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On June 18, 2025, the House of Councillors (upper house) of Japan’s parliament overwhelmingly passed an amendment bill to the Basic Act on Countermeasures Against Gambling Addiction that bans online gambling advertising and any other activity directing users to gambling websites.
Following passage in the House of Representatives on June 3, the Cabinet bill sailed through the upper house on a 233-5 vote, speaking to the consensus of lawmakers and the executive on the role of online gambling in fuelling addiction.
However, the bill’s brevity and lack of penalties betray keen reluctance on the part of the National Diet to codify a more aggressive response to financial and psychological damage among Japan’s massive pool of online gamblers, with lawmakers and the Cabinet apparently preferring between-the-lines enforcement to be teased out by police, prosecutors and the courts.
The five dissenting votes in the upper house belonged to the leftist and populist Reiwa Shinsengumi, a small but growing political party whose lower house members also objected to the absence of penalties and were the only holdouts in the earlier House of Representatives “standing” vote (vote count not recorded) on the bill.
The bigger picture
For years the Diet had averted its gaze to the relentless growth of the Japanese online gambling market. By the time national police began to investigate this massive online gambling ecosystem, the online market had exploded to become one of the top three in the world.
The market’s peculiarity has been the role of Japanese-language affiliate operations in educating users and channelling them to foreign websites. In development since at least the early 2010s, the affiliates became highly sophisticated in nourishing Japanese customers and reassuring them on the integrity of specific sites – while raking in small fortunes from deals struck with them.
So effective and ubiquitous were affiliate operations – and so non-plussed or oblivious were policymakers and lawmakers all the while – that when the police crackdown on the wider ecosystem began, the police force’s public relations team had to face and correct the perception of a public that largely, and quite reasonably, assumed online gambling not to be a criminal act, or at least one well outside the radar of the Japanese legal system.
Over the last two years or more, a hushed police investigation of the Japanese industry and its foreign connections has borne bitter fruit for users, affiliates and foreign website operators alike. It has forced major corporate interests with a stake in Japan to sever all or detectable links to the market as arrests of illegal payments providers and online gambling-linked embezzlers made way for prosecutions of online gambling parlours and individual gamblers, among them a host of sporting superstars and celebrities.
Throughout this, the parliament was steadfast in its inaction. So, when the government confirmed in May this year that online gambling advertising would be banned, industry sceptics expected and demanded a tough new deal in terms of penalties and deterrence. But that has not happened, at least on paper.
The new restrictions
The laconic amendment bill presented by Cabinet committee chair Toshitaka Ooka to the lower house was less than a page long. It is substantially unchanged after passage in the House of Councillors, with clauses relating to prohibitions identically worded.
Despite the protests of Reiwa Shinsengumi, no punitive clauses have been added to the text by the upper house, meaning that the Basic Act on Countermeasures Against Gambling Addiction remains a tool of persuasion and public and private social/medical intervention.
The Basic Act is still entirely free of penalties for breaches, other than Article 11’s vague, generic call on the government to “implement measures against gambling” by “legal or financial” or other means.
The bill amends Article 9 of the Basic Act by adding two restrictions in a sub-article 9-2. Those who transmit information via the internet must not:
- Display proscribed online gambling content to users in Japan.
- Transmit information that directs users in Japan to proscribed online gambling content.
The amendment exempts from any sanctions those who “merely provide an opportunity” for other people to transmit information on proscribed online gambling content. This apparently relieves internet service providers and similar corporate interests and other third parties from culpability for the transmission of gambling or gambling-linked content via their networks. However, this proviso is not spelled out in an attached explanation of the text.
The wording of this section of Article 9-2 appears to criminalise actors outside Japan who display gambling content, or content that facilitates exposure to gambling content, to Japan-based users. This is consistent with the national police’s recently reported request to eight nations or dependencies – Malta, Georgia, Canada, Costa Rica, Anjouan in the Comoros Islands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar and Curaçao – to crack down on their licensees targeting the Japanese underground market.
The remainder of Article 9-2 lists definitions. A separate, seemingly redundant amendment to Article 14 that enjoins the state and local public entities to remind the public of the illegality of online gambling was trimmed for expression by the upper house.
Why should you care?
The lack of detail and ambition in the amendment bill is par for the course for a legislature and policymaking establishment that has watched, largely silently, as the online gambling environment proliferated and matured before being held to account by the media, activists and eventually police, with the latter acting on the basis of existing archaic provisions for gambling in the criminal code.
The legislature’s inaction in part may derive from the seeming Japanese preference not to enact retributive policies on matters of vice that infringe on civil liberties, unless a critical mass of public opprobrium and criminal gain has coalesced.
The upshot of this is that law enforcement organs are now proceeding with a campaign against the underground online gambling industry, including previously grey-zone affiliate operations, with an intensity and reach that is out of proportion to its barely sketched-out legislative base.
This police campaign thus will likely continue under its own steam, in occasional consultation with associated Cabinet ministries and agencies, but ultimately driving the state’s response on behalf of lawmakers rather than under clear legislative parameters. In such an environment, it seems likely that police would have moved against online gambling advertising regardless of the passage of the current amendment bill.
In this regard, the call of the Reiwa Shinsengumi lawmakers for tougher penalties to be codified is noteworthy. By not clarifying and validating the judicial consequences of the overall crackdown, the Diet has, on the one hand, missed a chance to flesh out and enhance a policy of deterrence, while at the same time allowing law enforcement to prosecute, sometimes heavily, on the basis of ancient legal clauses.
This points to a longer-term environment of inconsistent punishment for gambling offences, destabilisation of the unstated policy of intervention and care for gamblers and their families rather than heavy fines and prison time, and – amid the wielding of regulatory discretion in lieu of legal granularity – the possibility of another long stretch of legislative inactivity as online gambling operators and corporate beneficiaries regroup amid a new enforcement reality.
However, even with a lack of meaningful punitive content, the bill’s subtextual message to the global regulated industry is clear and stark: Japanese police are not fooling around.
Police are now empowered to act not just against commercial gambling interests, skilled facilitators such as affiliate networks, and gamblers themselves, but also against social media influencers and any internet user who distributes promotional material for online gambling.
Meanwhile, ongoing police investigations into foreign operators, industry-friendly foreign regulators and their nexus with millions of Japanese customers are likely to generate new prosecutions, cross-border pressure and difficult headlines for companies juggling superficial compliance and Japanese lucre.
