Why Did Japan Make Exceptions for Gambling?

In 1868, Tokyo's authorities circulated a warning about fundraising at shrines and temples. They had heard that some religious establishments, claiming their buildings needed repair, were organizing associations and conducting activities resembling lotteries without applying for permission. The order denounced the reported conduct as inappropriate for religious personnel and threatened arrest, investigation, and punishment.^[1]

Repairing a temple was an awkward justification to reject. Earlier in the century, the Tokugawa government had authorized particular religious establishments to raise money through lotteries.^[5] The same kind of need could appear in an application for permission and in a notice condemning unauthorized activity.

The history becomes clearer when permission is treated as an arrangement rather than an opinion about luck. Someone had to be entitled to organize the event, someone had to pay to participate, and rules had to connect the participants' losses with an accepted purpose. Those connections could be made, withdrawn, or made differently. Following them from an ancient dice game through Edo's temple lotteries to twentieth-century race betting reveals why a prohibition and an exception could belong to the same governing system.

The Nihon shoki, the court chronicle, records a prohibition of sugoroku in 689. The short entry supplies the prohibited activity, but no account of a particular wager, an offender, or the results of enforcement.^[2]

The game concerned was the older form of board sugoroku, played with pieces and dice, not the illustrated paper games later associated with the same name. Its arrangement was related to backgammon: the players moved pieces according to throws. The dictionary account distinguishes this older board game from the later paper form.^[3] Using one name for both can otherwise turn a prohibition into a misleading comment on children's games many centuries afterward.

An elaborate sugoroku board survives among the Shōsōin treasures associated with Emperor Shōmu. Its identification in the imperial treasure inventory, alongside surviving gaming pieces and dice, places such equipment within an eighth-century courtly collection.^[4] Gaming equipment had retained a place in an imperial collection long after the recorded prohibition.

Yet the board does not show that its owner wagered money on a particular occasion. A beautifully made instrument of play can survive without preserving what the players agreed to risk. Nor does its survival establish that the earlier order was ignored everywhere. It places a more limited fact beside the prohibition: the equipment remained a valued possession.

Chance, competitive play, and a transfer of wealth are related possibilities, not an inseparable package. Dice determine movement whether the players have staked property or are competing for the satisfaction of winning. A rule may name a game because it has become associated with wagering, while a surviving object preserves only the means of playing it.

This is a useful starting point for the later history. Neither an official ban nor a prized gaming object supplies a complete national attitude. To understand a particular exception, we need the terms of the activity: what was paid, what might be received, and who was permitted to arrange the exchange.

In Edo, the city governed by the Tokugawa shoguns, an authorized lottery was called gomen-tomi. The expression identified permission, not merely a type of prize. Meguro's municipal history dates authorization for lotteries at Meguro Fudō and Yushima Tenjin to 1812, placing them within a system that supported religious buildings and their maintenance.^[5]

These establishments could obtain funds from people who were seeking a prize rather than making an unqualified donation. A purchaser paid for a chance; the religious beneficiary received support through the event. Their purposes could meet without becoming identical.

The drawing made the chance publicly actionable. Numbered tickets corresponded to wooden slips placed in a box. A pointed implement inserted through an opening selected a slip. The announced result identified the ticket entitled to the prize.^[6] A participant's hope thus had to be connected with a recognizable object and a procedure capable of producing a result.

That connection mattered to fundraising. If every payment simply returned to its payer, nothing would remain to support the stated work. If there were no prospect of a prize, the purchase would become a different sort of contribution. The undertaking depended on combining payment by many participants with rewards for some of them and provision for the institution.

Permission did not mean that the shogunate supplied all the money directly. It allowed a particular beneficiary to use a restricted means of obtaining it. Funds came through ticket sales, while the permission itself was selective: another institution could not assume that the same need gave it an equal right to hold a draw.

There was also a practical reason to specify the project. Repairing a damaged hall offered a proposed use against which an application could be understood. It connected an otherwise private prospect of gain with something an authority agreed to support. This did not prove that every purchaser valued the building, or that every promised repair was completed. It supplied the relationship under which the event could proceed.

The arrangement was consequently neither an unrestricted gambling market nor simply a donation box with an entertaining decoration. It created an authorized route from the desire to win to the costs of maintaining a religious establishment. Keeping that route recognizable required further rules.

