Six thousand yen. That's the charge a Japanese citizen, or a foreigner who lives in the country, will pay at the casino door of the resort now going up on Yumeshima, the reclaimed island in Osaka Bay that hosted Expo 2025.
The payment buys 24 hours inside. A foreign tourist won't pay it at all.
The figure comes from the 2018 law that allowed casinos inside integrated resorts, and it's only one of the entry rules lawmakers wrote straight into statute. The same text sets an age floor, caps how often a resident may come back in a week and in a month, and tells the operator exactly how to prove each point at the door. No casino has opened under it yet.
Sweepstakes gaming in the US has to answer the same questions about rules, rewards and eligibility. It answers them somewhere else entirely, in state law and in each operator's own terms, a long way from one national statute. The Japanese answers come first, because they're unusually exact.
Japan's casino law charges residents by the day and counts their visits
The statute is Act No. 80 of 2018, usually called the IR Implementation Act in English, and the government's e-Gov law database carries its current Japanese text. Two articles split the levy. Article 176 has the national government collect 3,000 yen on entry, and Article 177 lets the host prefecture or city collect another 3,000 yen. One payment covers 24 hours from the first entry, and anyone still inside after that pays again.
Article 69 lists who the operator must keep out. Anyone under 20 is barred, as are members of organized crime groups and people who left one less than five years earlier, along with anyone who hasn't paid the levy. The visit caps sit in the same article: three entries within seven days, or ten within 28 days, for everyone except foreigners with no address in the country. A single 24-hour stretch counts as one entry.
| Entry rule | Japanese citizens and foreign residents | Foreign visitors with no address in the country |
|---|---|---|
| Levy per 24 hours (Articles 176 and 177) | 6,000 yen, half national and half local | None |
| Entries in any 7 days (Article 69) | 3 at most | No cap |
| Entries in any 28 days (Article 69) | 10 at most | No cap |
| Minimum age (Article 69) | 20 | 20 |
| ID shown at the gaming-area door (Article 70) | My Number card; a passport for citizens living abroad | Passport |
| ID shown at the gaming-area door (Article 70) | Use restricted at own or a relative's request (Article 68) | Applies |
Read across the rows and the exemptions follow residence, not nationality. A Japanese citizen who lives in Singapore still pays 6,000 yen a day and still falls under the weekly cap, while a long-term foreign resident of Kyoto pays exactly what a Japanese neighbor pays. The age floor and the request route are the only lines that treat every visitor the same.
US sweepstakes eligibility comes from state law first and the operator's own rules second
That Japanese structure puts every eligibility rule in one national text, makes the operator enforce it, and gives oversight to a dedicated regulator, the Casino Regulatory Commission, which the government set up in 2020. A resident turned away after three visits in seven days isn't meeting a house policy there; Article 69 forbids the next entry. US sweepstakes gaming has no single text that plays that part. Who may take part depends on what a state's own law allows, and on what each operator then decides to accept.
Availability gets its own section in this list of sweepstakes casinos no deposit bonus, dated October 2026: one group of states with outright bans, a second where, by the page's account, older gambling law or sustained enforcement keeps most major brands out, and the rest, where operators add excluded-state lists of their own. The age line sits in the offer terms printed beside the listings, and it isn't one number there. One set of terms opens with "Age 21+" and another ends with "19+, except per T&Cs."
Those layers aren't the same kind of rule. A ban is law. An excluded-state list is a business decision that an operator can change without a vote, and the minimum age is a condition in the operator's terms, which, as those two lines show, differs from one site to the next and, at some sites, may differ from one state to another. Japan's floor of 20 binds every casino operator equally because it's statute. A sweepstakes floor binds only the site whose terms set it.
A My Number card gets read on the way in and again on the way out
Article 70 is where Japan's rules turn into a procedure. Each time a person enters or leaves the gaming area, the operator has to confirm identity, using the My Number card for residents and a passport for short-stay visitors and for citizens who live abroad. It must record the time of the check, the person's identity details (the photo excluded), whether the person is barred, and the times of entry and exit.
