Companies interested in competing for a gaming resort in Yokohama will have to submit their bids amid the possibility that residents might vote to remove Japan’s second-most populous city from consideration as a casino destination.
Legislation has been approved at the national level to end the country’s longstanding casino ban and empowers the central government to choose three cities to host major resort-scale casinos with the aim of boosting regional economic growth and employment through tourism.
The plan has been subject to a number of fits and starts, however, the most recent being the global Covid-19 crisis, which has delayed the beginning of the selection process to October 2021 and means the three winners won’t be known until sometime in 2022 at the earliest.
Yokohama wants to be one of them. Or at least the local government does.
The administration of pro-casino Mayor Fumiko Hayashi has appointed an Innovation IR Council comprised of private- and public-sector leaders and institutions whose mission is to define the city’s resort ambitions, gauge their economic impacts and develop a consensus around them.
A selection committee also has been created and was scheduled to hold its first meeting this week to begin the process of formulating criteria by which it can analyze whatever proposals for the “integrated resorts,” or IRs, as they’re called, come in.
Both advances, however, appear now to be somewhat out of step with grassroots sentiment, which has responded to a residents’ group opposing the casino by contributing three times the number of signatures required to place a referendum on the issue before the city’s voters, possibly as soon as February, if the city council allows it.
Hayashi has said she will abide by the verdict of the referendum, though formally it would be non-binding.
Either way, it’s a dilemma for prospective operators and investors.
“Unfortunately, the voting results would not realistically come in time for IR consortiums to consider as a variable in making their decisions on bidding for Yokohama,” said Joji Kokuryo, head of Japan-based consultancy Bay City Ventures.
There is also the more worrisome consideration, at least from the perspective of the pro-casino community, that Hayashi, who is up for re-election later in the year, will be voted out of office.
As Kokuryo summed it up, “Bidders would have to move forward with preparations for the request for proposals with the risk of the city government acting on a negative result in any referendum vote, and this is on top of the massive political risk of the mayoral election next autumn𑁋ironically just before the submission period to the national government.”
