Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2014

The Japanese Diet is set to vote on what they call “special zone legislation.” It’s not the first time this has come up and this time around, the bill may really pass. Tucked inside is what could become authorization for the first casino in Japan.

Japanese tabloids are already having a field day. A glance at their articles on the legislation is enough to make one imagine Al Capone, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel were riding into town. But a casino being built in Tokyo won’t herald the apocalypse. In fact, the idea has been around in one form or other for 20 years.

These days, Japanese folks don’t have to fly as far as Vegas to gamble anymore. South Korea is just an hour flight away. Singapore and Macau aren’t much further. Manila is building a new complex and others are planned for Vietnam and Cambodia. The neighborhood is getting crowded and Japan is exporting capital in the form of outbound gamblers. Meanwhile, Tokyo is overlooked. The international gambling crowd who’ll come to the Olympics won’t likely see pachinko as gambling. In that, they’ll join the US occupation authorities who took one look at a pachinko board and pronounced it a game—thus influencing modern Japan.

Of course, Japan already has gambling. There are bicycle, horse and power boat races as well as several kinds of lottery, including one based on soccer game results. But it’s crucial to distinguish between various types of gambling and what they mean. Around the world, very few casinos permit the type of sports betting that Las Vegas does.

Sports betting is really a world unto itself—one reason it doesn’t have the international appeal of other games of chance. Try to imagine someone who closely follows horse racing having a meaningful conversation with someone hooked on slot machines, and the image becomes clear.

The present boom in casino building makes their fate clear—some of these will last and some will be gone before the Olympics are held in 2020.

People who haven’t lived or traveled widely in the US seldom realize that legal gambling in isolated pockets dates back to before World War II. There’s a poker card room in a little town near San Francisco that, with minor changes, looked as it had in the 40s. Outside Phoenix is a legal card room on a sliver of what was once Indian land, with a few old slot machines and poker tables for stakes—quarters, half-dollars and dollars with the big table going up to ten dollars. Most of the players were retired and there for the love of the game.

The Arizona card room was the kind of place where a newcomer sitting down was news and a newcomer taking down an entire table was big news. (Disclosure: I was that newcomer, the game was seven card stud, and I caught three kings in the first three cards, had another pair showing and the fourth king came on the last card down). It was also the kind of place where regulars turned to shake hands and say, “Well played.”

That could be Japan. The country gets to do this any way it wants—baccarat for those who want it, roulette, various iterations of poker tables, low stakes, high stakes, private rooms for private games. I declined to join the game at the last private poker room I saw. The problem was  not the stakes, though they were high, it was the three bodyguards, two with submachine guns thought necessary by the players. That sort of thing would not be a concern in Tokyo.

Here, nobody is going to frog march pachinko players, or anyone else, into a casino. Players will come if they’re curious and come back if they’re interested, just as everywhere else in the gaming world.

There are only two things I would hope are not allowed. The first are the very newest slot machines that allow you to create your own Lehman shock by betting against yourself or betting multiples of your original bet, which makes them more like video games than the older mechanical models. Until they’re better understood and regulated, they should not be allowed.

And secondly, with all due respect, no pachinko in casinos, please. Any visitor who’s curious enough to try that is quite able to find it without venturing into a casino.