A new gambling addiction survey claims 3.2m Japanese citizens have trouble keeping their gambling in check, although the criteria used in the study appears to have vastly inflated this number.

On Friday, researchers at Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released an interim report on their latest survey, which claimed 3.6% of the 4,685 adults surveyed were suspected of having developed gambling addiction at some point in their lives. Given recent census data, that would put the total number of problem gamblers at 3.2m.

However, many of these ‘addicts’ hadn’t actually engaged in any gambling for years, and the percentage of respondents whose behavior over the past year indicated problem gambling behavior was 0.8%, which would mean around 700k adults nationwide were really problem gamblers.

The 0.8% figure is comparable to many other countries, including the UK, which recently reported an identical 0.8% problem gambling rate. But, as with Japan, the UK media chose to run with the larger 3.9% of UK adults who were ‘at risk’ of becoming problem gamblers, because it’s hard to gin up outrage when the data says you’re no better or worse than everyone else.