According to a study by the Ministry of Health, 3.2 million Japanese are, at some point in their lives, “addicted” to gambling. whyframeshot – stock.adobe.com
In Tokyo
And if, in Japan, it was the casino that won. On Friday, for the first time in its history, the government granted a casino operating license in Osaka (in the west of the country) to a Japanese-foreign consortium. The said consortium equally brings together the American operator MGM (40%), the local financial group Orix (40%) and around twenty local partners.
This license is the culmination of a process that began in 1999, a quarter of a century ago, when the highly publicized governor of Tokyo at the time, Shintaro Ishihara, considered hosting a casino in his city. Since then, the idea has caught on. At the national level, the public authorities fear the scandals carried by the gaming industry. At the local level, the city councilors are struggling to work with foreign players in this new world for them. Tokyo, for its part, too busy with the construction site of the 2021 Olympic Games, keeps pushing back its candidacy for a site.
Nobody in the world builds such complexes anymore. If Tokyo finally decided to have its casino, the budget would not even reach half that of Osaka.
The representative in Japan of an American operator
Japan is the only G7 country to ban…
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