Is Crypto Gambling Legal in Japan? The 2025 Crackdown
Japan prosecutes the player, not the operator. 2025 brought record arrests, a $194M case, and a new law asking Curaçao and Anjouan to block Japanese users.
Published July 12, 2026· By Evan Kowalski· Fact-checked by Abril González
| Regulatory authority | National Police Agency (enforcement); Japan Casino Regulatory Commission (JCRC)JCRC oversight applies only to the upcoming licensed integrated resort in Osaka — not to gambling generally, which is enforced by the National Police Agency. |
|---|---|
| Key legislation | Penal Code, Articles 185–186, Basic Law on Gambling Addiction Measures (revised) (2025) |
| Regulated online market | No |
| Player explicitly banned | Yes |
| Penalty for players | Up to ¥500,000 fine (Art. 185); up to 3 years/¥3,000,000 for habitual gamblingThe law criminalizes the act of betting itself, with no carve-out for offshore operators or crypto — simple gambling draws a fine of up to ¥500,000 or a petty fine (Art. 185), while habitual gambling draws up to 3 years' imprisonment or a fine up to ¥3,000,000 (Art. 186). |
| How it's enforced | National Police Agency arrests of individual players (196 in 2025), Formal requests to 8 foreign licensing jurisdictions to identify operators and restrict access196 player arrests in 2025 marked a 38% year-on-year increase. The 8 jurisdictions named are Canada, Costa Rica, Georgia, Malta, Anjouan, Curaçao, Isle of Man, and Gibraltar. |
| Law mentions crypto | No |
Short answer: no — and unlike most countries we cover, that “no” applies to the player, not just the casino. Japan’s Penal Code makes gambling itself a crime, and 2025 was the year enforcement caught up with that law. Record arrests, a $194 million referral case, and a new law that has Japan formally asking Curaçao and Anjouan — the two licenses behind most of the casino industry — to help block Japanese users. This is why you won’t find a “Best Crypto Casino in Japan” list on this site, and why the usual country-guide format we use for the UK, India, or Brazil doesn’t apply here.
The Law: It’s the Bet, Not Just the Book
Article 185 of Japan’s Penal Code is blunt: “A person who gambles is punished by a fine of not more than 500,000 yen or petty fine.”[1] No carve-out for offshore, no carve-out for crypto — placing a bet is the offense. Article 186 goes further for anyone who does it habitually or runs a gambling operation for profit: up to 3 years imprisonment or a fine of up to ¥3,000,000.[1]
Compare that to most of the markets we write about. India’s 2025 online gaming law targets operators and facilitators, not players. Turkey fines players but treats it as an administrative penalty, not a criminal one. Japan criminalizes the act of betting itself — a rarer structure, and one that makes “the casino accepts Japanese players” essentially irrelevant to your own legal exposure.
2025 Was a Record Year — By a Wide Margin
For years, that law was rarely enforced against individual players using offshore sites. That changed in 2025. National Police Agency data shows 196 people arrested for accessing offshore online casinos via phone or PC — the highest figure on record, up 38% from the year before — plus a separate 25 arrests of people running, promoting, or processing payments for illegal sites.[2] For context: 25 total arrests in 2023, and just 1 in 2022. This isn’t a slow trend — it’s a curve that bent sharply upward in a single year.
The Case That Made It Real: $194M Through One Referral Link
The clearest illustration of what “record enforcement” means in practice is Makoto Chomabayashi, a 38-year-old from Tokyo. He personally wagered around ¥90 million (~$625,000) through Stake, and acted as a referrer for the platform — earning a 2% cut of every bet placed by more than 100 people he brought in. Police put the total volume he referred at ¥28 billion (~$194 million), the largest individual illegal-gambling case on record in Japan, and say he collected roughly ¥7 million (~$48,600) in commissions since April 2023.[3] Chomabayashi reportedly told police he knew online gambling was illegal but assumed the odds of being prosecuted were low.[3] In 2025, that assumption stopped holding.
What Changed on September 25, 2025
Japan’s revised Basic Law on Gambling Addiction Measures took effect that day, and it closes the loophole that made “the operator isn’t Japanese, so it’s not my problem” a workable excuse. The law bans promoting or advertising unlicensed gambling to Japanese users regardless of where the operator is licensed.[4]
To enforce it, Japan’s National Police Agency formally asked eight licensing jurisdictions to help identify operators and restrict access for Japan-based users: Canada, Costa Rica, Georgia, Malta, Anjouan, Curaçao, the Isle of Man, and Gibraltar.[4] Two of those — Curaçao and Anjouan — are the licenses behind the large majority of the crypto casino industry, including 31 of the 33 casinos we’ve reviewed on this site. A separate analysis of 40 Japanese-facing casino sites found nearly 70% were Curaçao-registered.[4] This isn’t a request aimed at a handful of fringe operators — it’s aimed at the licensing infrastructure the whole industry runs on.
What’s Actually Legal in Japan
Japan isn’t blanket anti-gambling — it’s specific about which forms it permits and keeps everything else tightly controlled. Four public sports run legal parimutuel betting under their own laws: horse racing, bicycle racing (keirin), powerboat racing (kyotei), and motorcycle racing. State lotteries and the sports pool (toto) are legal under separate statutes. Pachinko occupies a long-standing legal gray zone — parlors pay out prizes rather than cash, which are then exchanged for money at a separate shop, a structure that’s kept it outside the Penal Code’s definition of gambling for decades.[6]
The one closing door: Japan’s first legal casino. MGM Resorts and Orix broke ground on an integrated resort on Osaka’s Yumeshima island in April 2025, with a projected ¥1.6 trillion (~$10 billion) investment.[5] Once it opens, Japanese residents will be able to gamble legally on-site — capped at 3 visits per 7 days or 10 per 28 days, with a ¥6,000 entrance fee (half to the national government, half to the local one) designed to keep it from being a habit.[7] It’s a narrow, tightly regulated exception, not a shift in policy toward offshore or online play.
Why We’re Not Recommending Anything Here
Most of the casinos we review don’t name Japan in their restricted-countries list — only 5 of the 33 do. That’s not an oversight on their part; a Curaçao or Anjouan license doesn’t require blocking Japan the way it requires blocking, say, the Netherlands or the US. But that’s exactly the point of this article: the casino’s policy was never the relevant question. Under Japanese law, the crime is on the player’s side regardless of what the operator’s Terms of Service say — and 2025’s numbers show that’s no longer theoretical.
If you’re weighing whether a VPN changes any of this, it doesn’t — see our VPN legal risk breakdown for why masking your location doesn’t touch the underlying offense. And for the full country-by-country legal picture, including the markets where offshore play carries little practical risk, see our crypto gambling legality guide.