Gambling News by House of Odds

Gambling at pachinko was a lot more fun for Reiko Kuzuhara before she
started wondering whether maybe -- just maybe -- her losses were helping
North Korea build nuclear weapons. Pachinko, a form of pinball deeply loved
in Japan, is an industry run by ethnic Koreans, and experts have long
believed that the revenues are a vital source of hard currency for the
impoverished regime in Pyongyang. Now, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's
nuclear weapons program gathers pace, Japan's attitude is hardening, and
that includes shutting out the ferry on which the gambling money is believed
to be hand-carried from Japan to North Korea.
"I really don't like that the money I spend could be helping them with those
sorts of things," said Kuzuhara, 55, who works in the printing industry and
was interviewed on a Tokyo street near several pachinko parlors. "It's
making me think twice and cut back on how often I play." The pachinko
connection is facing increased scrutiny as tensions rise following North
Korea's ballistic missile tests in July and its first test of a nuclear
device on Oct. 9. Pachinko is an upright pinball game played at tens of
thousands of brightly lit parlors across the country. Success is measured in
little steel payoff balls, which can be exchanged for cash or other prizes.
The machines are believed to rake in more than 27 trillion yen a year, some
of which finds its way to North Korea. Official figures put the sum of
remittances to North Korea from sources in Japan at 3 billion yen in fiscal
2005, more than 90 percent of which was hand-delivered. But the bookkeeping
is murky and some think the real sum could be as high as to 10 billion yen.
No one knows how much of it derives directly from pachinko and how much from
another major source of income for North Korea in Japan -- imported
methamphetamines.

"It's very difficult to say how much cash is actually going from Japan to
the North," said Toshio Miyatsuka, a specialist on North Korea at Yamanashi
Gakuin University in central Japan who has written a book about the pachinko
industry.

"But it does seem certain that a lot of it is winding up in the hands of the
North Korean government and military, and that includes money earned from
drugs and pachinko," he added.

The Ministry of Finance requires reports for large sums of money going to
the North, but only for 300 million yen or more for wire transfers and 10
million yen or more for money delivered in person.

With much of the money going to North Korea hand-delivered, the banning of
the Mangyongbong ferry from Japanese ports in July has almost certainly put
a crimp in the cash flow.

Government officials, however, say it's hard to track money delivered
through third countries, in person or through bank accounts. Cash from the
drug trade traveling through Japan's underworld is likewise hard to monitor.

For the pachinko industry, however, North Korea's image problems and the
sanctions have not been a business issue, officials say.

While ethnic Koreans may worry about how relatives in the North are faring
without the cash they used to take to them, their main concerns as
businessmen lie elsewhere.

"Yes, there are a lot of ethnic Korean operators, but the industry is not at
all concerned about the sanctions issue," said Takaaki Sasaki, spokesman for
Zennichiyuren, an industry organization. "We're not hearing about anyone
losing business because of the missiles or the nuclear test."

Still, the connection between pinball revenues and North Korea makes some
Japanese pachinko players uneasy.