The operator doesn't keep the count alone. Before letting in anyone subject to the caps, it has to query the Casino Regulatory Commission, which the law says will answer at once, and it must report each of those entries and exits back to the commission. That lets the count follow a person instead of staying with one building. Article 68 adds a route that doesn't depend on the casino's judgment: the operator must restrict a person's use when that person, a relative or someone else close to them asks.
The check itself can run through the chip. The method Article 70 names is the card sending the operator the signature certificate stored on it, which asks more than a glance at a photo, and the country's banks are now moving their own online checks onto the chip. After a run of data leaks, this site reported on October 21 that Mizuho Bank had stopped accepting driver's-license photos for online accounts, as banks drop photo-based ID checks ahead of rules that will require reading the IC chip in a My Number card or a license from next April.
Osaka's casino is years from opening, but the online line already applies
The rules above don't have a door to apply to yet. The government approved Osaka's plan, the first in the country, in April 2023, Nikkei Asia reported, and Asia Gaming Brief reported later that year that the tourism ministry had turned down a rival bid from Nagasaki over doubts about its financing. Osaka IR, the operating company led by MGM Resorts and ORIX, broke ground on April 24, 2025, GGRAsia reported, eleven days after Expo 2025 opened on the same island. Its opening is still roughly four years away.
At the groundbreaking, Osaka's mayor, Hideyuki Yokoyama, put the investment at more than 1 trillion yen and the expected traffic at 20 million visitors a year, the Daily Engineering and Construction News reported. Residents among them would meet the levy and the entry checks only at the casino's own door.
More doors may follow. In March, Nikkei Asia reported that the government was preparing to accept proposals for two more integrated resorts beyond Osaka, with some regional governments already interested. Each one would run under the same levy and the same visit caps, since both come from national law, not from a deal struck locally.
The online side doesn't wait for Osaka. The National Police Agency's position is that playing at an online casino from inside the country is illegal, whatever license the site holds abroad. A survey it released in 2025 estimated that about 3.37 million people in the country had used online casino sites, wagering roughly 1.24 trillion yen a year, and about 44 percent of respondents, users and non-users alike, hadn't known the play was illegal. All 40 sites the agency examined held overseas licenses, about 70 percent from Curacao, and 38 didn't clearly say that play from Japan was prohibited.
Enforcement had started well before any resort: police handled 62 online gambling cases in 2024 and arrested 279 people, the agency said. Lawmakers then moved in June 2025 with an amendment to the Basic Act on Measures Against Gambling Addiction, in force from September 2025, that bans displaying sites that host illegal online gambling, or spreading information that steers users toward them. A license issued somewhere else, then, doesn't open a site to a player inside the country. Location does the deciding.
Sweepstakes rewards turn into prizes only on the operator's conditions
Rewards are where sweepstakes gaming parts company with the planned casino floor in Osaka. The Japanese resort will offer real-money gambling once it opens, with the levy paid before the first bet. US sweepstakes operators run a two-coin model instead: Gold Coins, a play balance the operators' terms give no cash value, and Sweeps Coins, the promotional balance an operator may later exchange for a prize under its own conditions. A no-deposit offer carries conditions of its own.
Both coins are spent on games with a house edge built into their rules, as the tables in Osaka will have, and over long play that edge leaves the operator ahead. A slot's posted payback, the return-to-player figure, measures the share of all money staked on it, by every player over the game's whole run, that its design pays back. That figure says nothing reliable about one player's next hundred spins. Sweeps Coins stay a balance, not a prize, until the player meets the redemption conditions in the operator's terms.
Japan's commission will hear about every resident's entry in Osaka. A sweepstakes redemption request goes to the operator instead, which checks it against its own terms and against the law where the player is located. Neither this site nor PlayUSA on Instagram takes part in either check.
That leaves more of the decision with the player than Article 69 ever will. In Osaka, a resident's fourth visit inside seven days will meet a closed door, whatever that resident wants. Nothing in the sweepstakes terms quoted above counts visits at all, so the count, and the call on whether the conditions between a coin balance and a prize are worth meeting, belongs to the player alone.
