John:

I spent three years at Misawa, Japan and we visited many Pachinko parlors throught the country (including Tokyo). I have a pretty good collection of the metal tokens used in the parlor and even a few debit cards that were used in the larger places in Tokyo, but I never recall seeing anything even closely resembling a chip.

At the many US military installations around the country, Vegas style slot machines were (and are) installed in the clubs on base, but only use American coins (5c and 25c only). However, the clubs used to used tokens (5c, 10c, 25c, $1.00 and sometimes $5.00) in the machines until they were banned during the Vietnam war. There are some chips from these clubs as well, but are somewhat rare. They did have fun nites in these clubs as well, but only paper type money similiar to what is used during soft openings of American casinos was used during these events, with few surviving past the night.

Having said all of that, that does not mean that there were not chips used in Japanese establishments, but I've never seen nor heard of one. Hope the information helps, and if you have any of the metal tokens to trade, let me know as I have extras from my tour there.