2

In the second season of Kaiji, one of the games he plays is an extreme pachinko machine called "the Bog". There seems to be a counter on that game which is confusing:

  • Inserting a 10 million yen card is shown to set that counter to 1000.
  • Pressing a button near that counter decreases that number by 100 and allows a large number of balls (it looks like 100) to fill the reservoir.
  • We are told many times that each ball costs 4,000 yen so buying a 10 million yen card would allow the player 2,500 balls.

If the counter shows how much money is left on the card, it is off by a factor of 10,000. If the counter shows how many balls the card will still buy the player, it should start at 2,500 instead of 1000. Everything seems to make sense if we see the counter as showing 1/10,000 the amount of yen the player has left on the card. That, however, seems a very strange way to denote that amount of money. Am I missing something that would make that make sense?

kaine
  • 5,244
  • 3
  • 26
  • 39

1 Answers1

3

Your confusion stems from the difference in the number systems used in English and Japanese. Take a look at this chart. Note that where English would be ten thousand, Japanese has a word for that, 万 (man), and from there starts to count similarly to the English "thousand": 10万, 100万, and... 1000万. So it would be a natural cutoff point on a display: Japanese people would understand that the counter is cutting off five 0s.

Jimmy
  • 1,654
  • 10
  • 9