Fiction en masse

The doors slide open automatically and a wall of sound hits you. Maybe sound isn’t the right word. It’s a physical force, acoustic pressure comparable to a jackhammer, measurable in decibels close to the pain threshold. Eighty, ninety decibels — that’s what a typical pachinko (パチンコ) parlor generates during peak hours. Rows of machines stretching all the way to the far wall — three hundred, four hundred, five hundred stations in a single building — flashing alternately in crimson, gold, and electric blue. And the people. They sit motionless, one hand on the dial, eyes locked on the screens as if staring at their last chance in life. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t drink. They don’t eat. They are here, and yet they are not. This is not a picture of entertainment. It really doesn’t look like “fun.”

Japan — a country of silence, stone gardens, and tea ceremonies. A country that invented wabi-sabi and the art of saying nothing. But this same Japan created an industry that at its peak — in 1994 — generated thirty trillion yen a year. Over a trillion Polish złoty. More than the combined casino revenues of the world’s three greatest gambling capitals — Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore. An industry that in 1999 accounted for 5.6% of Japan’s GDP and employed over 330,000 people. And officially — it is not gambling. Because Japan can maintain fictions on an industrial scale with an absolutely perfect poker face. Pachinko may be the most honest mirror this country has ever looked into — and it didn’t blink.

Because beneath the neon sits half of Japanese sociology. The story of the Korean diaspora, pushed into dirty industries after losing their citizenship. The yakuza laundering trillions of yen through eleven-millimeter steel balls. Retired police commissioners in cushy positions within the very industry they supposedly “oversee.” And millions of people — nearly thirty million at the peak, still over seven million today — who sit down in front of machines every day because a pachinko parlor is the one place where a Japanese worker doesn’t have to bow, doesn’t have to apologize to anyone, and doesn’t have to be anyone or anything at all. The ball drops into the machine and bounces off the metal pins. No one knows where it will land. This is the story of that ball. And of the people who see their own lives in it.

From Children’s Toy to Postwar Drug

Pachinko was not born in Japan. Its ancestor was the European game of bagatelle — billiards played on a tilted board, where a ball rolled between wooden pegs and dropped into scoring holes. From bagatelle evolved the American game called “Corinth” — a miniature tabletop version, popular at the turn of the twentieth century. When it reached Japan in the 1920s, it ended up in candy shops — as a toy for children. A small wooden board studded with nails, down which glass marbles rolled. Sweet shop owners placed it by the counter so children would have a reason to stay and buy more candy. The Japanese gave it an onomatopoeic nickname — pachi pachi — after the snapping and clattering of the marbles against wood.

In the 1930s, the game leapt across the age barrier. In Nagoya, a city of craftsmen and inventors, the boards were enlarged, set upright, and fitted with metal balls instead of glass ones. Adults discovered that for a few coins you could play for hours — and that certain pockets paid out more balls than others. Gambling slipped into the pastime unnoticed — all it took was for the prizes to shift from candy to cigarettes. By 1940, pachinko had spread across the entire country. Then the war came. The machines were scrapped for metal — in an empire that melted down even temple bells and household pots for fighter planes, steel balls for amusement were indefensible.

The real explosion came after 1945. Japan lay in ruins. Cities reduced to ashes, millions without work, without roofs, without hope. In 1948, the first commercial pachinko parlor opened in Nagoya — and it struck a deep, unmet need. The game was cheap. Entry cost nothing. For a few yen you could play for hours. And the prizes — cigarettes, food, small goods — let people survive without the humiliation of charity. This was the psychological key: in a culture where accepting charitable help was a source of shame, pachinko offered the illusion of agency. You don’t receive — you win. You don’t ask — you earn. Japanese pride was saved by a machine with metal balls.

That was when a man appeared whom the industry still calls the “god of pachinko.” Masamura Takeichi of Nagoya designed a revolutionary pin layout — the so-called Masamura gēji (正村ゲージ, from the English “gauge,” literally “Masamura’s layout”) — which transformed a monotonous, repetitive game into something unpredictable, full of tension and false hope. The balls stopped simply falling — they began to dance. That single invention triggered the first great boom: by the early 1950s, over 45,000 parlors were operating in Japan. A country of barely 90 million people had one pachinko parlor for every two thousand residents. In 1954, machines with automatic loading were banned — and the market shrank overnight from 50,000 parlors to nine thousand. But pachinko survived. As it always does.

