Which Japanese prefectures sell the most lottery tickets per person?

Ever wonder which parts of Japan gamble the most? No? Well, stick with me and you might learn something about which prefectures are most willing to line up and pay the poor tax.

Each year, Mizuho Bank (which has a special relationship with the lottery from its days as a government bank) tallies the total number of lottery (Takarakuji) tickets sold and divides that number into each prefecture’s population to obtain an average per capita spending total. According to their numbers for fiscal 2007 (as reported in the Nikkei), the top ticket buyers were Tokyo, Osaka, and Kochi prefecture in Shikoku. There was a huge gap between the top of the list (Tokyo’s 12,933 yen) versus the bottom (Yamagata’s 5,328 yen). The top prefectures tended be prefectures that house large cities, such as Aichi.

UPDATE: A typical lottery ticket in Japan costs around 300 yen, meaning that Tokyo residents buy around 43 tickets a year or just about one every week.

Prefectures with the lowest home ownership rates tended to buy more lottery tickets. Tokyo and Osaka, the first and second highest per-capita lottery players, also have the two lowest home ownership ratios, in the same order.  Okinawa has the third lowest, and its residents are Japan’s sixth biggest lottery gamblers. On the other hand, Aichi, another prefecture full of takarakuji hopefuls, had the seventh lowest home ownership ratio. (Bonus fact: Toyama prefecture had the highest home ownership rate in 2003 (around 80%). Toyama residents play it relatively safe with a middling per capita lottery spend of between 7,000-7,999 yen).

The outlier was Kochi prefecture, however, indicating that low home ownership, a signifier of relative poverty, does not make up the only factor explaining the results. An official from Kochi prefecture’s budget division speculated, “Perhaps the prefecture residents’ nature of determination and love of gambling had an impact.”

A brief overview of Japan’s lottery system

Though it only brings in about 1/20 the revenue of the almighty pachinko, Japan’s lottery, with its estimated 15,000 or so ticket booths outside train stations (more booths than pachinko parlors, one for every 8,600 people), has been a highly visible form of legal gambling in Japan throughout the postwar era, along with horse racing, yacht speedboat racing, bicycle racing, and mahjong.

According to Wiki Japan, lottery-style gambling in Japan got its start in the Edo period as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples offered tomikuji (essentially the same as a lottery) in order to raise funds for repairs. Over the years, tomikuji faced various bans from the authorities, and private-sector lotteries remain criminalized to this day. In July 1945, a desperate wartime government instituted a lottery, but Japan surrendered and chaos reigned before a drawing could even be held. A national government-backed lottery was re-instituted during the US occupation in 1948, though it was abandoned in 1954, leaving only regional lotteries. Takarakuji took its current form in 1964 with the foundation of the Japan Lottery Association, a grouping of the regional lotteries.

According to association data, in fiscal 2007 (the period covered by the above survey) Japanese gamblers bought 1.0442 trillion yen in tickets, or about 8,200 yen per person. The US doesn’t have a national lottery per se, but the UK does – on average, UK residents spent 80 pounds (12,905 yen by the current exchange rate) per capita on national Lotto in 2008. The UK lottery’s press kit (PDF) claims that 70% of adults are regular players (but doesn’t cite a source), while a 2007 poll from Japan’s lottery association found that 55% of those polled had purchased at ticket at least once in the past year. The UK system, in which operations are contracted to a private company, appears to be more efficient than the one in Japan. According to the UK press kit, 10% of every pound spent on lottery tickets goes to operations and expenses (5% in dealer commission, 4.5% in operating costs, and 0.5% in shareholder dividends), versus 14.4% of each ticket in Japan (with 45.8% going to paying winners and 39.8% going into the general accounts of each prefecture and major cities).

The odds of winning a current popular Japanese game Loto 6 is 1 in 6 million, which is comparable to other lotteries I am familiar with in the US (and of course less likely than getting hit by lightning).

See the full list after the jump!

List of per capita Takarakuji spending by prefecture, April 1, 2007-March 31, 2008

10,000 yen or more

  • Tokyo (top spender overall)
  • Osaka (second-highest)
  • Kochi (Third place)

9,000-9,999 yen

  • Aichi

8,000-8,999 yen

  • Yamanashi
  • Shizuoka
  • Fukui
  • Kyoto
  • Wakayama
  • Tokushima
  • Hiroshima
  • Fukuoka
  • Saga
  • Okinawa

7,000-7,999 yen

  • Aomori
  • Akita
  • Ibaraki
  • Tochigi
  • Gunma
  • Kanagawa
  • Nagano
  • Toyama
  • Gifu
  • Ishikawa
  • Mie
  • Tottori
  • Yamaguchi
  • Ehime
  • Oita
  • Kumamoto
  • Miyazaki
  • Kagoshima

6,000-6,999 yen

  • Hokkaido
  • Iwate
  • Miyagi
  • Fukushima
  • Niigata (third from the bottom)
  • Chiba
  • Saitama
  • Shiga
  • Hyogo
  • Okayama
  • Kagawa
  • Shimane
  • Nagasaki

Less than 6000 yen

  • Yamagata (bottom of the list)
  • Nara (second from the bottom)

Source: Nihon Keizai Shimbun, June 3, 2009 evening edition , p. 3

5 thoughts on “Which Japanese prefectures sell the most lottery tickets per person?”

  1. Enjoyable post, especially for a risk-averse wussy non-gambler like myself.

    Just so all these factoids can be put in perspective, you may want to include the price of one “kuchi” of takarakuji. The distribution of people playing their luck with takarakuji is probably skewed right, and so for me the factoids on yearly expense per capita are slightly misleading.

    Also, “yacht racing”? It almost made me want to go watch until I figured out what you were referring to… 🙂

  2. One factoid I remember from Wikipedia is that Mizuho is the only bank which has a branch in every prefecture of Japan. This is because they have to maintain a branch in each prefecture in order to keep their lottery franchise.

  3. I can see no justification for giving Mizuho such exclusive access. I bet the lottery operators could easily save that extra 4% in expenses by eliminating the exclusive kiosks and opening up lottery sales to all convenience stores and banks.

  4. Wikipedia says

    日本勧業銀行(第一勧銀の前身)が大正時代に全国各地にあった農工銀行からの事業譲渡や農工銀行の吸収合併に伴う受け皿支店の開設などの理由により、その流れに加えて、宝くじ業務の関係を行っていることにより、メガバンクで唯一、全都道府県の県庁所在地・政令指定都市に必ず1つ以上の店舗を有する。

    そのため、沖縄県那覇市にある那覇支店(旧第一勧銀店舗)の場合、県外からの一般的な金融機関としては沖縄県で唯一存在する支店となっている。日本銀行及び商工組合中央金庫(商工中金)、旧日本郵政公社のゆうちょ銀行を除いた、他の都市銀行をはじめとした県外の地方銀行及び第二地方銀行、信用金庫や信用組合などは沖縄県内に支店を設けていない。戦前には(旧)鹿児島銀行(現在の鹿児島銀行の前身)那覇支店も設置されていた。2008年現在、法人向けの融資窓口として三菱東京UFJ銀行が那覇支社を設けているが、預金の取扱い等は行わない。

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