Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JAN 2020年1月 亞博匯 26 Gambling in Japan is a fiercely unpopular concept due largely to the nation’s experience with pachinko. 在日本，博彩是非常負面的詞彙，很大程度上是由於彈珠遊戲給國民造成的負面印象。 COVER STORY “boys” in this dating game are the candidate operators, some trying to dance with every girl in the room, others with eyes for just one girl, unless and until she rejects him, or, in some cases, she rejects all the boys. The “girls” in this game are the locations (some are cities, some are prefectures), each being courted by a group of boys which waxes or wanes depending on how attractive the girl is, or becomes, as she reveals her demands and conditions. INITIAL INTEREST TEPID Let’s start with the “girls” in this dating game, the candidate locations. As a starting point, candidate locations need the political will to enter the game. Historically, that has not been easy to come by. This is because of strong negative public attitudes towards gambling in Japan. Gambling, mainly in the form of pachinko, is highly prevalent in Japanese society, grossing tens of billions of US dollars in revenue annually. There are around 10,000 pachinko parlors throughout the nation. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, gambling as a general concept is fiercely unpopular in Japanese society. The prevailing image is of a seedy, noisy, smoky pachinko parlor, populated by men you wouldn’t want your daughter to date, and run by Zainichi Japanese of Korean descent – and usually North Korean descent at that! There are zero non-gaming offerings, and zero attention is paid to responsible gambling measures. Gamblers are seen as addicts. Or worse, gambling is linked to the criminal underworld, as it’s so often portrayed in movies. People fear what they don’t understand, so the general populous rejects IRs. They don’t really understand what IRs are, but they know gambling is involved, and they know “gambling is bad.” Japanese governments realize that today’s multi- billion dollar modern IRs are very different. They know the Japanese IRs will be particularly different, with 97% of their floor area devoted to non-gaming, stringent addiction countermeasures in place, and the enormous