***

It is ten in the evening at a parlor on the outskirts of Kita-Kyūshū — a working-class city, industrial in that old, twentieth-century sense of the word. Worn out. The overhead lights have dimmed, but the machines glow with their own intense light — each a different color, each with its own melody. The air is warm and sticky with humidity and smoke (that particular blend of grill, cigarettes, and something else). At the third row sits a man in a suit — tie loosened, jacket thrown over the back of his chair. His face is lit from below by a blue screen. His eyes are open but express nothing — as though he were looking not at the machine but through it, at something beyond the wall. His hand rests on the dial and turns it by millimeters, reflexively, like a man who has made this gesture for years, perhaps decades. Beside him stands a plastic container of balls — nearly empty. He doesn’t reach for his wallet. He doesn’t get up. He sits a while longer in this silence between noises, as if this space between one loss and the next were the only place where he is truly at home.

The Art of Pretending That Gambling Is Not Gambling

Gambling in Japan is illegal. Article 185 of the Criminal Code states plainly: a person who gambles shall be punished with a fine of up to 500,000 yen (around €3,200). The exceptions are strictly defined — five forms of gambling operated by the state: horse racing (keiba, 競馬), bicycle racing (keirin, 競輪), boat racing (kyōtei, 競艇), motorcycle racing (ōto rēsu, オートレース), and the state lottery. Beyond that — nothing. No casinos, no slot machines, no private betting. And yet across Japan stand nearly seven thousand pachinko parlors where millions of people daily exchange cash for balls, balls for tokens, and tokens for cash.

How is this possible? The answer lies in a legal construction called santen hōshiki (三点方式) — the “three-store system.” It is one of the most sophisticated examples of socially sanctioned fiction any culture has ever produced. It works like this: a player enters a pachinko parlor and buys steel balls for cash. He plays. If he ends up with more balls than he started with, he exchanges them at the parlor’s counter for “special prizes” (tokushu keihin, 特殊景品). These are small objects — ballpoint pens, cigarette lighters, small gold or silver tokens. The player leaves the parlor. Around the corner — literally — there is a small exchange booth. The player walks in and sells his “prizes” for cash. The booth then resells these items to a wholesaler, who in turn sells them back to the pachinko parlor. The circle closes. It sounds like a joke or a caricature. But this is exactly how an industry worth trillions of yen operates — today, in 2026, not in the nineteenth century.

Formally, these are three independent businesses with no connection to one another. The parlor doesn’t pay out money — so it’s not a casino. The booth buys secondhand items — so it runs a normal pawnshop. The wholesaler trades goods — so he’s an ordinary middleman. None of them break the law. If you ask an employee inside a pachinko parlor where the nearest exchange booth is, they won’t tell you. Because if they did, it would constitute evidence of a connection between the parlor and the booth, making the entire system illegal. The police — officially — “do not possess data” on exchange locations because they “do not know” such places exist. In 2014, when a parliamentary committee asked a representative of the National Police Agency about pachinko winnings statistics, they were told, with a stone face, that such statistics do not exist because there are no monetary winnings in pachinko.

There is something deeply Japanese in all this. Tatemae (建前) — the façade, the official version of reality — and honne (本音) — what lies underneath. Japan masterfully operates this duality in personal relationships, in business, in diplomacy. But pachinko takes it to an industrial scale. The santen hōshiki system is tatemae worth trillions of yen. The entire nation knows it’s gambling. Parliament knows. The police know. The media know. But as long as no one says it officially — the fiction holds. And there’s a bonus: since pachinko is officially not gambling, winnings are not taxed as gambling income. The state, which collects corporate taxes from the industry, simultaneously does not tax its customers — because it does not recognize that those customers win anything.

It is estimated that roughly 85% of the money spent by players comes back to them in the form of winnings. The 15% that stays in the parlor — multiplied by millions of visits and trillions of yen in turnover — is a fortune. The average pachinko player spends over 10,000 yen (around €65) per parlor visit. A single machine generates an average daily profit of 10,600 yen. A parlor with three hundred machines brings its owner several million yen per day — before operating costs. This is a business with margins that restaurant owners can only dream of.

