Those Restless Little Boats on the Uneasiness Of
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Meiji Gakuin Course No. 3505/3506 Minority and Marginal Groups of Contemporary Japan Tom Gill Lecture No. 12 Gamblers 賭博・ギャンブラー OGAWA For over twenty years he had a very cushy job, He says he earned a good salary for doing little work. He was married to his second wife, but he admits he treated her badly. “I never took my wife on holiday, I hardly even took her out for a meal. Any spare cash I had was used for gambling.” I met Ogawa san in a homeless shelter in Kawasaki in 2007. • Ogawa’s main weaknesses were bicycle racing and slot-machines. He reckons nearly everyone in his shelter has a gambling problem. Maybe Kawasaki has more compulsive gamblers than the average city, with bicycle and horse-racing tracks right in the center of town. Compulsive gambler ギャンブル依存者 But the slots and pachinko are worse, he says, because you can play them any time. Racing happens only at certain times of day and certain times of the month, but there is always an open pachinko / pachisuro place – and the money goes away faster. He can’t blame his wife for leaving him after he lost his job. It was his fault. I asked Ogawa why he did something so self-destructive. He offered three reasons: boring married life, too much free time at work, and easy access to gambling facilities. But the first of these was the biggest factor. From: “The Meaning of Self-Reliance for Homeless Japanese Men” by Tom Gill, on-line at Japan Focus Gambling fascinates, because it is a dramatized model of life. As people make their way through life, they have to make countless decisions, big and small, life-changing and trivial. In gambling, those decisions are reduced to a single type – an attempt to predict the outcome of an event. Real-life decisions often have no clear outcome; few that can clearly be called right or wrong, many that fall in the grey zone where the outcome is unclear, unimportant, or unknown. Gambling decisions have a clear outcome in success or failure: it is a black and white world where the grey of everyday life is left behind. Outcome = result, 結果 As a simplified and dramatized model of life, gambling fascinates the social scientist as well as the gambler himself. Can the decisions made by the gambler offer us a short-cut to understanding the character of the individual, and perhaps even the collective? Gambling by its nature generates concrete, quantitative data. Do people reveal their inner character through their gambling behavior, or are they different people when gambling? Gambling capital of world? US (2007) Gross revenues from gambling (including casinos, lotteries etc) were $92.27 billion in 2007, which at $1 = ¥80 is about ¥7 trillion for a population 2.5 times the size of Japan’s. So if Japanese were like Americans, we’d expect them to spend: 7 / 2.5 = c. 3 trillion yen. Gambling capital of world? UK: (2008-9) in FY2008-9 spent roughly £7.16 billion on horseracing bets and £1.72 billion on dog racing. Total: £9 billion or about ¥1.2 trillion at £1 = ¥130. The UK has about half the population of Japan, so if Japan was like the UK, we’d expect people to spend 1.2 x 2 = c. 2.4 trillion yen Gambling capital of world! Japan: (2005) ¥3.26 trillion on horse- racing, ¥1 trillion on powerboat racing, ¥0.88 trillion on bicycle racing, ¥0.11 trillion on motorbike racing. Total spend just on race gambling is ¥5.22 trillion. Then there’s another several hundred billion on lotteries… And this in a country once known for its high savings rate. The paradox: compared with people in other countries, Japanese SAVE more money but they also GAMBLE more money. Why is that? Is it really a paradox? People save because they are concerned about the future… right? Why do they gamble? People gamble because they think having fun in the present matters more than the future. OR… They have plenty of money, so they don’t have to worry about the future. OR… They ARE worried about the future, do NOT have enough money, and think they can win! People gamble because having fun in the present matters more than the future. PRESENT ORIENTATION 現在中心思考 They have plenty of money, so they don’t have to worry about the future AFFORDABLE GAMBLING 遊び金の賭博 They ARE worried about the future, lack money, and think they can win! INVESTMENT GAMBLING 「投資」型賭博 By global standards Japan gambles a lot – and that is before one even considers the ¥23 trillion spent on pachinko in 2008, which dwarfs all other kinds of gambling in the world. (Technically, pachinko is classified as “amusement” rather than “gambling”. Here’s how…) PACHINKO 1. Pachinko alone accounts for 74% of all amusement spending in Japan. 2. The average Japanese person (including children) spends ¥30,000 a year on pachinko. 