The worst thing about the new soccer lottery system may be its name. "Toto" is taken from the Italian word totocalcio, which is the name of a similar lottery that has been in place in Italy for more than 50 years.
As Marty Kuehnert pointed out in his Japan Times column last Sunday, the word is already used in Japan to describe illegal gambling. But even the shortened version carries semantic baggage. In Japan, "Toto" is either the name of an over-the-hill L.A. pop band or the word you are most likely to encounter when you use the toilet.
However, the name is not what some parties objected to during the last seven years as the proposed lottery was debated in the government and the media. Gambling in any form is a slippery slope, and when it's controlled and carried out by public bodies there is the central issue of how to promote it without seeming hypocritical.