But the emerging Japanese underground is pumping out excellent, innovative tracks that deserve to be heard around the world. The group, made up of sampler jocks Tera-D and Middle Finger, get their name from the meeting of porn and politics β the pseudonym taken from the then-current film starring Linda Lovelace and given to Watergate informant Mark Felt.
Released in July, their first album, XXX , samples both that film and a documentary chronicling the police battle against it. Which also pretty well describes Tokyo. I caught up with DTX in Koenji, whose mix of dead-enders and artists makes it like a pre-trendy Brooklyn. Like a surprising number of things in Japan, pachinko exists in a poorly-defined legal grey area β while gambling aside from the lottery is technically illegal, pachinko parlors use a painfully transparent ruse to skirt the rules.
Porn laws are just as two-faced. But this conservative law has to be at least partly credited with the infamously creative perversion of Japanese product. Tera-D recently got back from some time in Russia and was sure to sample the porn there. The [censorship] makes it more erotic. Like porn itself, DTX exist at the bottom of the barrel.
He says he showers at a manga-kissaten, a kind of hour entertainment center that charges by the hour for use of its comic book library, video games, and homey comforts. You see the full-time addicts β some of them so-called pachi-pros β perched in the front windows of these places in semi-permanent states of glazed indifference.
I had figured, then, that pachinko must be the long con, offering occasional small wins to keep you glued to the seat. Maybe the noise threw off our concentration β the clack of spinning wheels, the clatter of metal balls against pegs and into plastic trays, and the occasional explosive congratulatory recordings add up to a completely mind-altering racket. World War II and was stationed in New Guinea, where conditions and English assaults combined to kill thousands upon thousands of his fellow soldiers.
