All bets are off on Japan’s sports gambling craze

Kyoko has just become the first woman to secure the supreme prize in a traditionally male sport. A brooding ex-champion rues these changing times and will redress them by training up a former footballer and a fop. But the lads will meet their match when they race against a finishing school coquette and a stoical cat lover.

Welcome to season two of I am boat racer: a protracted, soap-opera style advertising campaign for Japanese powerboat racing, whose first season proved wildly successful during the pandemic and nurtured a new generation of boat-obsessed gamblers.

But can the 2023 campaign work the same magic on a nation that may be about to finally remove its masks? The drama of I am boat racer, while fictional, centres on the very real realm of a sport that is one of a strictly limited handful on which gambling is legal in Japan — others include horseracing, auto racing and Keirin cycling.

All four sports, in terms of betting revenues and numbers of punters, have thrived to a remarkable degree over the past three years, primarily through online portals. Some analysts attribute the growth to the pervasive (but possibly temporary), entertainment-hungry “nesting” dynamics that Japanese households settled into during the pandemic. Others suspect that the boat-race campaign (along with less captivating counterparts such as horseracing and cycling) has flicked a more permanent switch on the country’s attitude to gambling.

The ministry of economy, trade and industry’s indices of tertiary industry activity show that gambling on bikes, boats and horses was rising steadily but modestly from 2013, before surging decisively when the pandemic began. The index covering all four sports has risen just over 60 per cent since March 2020. The index for boat racing alone, over the same period, has risen 134 per cent. This expansion jumps off the page among data for sectors in which contraction — latterly because of Covid but fundamentally because of Japan’s shrinking and ageing demographics — is rife.

Tokyo Shoko Research published a report in May last year that tracked the performance of seven boat racing corporations nationwide and found their collective sales expanded more than 50 per cent from the September to October 2018/19 period to the 2020/2021 equivalent.

In all types of Japanese sports betting, though, a critical factor has been the evolution of easy-to-use, low-stakes gambling apps and software that makes it possible to watch races in high definition on a phone throughout the day. The horseracing industry was something of a pioneer in this. Even before Covid, one of the most popular apps collated footage from multiple tracks around the country to create a situation in which, at any given point during the working day, the Japanese workforce could surreptitiously place a ¥100 minimum bet on an imminent race. The boat racing industry has replicated this, but with infinitely more engaging adverts.

Both industries demonstrate a broader shift in the way that entertainment is consumed, as competition for eyeballs has intensified and attention-spans have shortened. For many decades, Japan’s unofficial gambling titan has been the vertical pinball game pachinko. To achieve a significant payout, a player must invest a lot of time; an investment fewer and fewer Japanese are prepared to make, which is why the game’s 2020 revenues were roughly half their 2006 level of ¥27tn ($207bn). 

For years, live audiences for horse and boat racing were similarly dwindling. But an adrenaline-inducing, three-minute spectacle, watched on the phone during the odd coffee break, was an entirely different proposition. Work-from-home and “nesting” effectively rendered that coffee break a permanent state.

But what happens next? Japan has not snapped back from the pandemic in the way some had forecast. Bars, restaurants and more or less everything else covered by METI’s tertiary index of services are notionally back to normal, but much of this at a subdued level. People are opting to nest, it seems, even as restrictions have evaporated. One theory, though, is that the continuing government recommendation that people wear masks indoors has been heavily influential, a featherweight millstone that crushes the ability to fully enjoy their previous pastimes.

On Friday, prime minister Fumio Kishida paved the way for the mask recommendation to be lifted from this spring. Many Japanese will continue wearing them, but the subconscious shift may come quickly. The big gamble, for the boat racing industry and its star-studded advertising campaign, is whether the betting will continue.

leo.lewis@ft.com