3. Japanese people spend 100 times more on pachinko than on movies and nearly 20 times more than on golf… though Japanese love of golf and cinema are famous. 4. Pachinko parlors are 4.5 times as profitable as movie theatres and 10 times as profitable as golf courses. Japan spends about 5 times as much on pachinko as it does on defence. So pachinko is a huge phenomenon… a license to print money. Why? “The parlor is a hive or a factory - the players seem to be working on an assembly line.” Quotation from Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes (1971) L‘Empire des signes (1970), 『表徴の帝国』 ロラン・バルト , 1974年 Roland Barthes, 1915 to1980 “The pachinko is a collective and solitary game. The machines are set up in long rows; each player standing in front of his panel plays for himself, without looking at his neighbor, whom he nonetheless brushes with his elbow. You hear only the balls whirring through their channels (the rate of insertion is very rapid); the parlor is a hive or a factory - the players seem to be working on an assembly line. The imperious meaning of the scene is that of a deliberate, absorbing labor….” From factory to factory farm, Barthes switches metaphors “The machines are mangers (かいばおけ,まぐさ おけ), lined up in rows; the player… feeds the machines with his metal marbles; he stuffs them in, the way you would stuff a goose; from time to time the machine, filled to capacity, releases its diarrhea of marbles; for a few yen, the player is symbolically spattered with money.” Something sexual and political in pachinko… “Here we understand the seriousness of a game which counters the constipated parsimony of salaries, the constriction of capitalist wealth, with the voluptuous debacle of silver balls, which, all of a sudden, fill the player’s hand.” Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, pp.27-29. “FEVER” • At twenty past two I drop a ball into a hole beneath the LCD screen and up pop three mermaids in a row. The machine goes ape-shit. White lights explode like landmines, the wheel starts buzzing and a siren begins to mewl Dolby sound from the ceiling above me. Jackpot. Blondboy slaps me on my back. He points at the three hula-dancing mermaids and screams “Fever!” over the wail of the sirens. There must be fifty balls screaming about behind the glass. I’m worried the screen will crack. More balls keep flying out the bottom of the machine, pouring into a plastic box between my legs. Soon, it’s overflowing. I jump up and start stuffing them into my pockets, a plastic carrier bag. A girl comes over and smoothly replaces the full box with an empty one. She whips out a DustBuster and sucks up the spilled balls from the floor. Jon Mitchell, Great Balls of Steel But the appeal doesn’t travel Other aspects of Japanese popular culture – judo, karate, karaoke, sushi, Pokemon etc. – have proved very popular abroad. Yet all attempts to transplant pachinko to other countries have failed miserably. For once, we can safely say that this really is “unique to Japan.” Atsushi Kubota – a ‘pachi-puro’ (professional pachinko gambler) 久保田 篤(くぼた あつし)、パチプロ How to win at pachinko 1. Bet with the streak 2. Bet against the streak 3. Watch the nails 4. Cheat… electronic devices etc. 5. Sweet-talk the management 6. Get lucky? Trusting to luck: Lucky balls on a key ring Trust the nail-man? “Generous Nails Corner” A book on how to overcome ‘pachinko dependence syndrome.’ Compulsive gamblers? The Japanese Gamblers Anonymous was only launched as recently as 1989, but now has 114 active groups in 44 prefectures. Given the enormous scale of gambling in Japan, surely the welfare state is not doing enough. Welfare state 社会福祉国家。Gamblers Anonymous 匿名賭博者、アルコール中毒者のAlcoholics Anonymous を原型にした賭博中毒の助け合い集団 Hahakigi (2004: 57-58) estimates that there are two million compulsive gamblers in Japan, but his evidence mainly consist of taking bits and pieces of data from other industrialized countries and assuming that Japan is roughly the same. Inami (2007) gives a figure of 1.6 million “latent patients” – but does not explain how. Hahakigi, Hōsei. 2004. Gyanburu izon to tatakau (Battling against gambling addiction). Inami, Mario. 2007. Byōteki gyanburā kyūshutsu manyuaru (The pathological gambler’s rescue manual). Yokohama’s One Day Port (Wandēpōto), founded in 2000, is a rare (unique?) example of a residential facility devoted specifically to gambling problems. It can only handle about thirty patients at a Mr. time and they come Nakamura, from all over Japan. It specializes in pachinko. the boss Race betting Keiba (horse racing) Keirin (Bicycle racing) Kyotei (Powerboat racing) … the “three Ks” of race betting Horse-racing (keiba 競馬) Bicycle racing (Keirin) 競輪 There are 50 cycling tracks in Japan The nearest ones to here are at Kawasaki and Hiratsuka.