Mahjong in Japan: the 1924 boom and a century in the grey zone

Two novelists

The first Japanese account of mahjong is a travel sketch. In 1909 Natsume Sōseki, already the country’s most famous novelist, toured Manchuria and Korea and wrote up the trip; among the things he describes seeing is a table of Chinese players moving small tiles about, a game he could not follow. Sets came back with travellers and students over the following decade, and by the early 1920s the game had a foothold among writers and the fashionable in Tokyo.

The second novelist did more than describe it. Kikuchi Kan, founder of the magazine Bungei Shunjū and the man who created the Akutagawa Prize, took up mahjong with the enthusiasm of a convert and put it in front of his readers. The first dedicated parlours opened in Tokyo around 1924, a rulebook and a federation followed at the end of the decade, and the game acquired the thing every craze needs, a vocabulary of its own that outsiders could not follow. It was, for a while, the pastime of the literary and the modern.

The rules Japan settled on diverged from the Chinese ones almost at once, and after the war the divergence became a style. Riichi, the declared ready hand, dora bonus tiles, and a scoring system built around yaku made Japanese mahjong its own game, and it is that version that the rest of the world now plays online under the name.

The parlour century

The mass boom was postwar. Through the 1950s and 1960s mahjong became the salaryman’s game, played after work in the jansō, the parlour that rents automatic tables by the hour. By the 1970s the number of parlours in Japan was counted in the tens of thousands, and the game had its own literature, most famously Asada Tetsuya’s Mahjong Hōrōki, a novel of the postwar gambling underworld whose hero is a tile hustler.

The parlour is where the grey zone lives. A jansō is licensed under the amusement business law as a place that provides tables and tiles; it is not licensed to host gambling, and a sign to that effect usually hangs somewhere on the wall. What happens at the tables is between the four players. For most of the century the arrangement has been that small stakes are nobody’s business and large ones are, and the line between the two is drawn by whoever is looking.

Momentary amusement

Article 185 of the Penal Code makes gambling a crime and then carves out one exception: it does not apply where the stake is “a thing provided for momentary amusement”. The phrase was written for a round of drinks or a meal, and the courts have read it narrowly; money, however little, is not a thing provided for momentary amusement, so a game of mahjong for a few hundred yen a point is, on the letter of the law, an offence. It is also, in practice, a thing millions of people have done without consequence, because the police have better uses for their afternoons.

The gap between the letter and the practice is usually invisible and occasionally not. In May 2020, during the pandemic’s state of emergency, the head of the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office was reported to have played mahjong for money with newspaper reporters; he resigned within days. Prosecutors initially declined to charge him, a citizens’ review panel found that decision inappropriate, and in 2021 he was fined by summary order. The stakes were small. The point was that the law he was paid to enforce did not contain an exception for small.

A grey zone is a rule that depends on who is looking. A published edge is a rule that does not.the difference, in two sentences

There is no mahjong on this site, and the reason is the same one that makes the parlour story worth telling. A game here is either offered, with a return computed from its engine and printed in the journal, or it is not offered. There is no version in which the table is legal and the money is a matter of interpretation. Pachinko solved the same problem with three shops and a prize counter; mahjong solved it by never quite asking. Both are answers to a law that punishes gambling and a public that wants to gamble, and neither is an answer a game with a stated house edge can give.