Arab News Japan

TOKYO: Plans to build Japan’s first casino resort in Osaka are coming under fire from politicians and residents who worry about the impact on local communities and say they haven’t been consulted enough on the project.

MGM Resorts International is leading the plan to build a resort on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay. The Osaka City and Osaka Prefecture governments have approved the plan and sent it to the national government committee on casinos for approval, but opponents to the plan say the figures don’t add up, people are likely to become addicted to gambling and any profits will go abroad, not to the benefit of local residents.

At a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on Thursday, local politician Tomoaki Nomura ridiculed the projected revenues of 490 billion yen ($3.45 billion).

“No other casino in the world has generated such huge revenues,” he said. “That would need 7 trillion yen (around $50 billion) to be gambled to generate such a sum. In 2019, the year before COVID, MGM’s two casinos in Macau only managed to generate 283 billion yen ($2 billion) while the Sands China in Macau generated 771 billion ($5.42 billion) from five casinos.”

“The projections for the Osaka project have clearly been overestimated. Osaka prefectural and city governments are assuming incoming revenues of 106 billion ($746 million) and are already spending taxpayers’ money on the project, but these numbers are very dubious. This project will have a huge negative impact locally.”

Former Osaka Prefecture Vice Governor Tadakazu Konishi said the planned project would affect Osaka economically and had already affected the available land for Osaka’s 2025 Expo.

“The land for the Expo has been reduced from 100,000 square meters to 20,000 square meters,” he said. “And this land wasn’t developed to build large commercial facilities such as hotels, so there is a risk of subsidence, which will be the responsibility of the local government, so it will be an unlimited burden on public finances, especially as the profits are likely to leave Japan.”

Konishi and local campaigner Kaori Takeda pointed out that Osaka Mayor Ichiro Matsui had promised that no public money would be needed for the project, but to date 78.8 billion yen had been spent to deal with issues such as land and soil pollution.

Takeda also noted that a petition demanding a referendum on the casino had attracted 210,000 signatures but was ignored by the authorities.

“There have been public hearings in only seven of Osaka’s 43 municipalities,” Takeda said. “This is a problem for democracy.”

Only Osaka and Nagasaki have proposed to build integrated resorts with casinos, but the national government has to approve such projects. Nomura was asked if casino operator and former President Donald Trump was suspected of being involved in pressuring Japan to legalize gambling.

“When the bill was passed in the Japanese Diet in 2018, ABE Shinzo was prime minister and Trump was president,” he pointed out. “I assume the impact of Trump on legalizing casinos in Japan was not negligible.”