Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JAPAN MAY 2019 74 Wakayama Marina City 和歌山マリーナシティ JAPAN MC: How confident are you that the government will actually issue an IR license to a regional area? YN: As you know, in Japan there are really not so many prefecture cities which have strongly expressed their intentions in hosting an IR at this point. From the point of view of the scale of the IR, Wakayama will be the second largest IR that can be built. Why? Because, as I said, we are very close to Kansai International Airport and we are very close to the huge population of the Kansai region. I don’t want to name other candidate areas, but there are no other [regional areas] that are blessed with such great conditions. So they can only build smaller-scale IRs. The second ranking is that we can assure the feasibility of the IR. Why? Because the site is ready for development and you can start construction right now. No other place has this kind of ready site. And I believe that when the government selects the three sites to issue the license, they will highly value the scale of the IR as well as the certainty of the IR. So Wakayama is one of the very promising candidates. MC: Are you confident that a Wakayama IR will be financially successful? YN: Last year, Wakayama Prefecture issued the fundamental concept for the IR development. And we have revised the plan. As part of it, we asked well-known consultant Deloitte Tohmatsu to give us estimates in many areas. And we had an estimate that the amount of investment in a Wakayama IR was expected to reach JPY280 billion (US$2.5 billion), and it will create an economic ripple effect annually of about JPY300 billion. Wakayama is not a prefecture with a large economy: its current annual GDP is about JPY3.5 trillion. Given that