I'm looking for adult things, but specifically more traditional gambling like black jack. Any leads?
Also, I'd like to get into a nice side hustle that supports drinking and meeting new people!
I travel around japan all the time, but my life and free time is limited due to the reason you can all assume, and that would be the line of work that brought me here.
I think you came to the wrong place to ask that question (when guys on TOKYO ADULT GUIDE have free cash, take a wild guess where they spend it?) and I also think you came to the wrong country if you're looking for a blackjack game.
If Japanese are going to "gamble," they play Pachinko. That's it. You might be able to find some decrepit shithole Mah Jong joint where the old timers might play for a few bucks but that's probably as good as it gets. The average Japanese person doesn't like to engage in any sort of game, sport or activity that requires any sort of strategic, dynamic or enigmatic thinking, and certainly not thinking all on his/her own without an illustrated, methodic guidebook with lots of cartoon characters telling him/her exactly what to do and when. That's why they absolutely adore monotonous, mindless games like Pachinko. Your only real hope is to fall into a group of friends or acquaintances that might know of a good, small underground game.
I've always been a pretty avid Hold'em player, and during my years in Japan, surrounded primarily by Brits and Aussies, there weren't many opportunities to get a good game going. Fortunately for me, during my last few years I fell in with an interesting crowd of Japanese guys (and a couple of girls) at my regular bar who certainly weren't average. Most had lived stateside at some point in their youths, half of them were flunkies by Japanese standards (not college educated, worked odd jobs), a couple of trust-fund types, a couple of yak associate types, but they were intelligent enough to have acquired a real taste for Hold'em and all of them were, like myself, degenerate drunks. Tencho, a poker fanatic himself who also owned the entire building, would shut down the bar around 1am, lock the doors, roll out the actual casino-grade poker table and then we'd go tournament style till sunrise, first train or whenever the pissed off wives started texting. We'd play for money, of course, but perhaps it was legal because basically everything ended up being paid out in drinks. Yeah, a dozen drunks gambling all night just to buy each other drinks.
But a serious, for-profit blackjack game scenario? Can't honestly imagine you're going to find something, but just make lots of friends and see where it takes you. Think Rounders, but instead of ass-kickings you just jump in front of a train if you can't pay the house.
