The Late 1990s
Fort Worth, Texas
Coerced by my father to spend time with him during his league night at the bowling alley, I found myself thoroughly bored. There are only so many times you can watch overweight, middle-aged men throw heavy balls down the lane before you start calculating the average turn time per person (thirty seconds per ball with ball return, shorter for a strike) and translating Beatles songs into Latin (Ea te amat, yeah yeah yeah), after which it is obvious to all involved that you need a break.
With a buck from my dad, I headed to the arcade. For all that money, my only options were one round of the racing game Cruisin’ USA, one attempt at a shooting game that only gave instructions in Japanese, or the claw machine. Of these, the most time consuming was the claw, so there I went. For two quarters, I was in for a grab, followed by a chance to get additional grabs by stopping a wheel at the right spot to earn up to three extra attempts. Having timed that out too, every fifty cents was worth four grabs, and that dollar could kill a half hour pretty effectively.
The prizes were lame and not worth my time or money. I told myself it was physics, that I was learning something, that it was a skill worth having, but when league night was no longer a problem, the usefulness of the skill died away.
2010
Sendai, Japan
I had moved to Japan two years earlier, to a tiny mountain town with no foreign coworkers. Eventually I relocated to Sendai, one of the largest cities in Northern Japan, and took a job with another company. This time I was working at the head office with several other foreigners, but having never mastered the ability to work well with others, I struggled to find common ground. They went out drinking after work. I lived with my probable future in-laws who expected me home at a decent hour and sober. They ran off for weekends elsewhere. My boyfriend worked more than 24 days a month. We didn’t have weekends.
Boring, I called myself, and in that little misery I decided to do what made me feel better earlier in life. I headed to the arcade.
The arcades in Sendai were expansive things with claw machines lining the front and ranging in difficulty from tiny machines with cheap and easy prizes to massive monsters that charged 200 yen per play with a claw about the size of a human torso. I opted for some of the middle-grade machines and found them fairly easy. I came back to work that day with some gloomy bears, stuffed animals made adorable yet bloody in a juxtaposition that is so indicative of modern Japan that most foreigners love the things.
Two of my coworkers realized my skill, and together we went on arcade raiding parties, trying to find new toys and new ways to win. I wasn’t always perfect, and sometimes lost up to ten dollars worth of yen in pursuit of an item that moved slightly once, but my colleagues were forgiving. After all, we were fighting the same machine. Soon, we were laughing or commiserating. The excitement of winning a prize or frustration with failing to do so formed our common ground.My hours at the claw machine finally paid off, only in friends rather than trinkets.
2015
Still in Sendai
My life has changed considerably since those lunch break prize grabs. I’m now mostly a stay-at-home mom with a toddler to show for it, and budgeting is significantly more severe, but still sometimes I find myself at the machines, trying to win a BayMax, a Rirakuma, or even a gloomy bear. I still see my raiding buddies from time to time, but we don’t spend as much time at the machines for lack of funds and necessity. For the most part, we have the prizes we need. Anything we find now is just for the sake of entertainment.
Here I am, on the other wide of the world— still a girl with a game, winning toys to amuse myself.
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