Even at noon on Sunday in this small industrial city, players pack the narrow aisles of the parlor. Smoke carpets the room, and the sound is deafening. Lined up in long dizzying rows, the jangling machines look like the mutant love children of old school pinball games and futuristic one-armed-bandits, each one pimped out with powerful speakers, intense video montages, and a barrage of flashing lights. The cocktail of sound, smoke, and light shake out to a full-on assault of the senses.

The players sit transfixed—one hand resting on the machine’s dial, another on a joystick—their eyes glued to individual video screens and cigarettes dangling from their lips. Most of them look like they retired more than a decade ago, but not Takahara Daiki.

Daiki is 20 years old and works as a line cook in a local restaurant. He explains the game to me, and it’s pretty simple—in theory. You buy a bunch of small silver balls and then use a dial to control how fast they shoot through a course of pegs. Get them in the right holes, win more balls. “The game is interesting,” he says, “and I play half for fun and half to make money.” Although, when it comes down to it, he’s a little evasive about his actual net gain or loss.

Daiki thinks he knows how to beat the machine. He always looks for a “hot” game, one that’s been paying out a lot. You can read the number of payouts over the past few days above each console. It’s all part of a strategy that makes players feel like the game is skill-based, when in reality, the machines have all been rigged in the parlor’s favor. It’s just like Western slots. The house always wins.

The pachinko industry constitutes Japan’s largest leisure activity. The sector employs over 300,000 people and brings in about 225 billion dollars a year. That’s more than two times the revenue from all legal US gambling operations—in other words, about the GDP of a country like Israel.

The parlors are everywhere. You can see the flash of their neon signs from the train as you pull into stations across the country. Turn on the TV and you’ll catch commercials for new parlors and machines, some like this bizarre series done by Nicholas Cage for Sankyo, one of the country’s largest pachinko manufacturers.

Daiki says he came to Zeus today because it has a new game, one the parlor has advertised as easy to win. The game exemplifies recent changes in the industry to snare a broader demographic, particularly retired women. It’s cheaper to play than standard pachinko and has a more intense video game component. This one has a narrative based on the popular anime series, Evangelion.

Naoko Takiguchi is a sociology professor at Otani university in Kyoto. She runs gambling addiction rehab programs, and she says the video game aspect can heighten pachinko addiction—a condition she claims is already widespread in Japan. “The government does not acknowledge this is a big problem,” she says.

Japan has recently made some regulatory changes to deal with addiction—most notably requiring the payout system to be less “exciting.” But Takiguchi says since pachinko is still considered a game – not gambling – the highly addictive nature escapes scrutiny. And she says in Japan, addiction is already a topic that people don’t want to admit or even talk about. “It takes a long time for people to seek help,” she says, “it’s the shame.”

Pachinko machine (Photo: Doug Downen/Flickr)

The pachinko industry has slipped some since it peaked in the 1990s. Back then the government did little to regulate parlors, and the industry brought in about 300 billion dollars a year. But after about a decade of decline, the industry has leveled out, and there’s even speculation now of a steady rise. Parlors actually out-performed Las Vegas casinos back when the financial crisis hit in 2007.

Pachinko was first introduced to Japan the 1920s, but it really took off after World War II when the country’s largest minority group started opening parlors. Sung-Yoon Lee is an assistant professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He says Koreans flocked to pachinko because they faced citizenship issues and discrimination that barred them from mainstream businesses. “This pachinko industry would have afforded an easier avenue to a livelihood,” he says, “it’s a cash industry of course. It’s shady business.”

Lee says most pachinko parlors are still owned by Koreans living in Japan. And about thirty percent of those owners have ties to North Korea. He says at the peak of the industry in the nineties those owners were sending several hundred million dollars a year – in cash – to Pyongyang. “For a poor, small economy like North Korea, that isn’t an insignificant sum,” he says, “in fact, that would equal about North Korea’s annual export earnings for that year. So that’s a lot of money back then.”

Japan has since cracked down on those money transfers. But Lee says North Korean-affiliated pachinko magnates are still raking in cash. And they aren’t the only ones. For years the Yakuza, Japan’s famed mafia, played a crucial role in running and regulating the industry. Now that task has been taken over by the national police, and there have been reports of corruption and nepotism. There’s a joke in Japan that the real police pension is a cushy high-paying job in the pachinko industry. But Takiguchi says people in Japan don’t talk much about that either.

So how has such a shady, addicting, game of chance remained legal in a country that bans casinos and online gambling? It all has to do with one small, extra step in the cash out system. Pachinko whiz Takahara Daiki shows me the trick.