***

Two in the morning. The parlor closed an hour ago, but the neon sign above the entrance still pulses — programmed to run all night, catching eyes even after closing. A few cars remain in the parking lot. In one of them — a small sedan with Saitama prefecture plates — sits a middle-aged woman. Business attire. Engine off, lights off. She scrolls through something on her phone. Maybe she’s counting how much she lost. Maybe she’s just scrolling. Or maybe she simply sits in the silence, because the home she was supposed to return to two hours ago is a place where the silence is louder still than these machines…

Korean Blood in Pachinko’s Veins

By various estimates, 80 to 90 percent of pachinko parlors in Japan are owned by ethnic Koreans. To understand why, one must go back to 1910, when Japan annexed Korea. Over thirty-five years of brutal occupation, hundreds of thousands of Koreans ended up on the Japanese archipelago — some voluntarily, seeking work; others through forced conscription into factories, mines, and wartime construction projects. In 1945, after Japan’s surrender, over two and a half million Koreans were living on the islands. Most returned — but around 600,000 stayed. Not because they loved Japan — many had nothing to go back to. Korea was in ruins, divided, politically unstable.

Throughout the colonial period, Japan treated Koreans as its subjects — second-class citizens of the empire. It forced them to adopt Japanese names, Japanese education, Japanese loyalty. But in 1947, two years after the war, the Alien Registration Law was enacted — and overnight, 600,000 people who had lived in Japan for decades were stripped of their citizenship. They became zainichi (在日) — literally “residing in Japan” — with the emphasis on the temporary nature of their stay. A term meant to suggest that their presence was transient. It was not. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in Japan to this day — and still constitute one of the country’s largest ethnic minorities.

Stripped of citizenship, zainichi Koreans lost access to the public sector, prestigious professions, and major corporations. Hiring discrimination pushed them into industries the Japanese called “3D” — dirty, dangerous, demeaning. Rubber manufacturing, metalwork, small-scale food service — and pachinko. Koreans began entering the pachinko industry around 1947, almost exactly when the industry itself was born. These were businesses the Japanese did not want. They demanded long hours, carried social stigma, were associated with the margins. But they generated cash. For people who had every other door slammed in their face, pachinko was the only available ladder. By the 1990s, zainichi Koreans accounted for 90% of total industry sales — an industry worth thirty trillion yen.

And here emerges a paradox that says more about Japan than volumes of sociological analysis. The Japanese — en masse, for decades, up to thirty million a year at the peak — played a game run by people they massively discriminated against. They spent trillions of yen in parlors owned by an ethnic minority whose civil rights they simultaneously denied, whose children they wouldn’t accept into schools, whom they refused to marry. A pachinko ball has no nationality — but the people on both sides of the machine do. And for seventy years, they pretended not to see it.

Min Jin Lee — the Korean-American author — captured this paradox in her 2017 novel “Pachinko.” A saga of four generations of a Korean family emigrating to Osaka. Ikaino — the neighborhood where Koreans settled in shacks of plywood and tin, on land nobody else wanted. The heroine’s son is absorbed into the pachinko industry — the only one that will take him. Lee wrote a sentence that became the aphoristic summary of the entire phenomenon: “Pachinko is a foolish game, but life is not.” Everything is in that sentence: the absurdity of the system, the dignity of people trapped in that absurdity, and a question no one wants to answer.

But there is an even darker layer to this story. After the Second World War, the Korean community in Japan split politically. Some identified with South Korea, others with North Korea. The latter group found institutional support in an organization called Chōsen Sōren (朝鮮総聯, Korean: 총련) — the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a de facto embassy of North Korea on Japanese soil. Chōsen Sōren ran schools, granted loans, built community — but simultaneously served as a pipeline for money transfers to North Korea. Estimates vary dramatically — from less than a hundred million dollars annually to sums reaching 200 billion yen — but the mechanism was simple: cash from pachinko parlors owned by Koreans sympathetic to the North was loaded onto North Korean ships docked in Japanese ports. In the other direction flowed — according to intelligence services — amphetamines and counterfeit dollars. Japanese authorities only began restricting these transfers at the start of the twenty-first century, under the pressure of the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

A paradox of history: a colonial victim, pushed to the margins and forced to live in the gray zone, becomes — not necessarily knowingly, not necessarily willingly — a cog in the machine of one of the world’s most dangerous dictatorships. According to some sources, roughly one-third of pachinko parlors in Japan were in the hands of Koreans loyal to Pyongyang. The rest belonged to South Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese — the latter historically linked to the yakuza. The pachinko industry is a map of Japan’s shadows — every owner has a story you won’t find in any registry.

