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.”

For gamblers who could no longer visit horse or bicycle tracks, or even buy lottery tickets from government-run booths, online casinos became the obvious alternative, Ishizuka told This Week in Asia.

“For the gamblers it was good as they could continue with their habit, but it was very bad for the government because they were not getting any of the profit,” he said.

The easy accessibility of gambling sites on the internet was particularly convenient to a media-savvy younger generation of Japanese, who were bored during the coronavirus lockdown and were seeking any sort of distraction, Ishizuka said.

“It has been really easy for young people to gamble in the last few years and more and more have started, with a lot of them not even aware that it is illegal,” he said. “Unfortunately, the gambling sites were linked with credit cards so while it was easy to start, it was very quickly very, very expensive.”

The other problem, he added, was that young people tended to get hooked on gambling very quickly.

According to the National Police Agency, about 3.37 million Japanese have gambled at online casinos, spending an estimated 1.24 trillion yen (US$8.7 billion) annually. A study by the agency confirmed that most of the online gamblers were in their 20s or 30s and while 40 per cent said they did not know that online gambling was illegal, about 60 per cent said they felt to some degree addicted.

Public attention to the issue has intensified following a string of celebrity betting scandals.

The most infamous case concerns Ippei Mizuhara, the personal interpreter for baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani, who was found guilty by a court in California of stealing nearly US$17 million from Ohtani’s bank accounts to cover his own losses from illegal gambling. Mizuhara was in February sentenced to 57 months in prison and told to pay restitution to Ohtani.

The following month, it was learned that 16 players from eight domestic baseball teams had used online betting sites. Only one player was identified, Orix Buffaloes pitcher Taisuke Yamaoka, when his team discovered his actions and suspended him.

Despite calls for baseball authorities to identify the other players involved amid accusations that illegal gambling could make them vulnerable to blackmail and throwing games, Nippon Professional Baseball opted merely to fine the players and issue leaguewide warnings.

Earlier this month, local media reported that six comedians affiliated with Osaka-based talent agency Yoshimoto Kogyo had been referred to prosecutors on suspicion of gambling and were facing indictment. The six men have all admitted the charges, with one of them saying he gambled more than 50 million yen.

The Sankei Shimbun newspaper declared in an April 11 editorial that Japan was facing a “gambling epidemic” and demanded that the men be “more severely punished to set an example and deter gambling via online casinos, which has become rampant”.

The editorial added that there was a “shocking lack of awareness of the illegality of online casino gambling” and called on the government to enact measures to clamp down on the sites, such as through blocking access on the internet.

“It is just too easy to find these sites. The sites may be illegal, but adverts are constantly popping up on your phone and clearly they are designed to appeal to young people,” said Makoto Watanabe, a professor of communications and media at Hokkaido Bunkyo University in Eniwa, Hokkaido.

“It is shocking to hear that these baseball players and comedians say they never knew that it was illegal to use these sites, but the media coverage these cases are attracting is a good opportunity for the government to get that message to ordinary people. It will be much harder in the future for people to say that they did not know it was against the law.”