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‘Gambling epidemic’? Japan weighs new law to tackle illegal betting via online casinos

High-profile scandals involving baseball stars and comedians have exposed a ‘shocking’ lack of public awareness about the law, observers say

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A study by Japan’s National Police Agency shows online gamblers are mostly in their 20s and 30s, with   about 40 per cent saying they did not know that online gambling is illegal. Photo: Shutterstock
Japan is considering new legislation to tackle the booming but illegal use of overseas online casinos, as high-profile scandals involving baseball stars and comedians expose what observers call a “shocking” lack of public awareness about the law.

While gambling is technically illegal in Japan, the government does permit a limited amount of betting on strictly controlled events, such as horse racing, boat and bicycle races and the lottery, with the profits being returned directly to the government.

For committed gamblers, however, yakuza groups have traditionally been able to arrange underground betting on cards, roulette and other illegal games.

But those lucrative sources of income quickly dried up, for the government and underworld alike, when the pandemic struck in 2020 and going out became far more difficult, analysts pointed out.

“Historically, gambling has been very tightly controlled by the government as it was a very important source of income and they wanted to monopolise betting,” said Shinichi Ishizuka, founder of the Tokyo-based Criminal Justice Future think tank.

“But things changed during the pandemic and the emergence of online gambling meant that the government lost control.”

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