A window which sells Japanese lottery tickets.
"Takarakuji" is the Japanese version of the lottery. Let me say that I do not buy lottery tickets or gamble. To me, it's simply tossing ones money out the window because the odds are so low that you'll win as much as you spend, let alone more. That being said, I always get a kick out of the way the Japanese lottery works because the prizes really aren't that big, especially when you factor in the cost of something like buying a piece of land in one of the big cities. Back home, people win more money than they should be able to spend in a lifetime (then manage to spend it anyway) when the really big lotteries hit. There is the potential in winning to transform the remainder of your life. In Japan, the total cash prize pool is huge, but tends to be spread out among many more winners with top prizes being in the $2,000,000 range and many more smaller prizes being offered.
There's something very egalitarian and socialist about the way in which a huge pie is divided into more and smaller pieces when it comes to the lottery in Japan, and I'll miss that.
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