Japan would be a latecomer to a gambling boom across the region, which is looking to Las Vegas-style super casinos to entice more tourists, with two huge complexes springing up in Singapore to take on the Chinese enclave of Macau. Taiwan is considering lifting its ban on casinos while Thailand is also seen as likely to relax its gaming laws in the coming years.
“Nowadays casinos are not considered to be evil places, whereas they might have been considered so 20 years ago,” said Aaron Fischer, an analyst who follows gaming at the investment bank CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. “Across Asia over the last few years you’ve been seeing legalisation of casinos including in Singapore and Macau,” he noted, predicting that Japan would follow suit within the next few years.
Lawmakers from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are already drawing up proposals to allow a handful of huge Vegas-style casinos, which could open their doors within a few years.
Almost half of the lower house of parliament - including some opposition lawmakers - supports the general idea of legalising casinos, said Toru Mihara, adviser to the LDP’s casino study group. “If we can create legal structures within one or two years to come, maybe in 2012 casinos in Japan will start to operate,” he told AFP in an interview.
The major US casino operators are already regular visitors to Japan, networking and lobbying behind the scenes to try to secure a lucrative contract in the world’s second-largest economy, Mihara said. “They are totally keen on this potential big market,” he added.
But local entertainment companies are also expected to be involved as the government will be reluctant to hand over to foreign operators alone what some experts say is almost a licence to print money. So US giants such as Las Vegas Sands and Harrah’s Entertainment could team up with Japanese companies such as Sega Sammy, Konami or Aruze to build huge entertainment complexes including casinos, analysts said.
Although illegal backroom casinos exist in Japan, the only gambling officially open to the country’s population of 128 million is on horse, speedboat and bicycle racing and lotteries.
But anyone in doubt of Japan’s love of a flutter need look no further than the nation’s multi-billion dollar pachinko industry, which attracts some 17 million punters, from salarymen to pensioners and even young women. Pachinko, a Japanese version of pinball played in thousands of noisy parlours across the country, is not officially defined as gambling, because prizes have to be exchanged outside the premises for cash. “There are approximately 5.5 million pachinko and pachislot machines here in Japan. If you count this as similar to slot machines, we’re the biggest casino country in the world,” said Mihara.
Add to that the growing number of wealthy Chinese who could jet in to Tokyo for a weekend, and the casinos would not likely be short of punters, he said. Only about 8.1 million tourists visited Japan in 2006, while Las Vegas attracted a record 38.9 million visitors and Macau 22 million.
Tokyo and the southern island region of Okinawa are seen as likely locations for the first casinos. So far the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, struggling in the polls, is taking a softly softly approach, apparently wary of a voter backlash ahead of elections for the upper house of parliament in July.
Although widely popular, the pachinko industry is dogged by criticism of gambling addiction as well as alleged links to organised crime and even Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Although casinos are expected to attract a different type of punter, Mihara said their legalisation could eventually kill off the popular pinball game if authorities subsequently decided to crack down on the murky world of pachinko.
