Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2013 4 COVER STORY C asino advocates in Japan have been waiting 10 years for a law to bring resort-scale gambling to the world’s third-largest economy. Analysts can barely contain their enthusiasm when they ponder the reception that thousands of slot machines and roulette wheels and baccarat tables are likely to get from what is arguably, for its considerable size, still the wealthiest country per person in the East. They’re still waiting. But there’s a word for this in the Land of the Rising Sun— nemawashi —whose literal rendering suggests a “going around the roots,” as in preparing a tree for transplanting. The equivalent in English would be along the lines of “laying the groundwork” or “building consensus”. It describes a largely informal but critical element of the process of legislating major social or economic change in Japan. Usually conducted behind the scenes, nemawashi can be a long and painstaking affair, as anyone even remotely familiar with the inherent conservatism of Japanese culture and its famously fractious politics might expect, and as the casino camp, which has numbered some fairly powerful individuals over the years, knows only too well. Not that anyone’s bolting from the table in frustration. Estimates of the industry’s money-making potential are too enticing. Going back to 2002 and the birth of the casino lobby in Japan, there was a study commissioned by Tokyo’s government that said a casino with a hotel and other attractions, one capable of attracting 2.25 million people a year, would generate US$642.6 million and employ 4,000 people. Within a few years the movement had signed on a bona fide player, Takeshi Iwaya, a high-profile lawmaker of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party who had served in the government of Yoshiro Mori in 2000-2001 and under Shinzo Abe during the current LDP leader’s ill-fated first crack at power in 2006- 07. The discussion soon coalesced around a full-blown “integrated resort” model—10 or more of them strategically located in major cities and places that stood to benefit from the perceived boost in tourism. “The idea isn’t just to build casinos,” an aide to Mr Iwaya said at the time, “but to develop huge entertainment complexes that include shops, restaurants and theaters to give tourists and business people something to do, apart from seeing all of the usual historical and cultural sites of course.” Considered in this light, casinos were held out as part of the solution to the country’s protracted economic malaise—a “must- have element for Japan to shine as a global tourist destination,” said Backwards Into the Future Casinos could do wonders for Japan’s ailing economy, but getting to a consensus on how to take that forward is proving difficult among a political leadership that cannot agree on what has gone before