Camping Heaven

The installation of “cardreader” machines has reduced the amount of tax evasion and money laundering in pachinko (though Korean money laundering is still troublesome, as described below). Pachinko has also cleaned up because so many police officers take jobs in the industry after they retire. This has reduced the amount of overt criminal involvement, though it has made the cops far too vulnerable to lobbying by former colleagues.

The governmentsponsored

gambling operations have effectively barred yakuza and other criminals for a generation. There are almost

no allegations of race-fixing these days. Since the ‘60s, but especially since the anti-gambling law of a decade ago, the

police have been making enormous efforts to roust yakuza out of pachinko. They have largely exiled yakuza from the

prize-exchange business and stopped most of the extortion by gangsters of parlor owners.

Japanese gambling is also, you may be surprised to learn, a relatively clean business. According to Takashi Kadokura,

an economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute, the Japanese underground economy is only half the size of the

underground economy in similar nations. Though gangsters are more public in Japan than elsewhere, the generally lawabiding

nature of the society means that there is less illegal gambling than you might expect.

American casinos are packed with high-stakes games of blackjack, poker, roulette, craps, and baccarat. But pachinko is a penny-ante game: You can’t play more than 100 balls per minute, and each ball always costs 4 yen. You can’t lose a lot, and you can’t win a lot. Japanese gambling, as several observers noted to me, is like most of Japanese society: low-stakes, low-risk. You can make unlimited wagers at the tracks, but even there gamblers are conservative. Bets as large as $100 are enormous; bets of $100,000 are essentially unheard of.

It occurred to me, after awhile, that gambling in Japan is quite unlike gambling elsewhere? In one peculiar way the people who deny that Japan is a gambling society are right. Japanese love gambling games, but they don’t actually gamble—in the sense that they take no chances. Japanese gamblers never risk it all on one throw, never take one enormous risk. The games don’t allow it, and the players seem allergic to it. In Japanese gambling, players lose money (and win it) a little at a time.

The gambling industries face a demographic crisis. The best

customers are old men who picked up the habit 20, 30, 50 years ago. Few kids are going to the kyotei, because they

have much better ways to kill time. Pachinko parlors have slowed this decline by adding kid-friendly slot machines, but

they still have trouble competing with virtual reality games and satellite TV.

The diversification of Japanese leisure is catching up with the gambling business, however. Japan’s wealth, along with

the success of video games and TV, mean that Japanese gamblers have more ways to waste their time and money.

Pachinko revenues have been flat for a few years. Revenues from government gambling—especially motorcycle racing,

bike racing, and motorboat racing—have been falling fast.

Horse-racing, bike-racing, boat-racing, and motorcycle-racing became hugely

popular (and profitable) because Japan offered so few other sports or diversions. Going to these races was cheap, and

there was always the faint hope of a big score. Pachinko required very little space and offered Japanese the chance to

win goods that they needed. Pachinko and government gambling had a headstart on television, video games, sports, and

that is what allowed them to grow and grow and grow. Even today, leisure is more expensive and harder to find in

Japan than in the U.S. People go to pachinko parlors or the kyotei because there’s less other entertainment they can

afford.

The popularity of pachinko and of the other forms of Japanese gambling is rooted in the absence of entertainment in

Japan. After the war, Japan had effectively no leisure activities. Japan could spare little space for recreation. Japanese

work schedules allowed few opportunities for play. Pachinko and government-sponsored gambling, which exploded in

the late ‘40s and ‘50s, filled the void.

Collectors pay high prices for old pachinko machines. Bookstores sell pachinko machine photo books. There

is even a pachinko machine museum. Players love all the little gizmos on machines—the “tulips” that open up to allow

more balls to find the right holes, different arrangements of nails, clever new video-games-within-the-game. (One

theory why pachinko revenues stagnanted recently is that government regulators have not allowed manufacturers to

bring new machines to market. Pachinko players have grown bored with the old machines’ tricks, and hunger for new

gadgetry.)