to make the game more vibrant and exciting. The little wooden dowel was replaced by a spring-loaded "popper" and some flippers were added above the "out" hole to give the player more control. For those who have not guessed as much yet, the Corinthian Game became the pinball machine.
In Japan there was just not enough space for the relatively compact korinto gēmu to take on the proportions of a pinball machine and thus the Japanese version took a much more space-economical path. Often, for lack of a better translation, pachinko is referred to as "Japanese pinball," although the differences between the games are vast.
It is a bit unclear where the first upright korinto gēmu appeared. It would seem that the actual innovation took place around 1926 in the Kanazawa area of Ishikawa Prefecture, where in the early days, two thirds of the pachinko-machine makers (eight of twelve establishments) were located. (Today, Gunma Prefecture has about fifty percent of the pachinko-machine market. The other half is held by Aichi Prefecture, where Nagoya is located.) The upright version of the game had a spring-loaded handle to make shooting easier, and a glass cover to contain the balls. This new form became prevalent in the Osaka area before the 1930s, where it came to be known as gachan or gachanko, here again the name was in imitation of the sound of the shooter hitting the ball. This primitive pachinko's popularity also skyrocketed. The number of makers increased and new gimmicks were constantly added to the machine. This in turn accelerated growth and incited the first "pachinko boom." Eventually the roten and candy shops could no longer keep pace with demand, even with the space-conserving vertical machines. In 1930, the Aichi prefectural headquarters granted the first formal license to a Nagoya businessman to operate a hall full of gachanko machines. All this took place within five years of the Japanese discovery of the Corinthian Game.
During the early 1930s these pachinko-like games continued to grow in popularity. There were a number of innovations, but the major one was the dispensing of new prize medals. These dropped out of the bottom of the machine when a ball fell into a scoring slot, and made it much easier to keep score. The prize medals were actually replaced by prize balls in the mid 30s, but did not come into widespread use until after World War II. It is also believed that this is when pachi-pachi, gachan and gachanko came together in everyday Japanese to form the game's present-day name, pachinko. Some accounts attribute the first use of the word "pachinko" to the Ishikawa Prefecture machine makers of the late 20s. Pachi-pachi is a Japanese word used to express the sound of something dry or crackling, like a fire. "Pachinko" also has an alternate usage, referring to a slingshot or the ball shot from one.
The early 1930s was an unprecedented growth period for pachinko, but the latter part of the decade proved not to be so kind to the game. In 1937, the production of pachinko machines was called to an abrupt halt as a result of Japan's military involvement in China. The metal used to make the nails and balls for pachinko was needed for guns and bullets, and manpower was needed too. In 1938 all pachinko parlors were ordered closed as pachinko factories retooled for munitions. Some of these parlors, especially those in the Nagoya area, were lucky enough to receive an indemnity from the government upon ceasing operations. Here and there a few places managed to illegally continue their pachinko business, but for eight years, until the end of World War II, mere was no legitimate pachinko in Japan. It was during this dormancy that the game's earliest forms, such as gachan, disappeared, never to return again. The humble korinto gēmu managed to survive as a novelty product and can still be purchased today in some department stores.
Pachinko's revival following the war was almost as rapid as its original growth. In 1946, the Nagoya factories again began manufacturing pachinko machines and pachinko parlors sprang up across the country. This revitalization was mainly a result of the prize system on which pachinko had originally been founded.
Japan right after the war was, needless to say, a wreck. Daily necessities were scarce or unavailable. The hows and whys are extremely vague, but many pachinko parlors were nevertheless able to get relatively stable supplies of essentials such as soap, vegetables, and shoes, and even luxuries like cigarettes. Understandably, the poverty-stricken Japanese flocked to the pachinko parlors to try and get their hands on these prizes, and many were successful in obtaining hard-to-get commodities for very little money.
Accompanying the changes in the prizes were further alterations in the design of the pachinko machine. A specialty pachinko manufacturer in Nagoya decided that a speeded-up version of the game would be more exciting. It accomplished this by incorporating an idea that had almost come into vogue prior to the war. It constructed the game so that when a ball fell into a scoring slot it caused the machine to dispense prize balls. These balls could then be used to continue play, so that the player could hopefully compound his investment and win yet more balls. This led another Nagoya manufacturing facility, operated by Shoichi Masamura, to further change the machines by pounding in more nails and adding spinners. These prevented the balls from falling straight to the bottom of the machine if they missed a scoring slot. Rather, they ricocheted around a bit and perhaps found a scoring slot further down on the board. This enhanced the game so much that this classic nail pattern, known as the "Masamura Gauge," is still in use today.
Masamura was also partly responsible for developing the "all" concept, where a ball entering any scoring slot put out a specific number of prize balls. The first such machine was called the "all ten" and had a total of eleven scoring slots. Each slot put out ten balls at a time. By 1948 Masamura was operating his own parlor full of these machines. By 1951, he had fully integrated the Masamura Gauge, and his ideas had become standards for the industry.
Even after achieving this success, Masamura was not willing to stop. He continued developing new machines and by the early 1950s had created what was to be the direct forerunner of the modern pachinko machine.
