Pachinko Road

The pastime of "Pachinko" is a great mystery to visitors to Japan. What is it? Is it fun? How can it be played? In this book I explain Pachinko in detail so you can enjoy it for yourself on your next trip to Japan. The book covers all you need to know over 7 chapters including how to find a parlour, how to operate the machine, how to "read" the machine and how to cash out. I have included my own photographs of actual pachinko machines in Japan to help you understand the different aspects of the game. There is also a handy Japanese/English glossary covering many pachinko-related words and phrases. I recommend this book to anyone visiting Japan that wants to try something new as well as fans of Japanese anime, drama, games, slot machines or gambling. This is the definitive guide to a unique and compelling Japanese pastime that you have to try!

Most remote islands of the imagination conjure up paradise. Japan is an archipelago of puzzlement. From the sands that forged their swords and serenity, they traveled a Samurai Road of temples and shrines, feudal fortresses, and flowing mountain streams of wasabi. On sashimi and soy sauce, and green tea over rice, they lived a thousand years of pathos, under cherry blossoms and ephemeral moonlight, in Zen gardens and futon dreams. It was all so perfect.

Faced with an aging workforce, Japanese firms are hiring foreign workers in ever-increasing numbers. In 1990 Japan's government began encouraging the migration of Nikkeijin (overseas Japanese) who are presumed to assimilate more easily than are foreign nationals without a Japanese connection. More than 250,000 Nikkeijin, mainly from Brazil, now work in Japan. The interactions between Nikkeijin and natives, says Joshua Hotaka Roth, play a significant role in the emergence of an increasingly multicultural Japan. He uses the experiences of Japanese Brazilians in Japan to illuminate the racial, cultural, linguistic, and other criteria groups use to distinguish themselves from one another. Roth's analysis is enriched by on-site observations at festivals, in factories, and in community centers, as well as by interviews with workers, managers, employment brokers, and government officials.Considered both "essentially Japanese" and "foreign," nikkeijin benefit from preferential immigration policy, yet face economic and political strictures that marginalize them socially and deny them membership in local communities. Although the literature on immigration tends to blame native blue-collar workers for tense relations with migrants, Roth makes a compelling case for a more complex definition of the relationships among class, nativism, and foreign labor. Brokered Homeland is enlivened by Roth's own experience: in Japan, he came to think of himself as nikkeijin, rather than as Japanese-American.

A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*

Richard Monk was on holiday in Japan. He didn't expect to get involved in the theft of £50,000, blackmail and murder ... But that was what happened when the good-looking young man came up to him on a Japanese mountainside and said: 'I'm in deep trouble, Mr Monk. Will you help me?'