Historian Takiguchi Masaya identifies a change in 1766: permission increasingly specified a total number of draws through a combination of annual frequency and a fixed term. Organizers could plan against that allowance. His account also identifies professional intermediaries who arranged events, financed preparations, and paid deposits and per-draw contributions to the beneficiary temples.^[7]

The institution's need for funds and the work of producing an event had separated. A temple could possess the relevant permission without possessing all the local connections, working money, or sales arrangements required to use it. An intermediary could supply those capacities in return for a place in the proceeds.

This changed the risk as well as the division of labor. A payment committed in advance became an expense to be recovered from subsequent sales. The religious beneficiary and the organizer no longer necessarily experienced an unsold ticket in the same way. One could be expecting an agreed contribution while the other still needed buyers. A successful application did not guarantee a successful business.

The ticket was particularly capable of moving beyond the setting that justified its issue. Takiguchi finds sales through nearby teahouses, sometimes above the posted price, rather than solely at the temple's designated sales point. He connects the growing difficulty of containing this circulation with the prohibition imposed in 1842.^[8]

Selling outside the precinct was consequential even if the drawing remained inside it. The event now depended on transactions its religious setting did not physically contain. A purchaser could obtain a claim through a commercial intermediary without first approaching the beneficiary's hall. The ticket carried the chance away from the place where the permitted purpose was most visible.

That is why the history cannot be explained only by the honesty of a draw. A lottery might select a winning number in the announced manner and still develop a wider trade in its tickets. Controlling the selection, controlling distribution, and ensuring that money reached the beneficiary were separate tasks. Each demanded information about a different part of the operation.

The 1842 prohibition ended the authorized arrangement under the shogunate. It did not remove the attraction of a prize or the need to fund buildings. Those demands would reappear under altered names, making classification itself part of the authorities' work.

The 1868 Tokyo order called attention to tanomoshi-kō. This term could designate an association for mutual finance. In the basic arrangement described by the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives, members contributed repeatedly and took turns receiving a pooled sum, sometimes with the sequence decided by lot.^[9]

Here chance could determine timing rather than divide the participants permanently into winners and losers. A member receiving money later was still part of an arrangement in which everyone was expected to have a turn. The drawing did not, by itself, make the association equivalent to a lottery selling a chance at a prize.

The economic difference lay in continuing obligations. Someone who had already received the pool could still owe contributions needed to fund other members' turns. A receipt today belonged to a longer sequence of payments. Remove that sequence, allow recipients to withdraw, or make receipt depend on a final winning selection, and the relationship between members changes.

A label could obscure such changes. Calling an undertaking an association did not establish whether participants were financing one another over time or paying for unequal chances of return. Likewise, calling its purpose temple repair did not establish that the authorities had accepted its method.

This is the force of the opening document. The officials reported that religious fundraisers were conducting lottery-like activities without making the required application. They demanded that the warning circulate through the city's religious establishments and neighborhoods.^[1] Its accusations are evidence of what the authorities said they had heard; they do not independently establish the conduct of every unnamed organizer.

Applications for renewed permission were being made too. The Archives describes a proposal from Higashi Honganji in 1868 for twice-monthly draws over ten years, offering an annual payment to the government. Two commercial applicants submitted other schemes. All three were rejected by Tokyo's authorities later that year.^[9]

The offer of government income matters. Applicants were proposing to make the return acceptable by assigning part of it to authority itself. But the refusal shows that such an offer did not automatically supply permission. Neither a religious destination nor promised public receipts could settle the question without an affirmative decision about the undertaking.

The change of government had therefore not given the ticket a fresh start. Officials continued to ask what kind of transaction it represented and whether anyone had been authorized to sell it. The old repair rationale remained available to applicants while losing its ability, on its own, to carry their plans through.

The Penal Code promulgated in 1907 placed gambling and lotteries in a dedicated chapter. Article 185 addressed wagering property on uncertain wins and losses, with an exception for things supplied for temporary amusement. Article 186 distinguished habitual gambling and organizing gambling for profit. Article 187 separately addressed issuing lottery tickets, intermediating their sale, and other transfers or receipt of them.^[10]

The wording moved attention beyond the name of a game. What property was at stake? What role had the accused person performed? Was this participation, repeated conduct, or the organization of other people's wagering? The code supplied categories through which different acts within one undertaking could be treated separately.