***

In a parlor on the outskirts of Osaka, right by the Kintetsu rail tracks, the small sign above the entrance has faded in the sun. Inside — newer-generation machines with LCD screens and animations from popular anime. But the walls bear the marks of many renovations, layers of paint one atop the other. In the corner, by the register, hangs a framed black-and-white photograph: a man in a white shirt stands in front of the same building, only fifty years younger. On the back — if anyone were to take it down and check — is an inscription in hangeul (the Korean alphabet). The current owner is third generation. He was born in Japan, speaks Japanese, his children attend a Japanese school. He has held a Japanese passport for years. But to the neighbors, he is still zainichi. And he runs a pachinko parlor — because it’s the only thing his family has known for seventy years.

Yakuza, Police, and the Dance of Power

Where large sums of money circulate in a legal gray zone, organized crime appears. The yakuza — Japanese criminal syndicates — entered the pachinko industry in the 1970s. Initially on the periphery: protection rackets shaking down parlor owners, fictitious deliveries of “gifts” masking regular protection payments, money laundering through an industry with enormous cash turnover. Where thirty trillion yen a year is generated, even a marginal stake meant fortunes.

In the 1980s, the police launched an offensive — and indeed, over the following decade, the yakuza was largely forced to withdraw from direct involvement in the pachinko business. The Anti-Yakuza Law was enacted in 1991, prefectural exclusion ordinances followed in 2009–2011, and controls were tightened (you’ll find more on that in this article: How the Mighty Yakuza was Tamed in the 21st Century. And What Sumo Tournaments Have to Do with It?). Success? Depends on whom you ask. Because in the yakuza’s place stepped an institution called SECTA — the Security Electronics and Communications Technology Association (Hōan Denshi Tsūshin Gijutsu Kyōkai, 保安電子通信技術協会, abbreviated as Hōtsūkyō). A government body established in 1985, the sole regulator of the entire pachinko industry — issuing licenses to parlors, certifying machines, conducting factory inspections. Controlling an industry worth trillions.

And who works at SECTA? Retired police officers. The phenomenon has its own name in Japan: amakudari (天下り) — literally “descent from heaven.” It is a systemic practice in which high-ranking government officials, upon retirement, assume lucrative positions in the industries they previously oversaw. In the pachinko context, the mechanism is particularly piquant: a police officer who spent twenty years overseeing pachinko parlors and pursuing the yakuza within them, upon retirement, settles into a director’s chair at the organization regulating those same parlors. There is a joke in Japan — repeated without a smile — that the real police pension is a well-paid position in the pachinko industry.

In 2009, active police officer Senba Toshirō published an internal critique of the system, describing financial machinations, evidence fabrication, coerced confessions, embezzlement from police operational funds — and the amakudari mechanism within the pachinko industry. His conclusion entered the annals of Japanese public debate: “The biggest gang in Japan today is the National Police Agency.” Researcher Andrew Rankin of the Asia-Pacific Journal put it more precisely: the police shut down the yakuza’s racket — and replaced it with their own. From the perspective of parlor owners, the yakuza had been cheaper, less bureaucratic, and easier to negotiate with than retired policemen in suits.

***

It is nine in the morning, a weekday. In front of a parlor in Tokyo’s Kabukichō district, a line forms — mostly men, mostly over fifty, mostly in everyday clothes: jeans, jackets, sneakers. No one talks. They stand in silence, phones in hand or a cigarette between their fingers. When the doors open, they walk in quickly but somehow lifelessly — each knows which machine he’s heading for. Some have been visiting this parlor every day for years. They know the layout of the machines better than the arrangement of furniture in their own apartments. Above the entrance hangs a board displaying payout data for individual machines from recent days — how many players hit ōatari, how many balls were dispensed. The regulars read this data like stockbrokers — looking for the machine that “hasn’t paid out yet,” convinced that the statistics are on their side. They aren’t. But the illusion is part of the game. This is what unemployment looks like in Tokyo.

