Mahjong and Social Connections in Post-War Japan

• In Event: Japanese Gambling in its Sociocultural Context

Abstract

In both academic and popular discourse, gambling is often treated as an entirely problematic activity. However, in Japan during the 1970s, it was an integral part of male corporate communication. Forty percent of Japanese men played the game, and its play was subsidized both by corporate budgets and by government entertainment facilities. Similar to poker’s function both as a social activity amongst friends and colleagues and as a way for participants to transcend organizational and social boundaries, regular games of mahjong served to provide coworkers a space in which they could bond outside the formal constraints of the office hierarchy. These games were invariably played for money, generating gains and losses amongst participants. However, due to the strong element of luck in mahjong gameplay and social norms mandating that winners treat losers to drinks and dinner after the game, for many players the exchange of money did not lead to financial stratification but rather the chance to regularly trade the roles of winner and loser. Drawing on several years of interviews with retired salarymen as well as observations of retirees' mahjong gatherings, I argue that these practices contradict the popular notion of gambling as wholly socially detrimental as well as contrasting from most scholarship on salaryman socialization, which tends to focus on hierarchical spaces. It also links the decline of mahjong socialization to a larger trend away from group leisure activities to individual games such as pachinko, mirrored in current scholarship on Las Vegas (Schüll, 2014).

Author

• Benjamin Boas, Keio University