Illegal casinos drawing in growing number of 'salarymen'

Many bad things and all good things are potentially addictive. You can’t ban everything. Nor, it seems, can you permit everything. A law passed last year to legalize gambling has its supporters and its opponents. Supporters see a welcome economic boost. Opponents fear an epidemic of gambling addiction, rampant in any case. A recent government survey found 3.2 million Japanese gambling addicts, without a single legal casino in the country. Pachinko (which is legal) accounts for most of them. And there are also, of course, illegal casinos, no small factor in the equation.

Spa! (Oct 24), focusing on the latter, finds them proliferating of late, along with a new, similarly proliferating, clientele – the average "salaryman." It’s a chicken-and-egg business trying to decide which is causing which – the proliferating facilities the new clientele, or vice versa. Either way, what Spa! calls “hidden casinos” are as far from the feverish, vaguely thuggish gambling dens of lore as image sanitization allows. Entering one feels much like entering a coffee shop. That’s partly, but not only, to deceive the cops. The other reason is to draw ordinary people, rather than, or at least in addition to, gangsters, soapland personnel and professional gamblers.

Most of the action is online, courtesy of mostly overseas-based gaming enterprises. Some casinos even lend out notebook-size computers, so that, in effect, patrons patronize the establishment in the privacy of their own homes. Even at those which do not, the appearance, to a curious passerby or a suspicious police officer, is very much that of a Net café. Nothing intimidating, nothing subversive. Technically illegal, yes, but not sinister.

And – for better and for worse – salarymen are noticing, and flocking. The good news is, it’s fun; the bad, that it’s potentially addictive.

“I often go (to a cafe-casino) with colleagues on the way home from work,” says a 30-year-old employee of a leading IT firm. “But lately I’ve taken to ducking in for a few minutes even during the working day. In and out. It refreshes me. I get back to the office in fighting trim.”

A manufacturing company executive, possibly because he’s older (39), sees a darker side. “If I got arrested, it would mean my job,” he says – “or at least a demotion.”  A sober thought. It sobered him. He quit cold turkey.

Students too are drawn by the cafe atmosphere of these new casinos. Some casinos throw in a meal along with the 1000-yen admission fee. A young and naïve customer might think the meal is the main thing and the gambling secondary. The casino operators know better.

“To us these people are easy marks,” says one to Spa!. Not that they lose much money, but they do keep coming – to the point, says a 21-year old third-year student, of “forgetting altogether about studying.” “And unlike the gangster types,” adds the operator, “when they lose they don’t fight.”

“Gambling per se is not a bad thing,” the magazine hears from psychologist Takehiko Kasuga. “But if you happen to win, you may get that feeling of being destiny’s chosen one. Once you’ve experienced that feeling, you never forget it. You want to feel it again. That’s how you get hooked.”

If, of course, you do. Not everyone does. Most recreational gamblers gamble responsibly. But experts are pressing the government to be better prepared than it is for a rise in gambling addiction once the newly legal “integrated resort” casinos get going, probably within the next five years.

© Japan Today