Japan Casino Resorts in Limbo

Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The hottest summer in Japanese history has so far proven to be stone cold when it comes to major news developments regarding the prospective casino resort industry.

At the end of April, two prefectures—Osaka and Nagasaki—submitted applications to the central government to have their respective Integrated Resort (IR) projects licensed for operations under the terms of the 2018 IR Implementation Act.

Since then, not a whole lot has happened—at least not much that is within public view.

Basically, all there is to do for the local governments and the two IR operator hopefuls is to wait for the central government to determine whether or not these projects will be given a license.

This decision is primarily in the hands of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism headed by the government’s only Komeito party minister, Tetsuo Saito.

The verdict is believed likely to be announced either in the autumn or winter of this year.

Some industry analysts—notably Bay City Ventures Managing Director Joji Kokuryo—suggest the possibility that some kind of policy curveball could be in the offing. Rather than simply giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the two applications, Kokuryo suggests, the central government might grant conditional licenses or even scrap the current process altogether and fully reopen bidding to local jurisdictions and casino firms with a new deadline, presumably a couple years in the future.

For now, all remains speculation. Local governments and IR operators just have to wait.

The only side which has continued to be active are the citizen anti-casino forces which continue to chip away at the political will of those few leaders still willing to advocate publicly in favor of casino legalization.

At the end of July, the Osaka Prefectural Assembly voted down a proposal for a popular referendum on the IR project at Yumeshima. Citizen activists submitted more than 190,000 resident signatures, but the pro-IR Osaka Restoration Association determined that the people should not be given a say in the matter—just as had previously occurred in the cities of Yokohama and Wakayama.

Throughout the IR process, it has continued to be a “no democracy zone” in which many conservative political leaders and parts of the business community have repeatedly defied the popular will.

At any rate, the ball is very much in the court of the national government at this juncture, and all interested parties are waiting to see what they do.

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