Japanese Casinos Coming After New Bill Passed

Something happened recently that a lot of people thought had no chance of happening for a very long time: Japan passed a bill to regulate casino gambling. This has been set up in a way that Japanese casinos will be built, and participation in them will be heavily regulated. However, there will be no changes with this bill for online gambling, and that includes sites like Casino Alpha that accept Japanese players and that offer a lot of goodies and bonuses for players from that country (and many others). With that having been said, it could impact the direction of legislation for gambling in Japan, which could eventually lead to something changing for Japanese online casino play in the future.

Details on Three New Japanese Casinos

The first major part of the bill that players will want to be aware of is that as many as three casinos are going to be built in Japan. These will be heavily regulated by the government, and after seven years, they will revisit the issue of the number of casinos in the country with the option to build more if they see fit. This is a pretty flexible approach and allows them to get into the industry a bit and to see how it goes before getting in over their head by investing too much time and money into it.

Getting into these casinos is set up in a way that is designed to protect players from the start. You’ll have to pay to get an admission ticket that’s available for one day only, and the cost is around 6,000 yen or about $50 (US). You can only purchase admission up to ten times in a calendar month or a maximum of three times in a calendar week, and you’ll also have an identification number that will track your play over time. This will help to identify and prevent problem gambling behaviour, but it will also help them to track the number of Japanese players and foreign nationals for the sake of keeping up with demographics of their player base.

The Current State of Japanese Online Gambling

For the online sector, it’s more of a legal grey area. There aren’t laws explicitly making online gambling illegal, so it’s legal, but it’s not clear if they’re going to look to regulate the industry in the future like they’re working on with the land-based side of things. While that’s typically in the best interests of players, in theory, it’s not always the case in practice. With the overly restrictive regulations put on the proposed casinos that they’re going to build, we can only imagine how tight the guidelines would be for players under some type of online regulation in the country.

Casino Games in Japan

A variety of casinos have operated by organized crime outfits in Japan for centuries. It’s basically a part of the culture there, and it’s the kind of thing that they’re hoping to put a damper on with this type of regulation. Games like mahjong and Baccarat are particularly popular there, and we suspect that they will get a lot of attention in the games for these proposed brick-and-mortar sites that come as a part of this bill passing.