Melco Resorts and MGM Resorts both recently sponsored activities in Osaka. Melco paid for a fireworks show during the city’s July festival, while MGM brought the Blue Man Group to the area for a boat party.<\/p>\n
Melco founder and CEO Lawrence Ho additionally donated $450,000 to a fund established to help victims of a June earthquake.<\/p>\n
Osaka public records show that Governor Ichiro Matsui has met with 11 casino companies a staggering 119 times since May 2017. Matsui said recently that he expects Japan’s first integrated resort to be up and running by 2023 or 2024 “at the latest.”<\/p>\n
Osaka officials have already lent their support to welcoming an integrated casino resort. But that’s not the case in Tokyo and Yokohama, the presumed two other leading candidates for licensure.<\/p>\n
Matsui supports an IR because he believes it will grow tourism, add jobs, and increase tax revenue for the prefecture. That’s precisely what drove Abe into pressuring his controlling Liberal Democratic Party to back the bill.<\/p>\n
\n“We will promote tourism with visitors from all over the world spending days at the casino resorts, while taking complete measures to address various concerns including gambling addiction,” Abe said in April.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe Kyodo news agency found earlier this year that just 26.6 percent of residents support commercial casinos. Sixty-five percent said they were opposed to the IR measure, and the rest weren’t sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In less than a year, Japan will unveil its Casino Administration Committee (CAC), a government agency that will be tasked with overseeing and regulating operators in the country’s forthcoming commercial gaming industry. According to GGRAsia, a media outlet covering Asian gaming markets, the CAC will be responsible for licensing control of the three integrated casino […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":86988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,61,13592],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Japan Forming Casino Administration Committee, 40 Regions Want IR<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n