Image by Keisuke Kuribara

Japan’s Integrated Resorts Race Is Still on As Nagasaki Launches Its Request for Proposals

Article by : Helen Jan 22, 2021

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While the nationwide call for integrated resort proposals is still months away, it’s high time for the interested local authorities to find businesses willing to invest in one in their locale. Nagasaki Prefecture has been the latest one to have officially launched its open call to find a business for such a partnership. The integrated resort is supposed to be built in Sasebo City, a core city of the whole country located in the south.

The deadlines imposed by the prefecture are tight: it allowed for just one week to receive and answer questions related to the call (from January 7 to January 15). The final date for submitting qualification examination documents is January 28, another sign that the local authorities are on a tight schedule.

The final results should be in by August 2021, followed by signing a basic agreement. The open call guidelines also reiterated the earlier reports that the Japanese officials expect the first integrated casinos to open their doors in the late 2020s.

Yokohama, the second-largest city of Japan and the capital of Kanagawa Prefecture, is also racing to open its call for proposals. However, the idea doesn’t excite locals as much as the municipality officials. More than 200,000 people opposing the construction of an integrated resort have signed a petition urging the authorities to hold a referendum on the matter.

While Yokohama mayor Hayashi Fumiko has been a “vocal advocate” of bringing an integrated resort with a casino to the city, she initially supported a referendum. But once the petition was signed, she was quoted as saying, “The draft ordinance says the local government should respect the outcome of a referendum, but I think this would be difficult, considering the discussions that have already been held in the assembly.”

The assembly rejected the idea of holding a referendum altogether on January 8, thus leaving no room for the public’s discontentment to slow the process down or stop an integrated resort from appearing in the municipality.

Tokyo, another rumored contender in the race for an integrated resort, is yet to confirm or discard those rumors. On the other hand, Hokkaido confirmed that it is out of the competition (it was speculated that Hokkaido isn’t interested in an integrated resort for over a year). Launching integrated casino resorts has been a dream for Japanese officials ever since the Integrated Resort Promotion Act was passed in 2016, but the road to making it happen has been rough. The potential legalization of casinos was met with considerable opposition, although the law still was approved by the Diet (Japan’s parliament).

Then, there was a corruption scandal that will probably go down in history as the 500.com scandal. 500.com, a casino operator based in China, had its representatives reportedly bribing House of Representatives lawmaker Tsukasa Akimoto with 7.6 million yen (a little more than 73 thousand in U.S. dollars) in exchange for getting approval to build an integrated resort. Akimoto has been indicted, although he keeps stating he is innocent.

Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic made its corrections to Japanese authorities’ plans on launching the official competition for the integrated resort licenses. The call for proposals – which was supposed to be open in January 2021 – was put off until October this year, with the same seven-month time frame remaining. Under Japan’s laws, the call for proposals is open to municipalities. Local authorities, in their turn, must find an integrated resort operator to partner up with and draw up the integrated resort proposals beforehand for submitting for the nationwide call.

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