When Daiki finishes his session, he trades in the balls he’s won for a “special prize” – a card with his winning information and a little candy box. It’s got picture of Hello Kitty on it. Daiki takes the card and candy outside the parlor to a shoebox-sized slot in the wall about ten feet from the entrance. He passes them through the hole. A shadowy figure hands him his winnings. And presto. Since the money is obtained through this third party exchange shop, pachinko is not technically gambling.

Daiki says he thinks of pachinko as half gambling and half fun. But for his boss, the head chef, it’s a different story. Daiki says he goes all the time and often loses most of his pay check.

The “white wedding” in Japan copies an archetypal Western ceremony. There are all the traditional elements: live music, an expensive white dress, and a giant cross hanging in the background. The couple swaps rings, cuts a cake at the reception, and at the end, the bride throws a bouquet to the next lucky girl. But perhaps the most essential part of the event is a minister who looks the part. In other words, a white person.

At this hotel near the central train station in Nagasaki, wedding planners are putting on a typical ceremony. A string quartet and organ play Pachabel’s Cannon in D to open the service and then minister Wayne Hamilton takes over.

From behind the podium, Hamilton reads in both Japanese and English, delivering all of the traditional lines: A speech about the rings and their significance, the “do you take this man, do you take this women” bit, and of course the climactic,“you may now kiss the bride.”

At the end the choir sings a weddingifed version of “All You Need is Love,” and the crowd showers the newlyweds with rose petals supplied by the highly organized hotel staff.

But in this case, the couple has not really been married. This is only a mock ceremony. The hotel is photographing it to advertise its wedding services. That explains why the groom only gave his would-be, model-of-a-bride a little peck on the cheek instead of a full-on kiss.

It also explains why the groom is a young, photogenic white guy with perfect teeth and curly brown hair. Wedding services often use white grooms in their advertising material. It’s a common scheme to sell the “white wedding” fantasy to Japanese women.

For the most part Japanese couples get married in either lavish hotel lobbies like this or in one of the many ornate chapels built to accommodate the booming wedding business.

You see the advertisements for wedding services all over Japan—the movie-set chapels, churches like Disneyland castles, and happy brides in bright white wedding dresses. Nils Olsen, a Christian missionary from Washington state, says that “basically, the Japanese social concept of a wedding is that it’s fashionable.” He would know. Olsen has been putting on weddings in Japan for 20 years.

Olsen is one of the few ministers in Japan that’s actually ordained. He says that when he started there were far less “fake ministers,” and that the money was better than it is now. Way better. He used to make almost $400 per wedding ceremony. Since wedding providers started hiring any white person to do his job, Olsen’s pay has been cut in half.

Unlike most white guys doing the wedding gig, Olsen is in it for more than just the money. He spends a few hours with each couple, introducing them to Christianity and rehearsing the ceremony. Most couples, he says, have no clue about the religion. They don’t know basics like the meaning of the cross or narrative of Jesus. He shows them a video explaining the religious themes of the wedding and gives them a translated Giddeon’s bible.

Most stand-in ministers put in far less time then Olsen. Many aren’t even religious at all. Several that I met are actually too embarrassed about their profession to speak with me. The one who will talk doesn’t want to use his real name because he is afraid he is doing something illegal by ministering weddings.

“Tom,” as I call him, is an American student in Japan who does weddings for the same reason he teaches English. Money. He says, “I’m not ordained, I’m not religious, I don’t understand anything that I’m reading in the actual ceremony.”

As long as his visa allows him to work, “Tom’s” wedding gig is totally legit. Marriage ceremonies in Japan are completely separate from the legal stuff at City Hall.

Anyone can officiate because the whole thing is just for show. “Tom” says he feels ridiculous when he administers weddings, and that the only reason they hired him was because of his race: “I’m white, I’m young, and that’s it. That’s the only thing that they care about. I’m a photo model is what I feel like. I’m a photo priest.”

An English friend got him the job. He gave Tom the priest outfit, complete with rosary and cross, along with a binder full of notes. For the first few weddings, Tom was really nervous. He was worried that he was pronouncing everything correctly, and that his English sounded “English enough.”

But “Tom” soon realized everyone was nervous and confused. He says there are only a few things you can’t mess up.

You need to pronounce the couples names right, the couple needs to get the right rings on the right fingers, and at the end they need to kiss at the right moment. And, hopefully, on the lips.

The only instruction the wedding organizers gave him was to smile more, clap louder, and make sure to pronounce the word “kiss” with a really strong Japanese accent. So now he says “you may kissu the bride.” It helps avoid confusion.

After every ceremony, Tom strips down to his t-shirt and jeans and sneaks out of the ornate chapel through a back door. On the way out, someone hands him an envelope with about $200 in yen. When I tell him that real ministers used to make twice that, his eyes widen.

That would have been great, he says. It’s really expensive to live here.

