Played on a few of these when I lived in Japan - one of my friend's families owned a janso - a mahjong parlor. Anyway, they can shuffle the tiles, but the Japanese game also uses these little stick things to keep score. The automatic tables also have little slide-out trays to keep the sticks in, and automatically tabulates scores and displays them on a LCD near each person.

BoingBoing is back up in China. Or it is on my ISP, anyway.

-live and direct from Beijing