Its treatment of tickets was especially revealing. The law could reach a transaction away from the actual drawing. A person handing on a ticket did not need to operate the box or announce the winning number to occupy a legally relevant place in the chain. The form capable of carrying the chance across the city also carried consequences for people involved in its circulation.

There was an exception within the gambling provision itself. The reference to temporary amusement meant that the rule did not classify every use of chance and every stake identically. Its wording should not be converted into an assumption that any small cash bet was allowed. The passage identified a category of objects and use; applying it required further interpretation.

This framework differed from authorizing an individual temple's fundraising project. It described classes of prohibited conduct and an internal boundary of the offense. Yet it did not prevent another enactment from establishing a separately regulated activity. A general prohibition and a special permission could coexist because they operated through different rules.

The remaining question was what the special permission would contain. Simply announcing that horse racing served a useful purpose would leave unresolved who could sell wagers, where buyers could obtain them, and how extensively the tickets could circulate. The next exception would address those matters in considerable detail.

Race betting had already passed through permission and prohibition before the 1923 Horse Racing Act. The JRA Racing Museum's historical account dates tacit government permission for ticket sales to an agreement among four ministers in 1905, followed by prohibition in 1908.^[11] The earlier ministerial decision had not established a permanent basis for selling tickets.

The transition involved actual venues and receipts. An institutional history identifies betting meetings at Hakodate in July 1906 and at Tokyo's Ikegami course that November, following the earlier decision. It connects that policy with financing a program of horse improvement.^[12] The ticket supplied a proposed income stream for racing; the program supplied a stated reason to permit it.

The 1923 act, promulgated on 10 April, placed the exception within a defined organization. Eligible corporations needed ministerial approval and a purpose involving the improvement and increase of horses and the spread of knowledge and interest in horse affairs. The law then restricted sales to racecourse attendees, with one ticket per person per race. Tickets were not transferable.^[13]

Those provisions joined permission to a place and a participant. Buying a ticket required a connection to the meeting, while the ban on transfer attempted to keep the purchase from becoming a freely circulating claim. This was a different approach from letting an authorized event generate a secondary market wherever buyers could be found.

The nontransferable ticket provides a useful comparison with Edo's teahouse sales. Both systems faced the possibility that a permitted event would sustain transactions beyond its own setting. The 1923 rule made one response explicit: the ticket was to remain attached to its purchaser. That legal design is recoverable from the statute; its effectiveness would require evidence of practice.

The act also excluded students and minors from ticket purchases, along with organizers' officers and people working in the races, including trainers and jockeys. Admission charges, ticket denominations, sales methods, and payout arrangements required official approval.^[13]

The authorized public was thus a selected public. A person could be present at a race without being eligible to buy a ticket. People especially close to the event's operation could also be excluded. Permission was being made workable through restrictions on precisely who could use it and how.

None of these provisions proves that betting improved horses or prevented gambling-related harm. They establish the conditions under which lawmakers connected the activity with an accepted purpose. The exception was a managed legal channel, not the withdrawal of government from wagering.

The ancient game, the temple lottery, and the licensed race did not represent one activity moving steadily toward acceptance. Their objects, participants, and institutions differed. The continuity lies in a question repeatedly requiring an answer: which uncertain transfers could be allowed, under whose responsibility, and within what limits?

Edo's permission connected a chance of private gain with religious maintenance, then depended on commercial work to make the event possible. The 1868 applications tried unsuccessfully to restore a recognized channel, adding promised payments to the government. The criminal code classified conduct along the ticket's route. The racing statute created a new permission by specifying organizers, purchasers, place, and methods.

These arrangements explain why a worthy purpose, as understood by an applicant, was never sufficient by itself. The authority still had to accept the connection between that purpose and the means proposed to fund it. It could require limits that changed the undertaking or refuse the connection altogether.

A ticket is therefore more than a small record of hope. It embodies the rules joining a purchaser to an uncertain result. In one period it could travel through teahouses beyond the precinct that justified it. Under another arrangement, the law expressly forbade its transfer. The historical work lies in those rules and relationships: they made a particular wager an exception while leaving the prohibition around it in place.