At a ferry dock in the small town of Picton, New Zealand, a young man hands pamphlets to drivers waiting for the boat that runs between New Zealand’s two main islands. He’s a bio-security officer, warning people about an invasive aquatic organism called didymo. It’s a brown algae known locally as “rock snot,” and it has infested waterways throughout the country’s south island since it was first seen here in 2004.

In an effort to stop its spread to the north island, government officers now routinely hose down any clothing, equipment or vehicles that might’ve come in contact with didymo before drivers can get on the boat.

If bio-security is a foreign concept to most visitors here, for New Zealanders it’s a fact of life. Invasive species have plagued the remote island chain ever since humans first arrived 800 years ago. Now globalization is intensifying the threat, and New Zealand is ratcheting up its response. The isolated island country spends over $150 million annually on border screening, eradication, and containment, and this year, the government created a whole new department to better coordinate the effort.

“We are an island nation and we don’t have a lot of the pests and disease that are present in other countries,” says Wayne McNee, Director-General of the new Primary Resources Ministry. “So on the plus side, because we don’t have those pests and diseases, we have a lot of biodiversity in New Zealand.”

On the down-side, though, when these things do arrive, they can wreak havoc. And McNee says increasing trade and tourism is making it harder than ever to keep them out. In the last decade alone, there have been incursions of rust fungi, didymo, and a bacterium known as PSA that’s devastating kiwifruit, one of the country’s most important crops.

On his kiwifruit orchard outside of Te Puke, Paul Jones points out an infected vine that’s oozing a red goo.

“It looks like radiator rust,” Jones says. “The vine’s own vascular system is carrying it around and it does not have a future.”

Since officials first detected PSA here two years ago, it has spread to infect 60 percent of the country’s extremely valuable gold kiwifruit vines. Jones’s orchard does still have some healthy fruit, but before he’ll show it to you, Jones requires visitors to put on bright blue hairnets and get sprayed down with antibacterial solution.

“We’ve developed a set of hygiene standards, none of which we used to think about before PSA,” Jones says. “It’s costing us a lot of money just in terms of control mechanisms.”

The industry says it will be impossible to contain the disease. Instead, it’s trying to develop new strains of the fruit that are immune to the infection. But Jones says the outbreak has already ruined many growers.

The government acknowledges that no amount of security could keep out every biological stranger. Microbes can slip in with tourists, cargo ships, or even on gusts of wind from Australia, more than a thousand miles away. Many interlopers have even been brought in on purpose. Introduced livestock, crops, and pets have become a big part of the landscape.

Some newcomers are a boon for the economy, like sheep, wine grapes, and trout. Others have become a national nuisance.

Herb Christophers, of the department of conservation, says the list of imported mammals is a long one. “Cats, rats—that’s Norway rats and ship rats—stoats, ferrets, weasels, which were introduced to control rabbits, which were introduced. Seven species of deer, pigs, goats…”

Christophers says the naturalization of these pests served as cautionary tale for a country with some of the most unusual wildlife on earth. Before humans arrived in the 13th century, the only native land mammals here were bats. Modern mammals hadn’t yet evolved when New Zealand broke away from the other continents about 85 million years ago. So thousands of unique animals evolved here instead, especially birds.

“We have a bird, which is nearly extinct, called a kokako, which fills the same role as a squirrel,” Christophers says. “We have other birds, which—why bother flying, when your food is on the ground—so their wings became vestigial, such as the kiwi. So it’s our national icon.”

But unique wildlife like the kokako and kiwi proved easy prey for many exotics. Imported creatures like rats, stoats, and possums have pushed dozens of native species into extinction and are now too pervasive to eradicate. The only hope is to contain them, which is a big part of the country’s bio-security efforts.

Ranger Duncan Kay is part of that effort. One recent day he tested out a spring-loaded stoat trap near the South Island’s Tai Poutini National Park.

“It’s got quite a bit of force,” Kay says as he sets the trap. “So if the stoat puts his paw on that, he’s pretty much a gonner.”

Kay steps back and taps the trigger with a stick, to which the trap responds with a deadly thwack.

Traps like these are found all over New Zealand. So is a controversial pesticide that’s banned in many other countries because it is so deadly to mammals—the exact reason why New Zealand has become the world’s number one user.

It’s an extreme measure, perhaps, but the government believes it’s an important part of a broad national effort to fight back against invasive species.

Herb Christophers, of the department of conservation, says it’s not just about protecting New Zealand’s agriculture, or even its huge tourist industry. It’s about protecting the country’s national identity, for which there are no replacement strains.

“To retain what is individual about New Zealand, we want to retain that biodiversity,” Christophers says. “We don’t need anymore introductions, thank you very much.”