A Machine for Souls

Japan has one of the highest rates of pathological gambling among developed nations. A 2017 study by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare found that 3.6% of Japanese adults — over 3.2 million people — had experienced gambling addiction at some point in their lives. In the preceding year, 0.8% of the population — roughly 700,000 people — exhibited behavior consistent with addiction criteria. The average monthly expenditure of an addicted gambler was 58,000 yen — the equivalent of around €375. And the primary form of gambling cited by those addicted was — naturally — pachinko.

This is no accident. Pachinko machines have all the structural features that the psychology of gambling identifies as addictive mechanisms. A low entry threshold — in parlors offering ichi-en pachinko (one-yen pachinko), you can play for hours on a thousand yen, less than seven euros. A rapid, continuous play cycle — balls fly almost without interruption, every second a new chance, a new disappointment, a new hope. Intense sensory stimulation — LCD screens with anime animations (remember that anime resonates differently in Japan than in the West — in Japan it speaks to the 50+ demographic just as much as to youth), speakers built into every machine, pulsing lights. And — most crucially — a variable reward schedule: small wins interspersed with rare major jackpots (ōatari, 大当たり). The player’s brain is bombarded with micro-confirmations — enough to sustain hope, too small to satisfy desire.

There is one more element, uniquely Japanese. The dial — handoru — which the player turns to regulate the force of the ball’s launch. It is a small but psychologically crucial feature: it creates the illusion of control. The player believes that the outcome depends on the precision of his movement — that this is not pure chance but skill. Research shows this illusion is among the strongest factors sustaining gambling behavior. In 2014 studies, the rate of pathological gambling among Japanese men was 9.04% — more than five times the North American average of 1.6%. Among pachinko players surveyed in the late 1990s, 29% considered themselves addicted and in need of treatment. Another 30% admitted they regularly exceeded their budgets and borrowed money to keep playing.

But statistics do not capture the human dimension. In Japan, where haji (恥) — shame (more on that here: Haji 恥. Shame. What lies at the very bottom of the Japanese soul?) — is one of the most powerful forces regulating social behavior, admitting to pachinko addiction is an act of social suicide. It is not a disease — it is weakness, a permanent crack in a person’s soul. That is how it is perceived. Not a disorder — a lack of gaman (我慢), that famous Japanese endurance which demands bearing everything without complaint. Qualitative research conducted among addicted gamblers in Japan reveals a recurring pattern: shame prevents seeking help, isolation deepens addiction, addiction deepens shame. A closed loop — like the santen hōshiki system, except that instead of balls, it is human suffering that circulates.

The infrastructure of help must be sought with a microscope. The Recovery Support Network — a Japanese support organization for gambling addicts — recorded fewer than 800 calls per year in its most recently reported figures from people seeking help. Eight hundred calls — in a country where over three million people have a gambling problem. The government, which for decades collected corporate taxes from the pachinko industry and tolerated it as an engine of local economies, took no systemic action for decades. Only the casino law of 2016 — introducing legal casinos — forced parliamentarians to confront the subject of addiction. Yet even that law was not accompanied by real protective measures.

There are things Japan does not speak of aloud. One of them is children in cars. In the parking lots of pachinko parlors — especially in summer, when temperatures reach 35 degrees — there have been cases of infant deaths, children left in locked vehicles by parents playing inside. These tragedies appeared in the press regularly from the 1990s onward (far less common now, but they still happen). The industry responded — some parlors began organizing parking lot patrols, others opened supervised children’s corners. But the very fact that parking lots had to be patrolled to search for abandoned infants says more about the depth of the problem than any statistic.

***

Three in the afternoon, Wednesday. A parlor in a small town in Gunma Prefecture. Between the rows of machines walks an employee — a slight woman in a company vest — collecting empty canned coffee from the vending machines. At one of the machines sits an elderly man in sweatpants and flip-flops. He plays slowly, sparingly — one ball every few seconds, as if rationing his supply. On the side table — an empty bentō box and a double espresso from a konbini. This man has been here since opening, since ten in the morning. The employee knows him — not by name, but by habit. She knows he always sits at the same machine, that he never speaks, that he leaves at eight, two hours before closing. No one knows if he has anywhere to return to. No one knows if anyone is waiting for him. What is known is that tomorrow he will be here again.

