Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JAPAN JAN 2020 26 (Left to right) Osaka Mayor Ichiro Matsui and Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura. （左から）大阪の松井一郎市長と吉村洋文知事 COVER STORY capital investment giving rise to a dazzling array of F&B, entertainment, hotel, MICE, architectural and cultural offerings. And don’t forget the stupendous economic and social benefits with the potential to jump-start the Japanese economy and society into a new era. Japanese governments have done a poor job explaining all this to their constituents. Most Japanese are blissfully ignorant regarding the IR revolution about to sweep across their land. With the people by and large against the introduction of IRs, it has been politically unpopular for cities or prefectures to raise their hands, and especially difficult to get a city mayor and corresponding prefectural governor to raise their hands in unison. Osaka is the only major city in Japan which has openly and consistently embraced the IR opportunity for many years, with the tag-team pair of Hirofumi Yoshimura and Ichiro Matsui, who both support an IR for Osaka, swapping places as the Mayor of Osaka City and the Governor of Osaka Prefecture early last year. As the end game for locations has neared, more candidate locations have emerged from the woodwork as serious prospects. MEET THE GIRLS – THE CANDIDATE LOCATIONS At a press conference in September, Japan’s Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Kazuyoshi Akaba, listed eight locations “definitely” considering IRs: Chiba City, Hokkaido, Nagasaki, Nagoya City, Osaka, Tokyo, Wakayama and Yokohama City. To that list we have added Kitakyushu City (Fukuoka Prefecture), Makinohara City (Shizuoka Prefecture), Okinawa and Tokoname City (Aichi Prefecture). Each is discussed below. We list them in tiers, which approximately order them in likelihood of success, in our opinion, as at the time of writing.