In the corridor between the rows of machines stands a vending machine — canned coffee for 130 yen, tea for 120. Beside it — a cigarette vending machine. On the floor beneath the machine lies a stray pachinko ball — small, gleaming, and indifferent. Someone dropped it or lost it. No one will pick it up. It is worth less than a single yen. But a few hours ago, in the hands of someone who believed that ball would find the right pocket, it was worth everything.

Twilight of the Neons

The pachinko industry has been shrinking for over twenty years — and each new figure confirms the trend. In the peak year of 1997, Japan had 18,244 parlors. In 2023 — 6,839. A decline of over 60%. The number of players: from nearly 30 million in the 1990s to 7.2 million in 2021. The market — measured by total ball rental fees — fell from 35 trillion yen in 2005 to 15.7 trillion in 2023. Still an astronomical figure, but less than half of what it was. The number of parlors drops by 500–600 per year. The number of operators shrank by over 11% in 2023 alone, to 1,825 companies. Industry forecasts predict continued, steady decline through at least 2028.

The causes intertwine like braided rope. Japan is aging — the median age exceeds 49, and the young don’t walk into parlors. The smartphone generation treats pachinko as a relic of their grandparents’ era. Regulations introduced in 2018 forced operators to replace older machines with newer models offering lower payouts — costing billions of yen while simultaneously making the game less attractive for devotees. The gradual ban on indoor smoking, introduced from 2020 onward (yes, that late!), struck at the culture of the pachinko parlor, which for decades had been inseparable from the cigarette. COVID-19 shuttered parlors for weeks — and some players simply never came back after that forced detox.

And on the horizon lurks a new competitor. In 2018, Japan legalized casinos — as part of so-called “integrated resorts” (tōgō risōto, 統合リゾート). The first such complex is slated to open in Osaka by 2030 — with a projected 20 million visitors annually and one trillion yen in yearly revenue. A second is rumored for Nagasaki. For the pachinko industry, which for seventy years benefited from a quasi-monopoly born of the ban on private gambling, the arrival of legal casinos is an existential threat. Because if Japan begins openly offering gambling — why maintain the fiction?

And yet pachinko endures. The industry consolidates — large chains like Maruhan, with annual revenues exceeding 1.4 trillion yen, swallow small, family-owned parlors. The machines evolve — integrating licensed characters from anime and manga, offering narrative mini-games, employing artificial intelligence to personalize the experience. But the core remains the same: a person sitting before a machine, turning a dial, watching the balls.

In small Japanese towns, where yet another shop closes and yet another izakaya shuts its doors, the pachinko parlor is often the last point of light on the main street. A neon colossus amid rice paddies and wooden houses — with a parking lot larger than the building itself, advertisements glowing through the night, ventilators exhaling warm air into the darkness. It looks like an alien ship that landed in the provinces and forgot to leave. Or like the last lantern in a landscape that is slowly going dark.

***

There is something about pachinko that defies simple judgment. One can condemn it — as a machine for extracting money from those who can least afford it. As a legal gray zone maintained for the convenience of politicians and police. As a tool that destroys families, feeds dictatorships, and poisons the air. All of this is true.

But pachinko is also something else. It is a form of loneliness — sanctioned, institutionalized, lit by neon. In a society that demands perfection from the individual at every turn — at work, in the family, in relationships — a pachinko parlor is the one place where you can simply sit and demand nothing of yourself. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to achieve anything. You don’t have to smile. You can be nobody — for an hour, for three hours, for an entire day. And no one will ask you about it.

The ball drops into the machine. It bounces off the pins. No one knows where it will land — in the winning pocket or in the void at the bottom. The system is designed so that in the long run, the house always wins. Roughly 85% of the money comes back to the players — but that 15%, multiplied by millions of people and trillions of yen, is a fortune. The player knows this. He keeps playing.

Pachinko is the Japan that doesn’t fit in the tourist frame. The Japan of noise, smoke, desperation, and brilliantly constructed fictions. The Japan where someone once took someone else’s citizenship — and gave them a machine with metal balls instead. The Japan where a police officer keeps order, and then settles into an armchair in an industry where that order is an illusion. The Japan where thirty million people once sat down before flickering screens every day — not to win, but for a moment to stop thinking about the fact that they had already lost.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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