The latest IR information about the casino Implementation Bill 2018 / When will it be approved?

When will the approval of the Casino Implementation Bill be?

( ≫ Click here to check out the flow until 2017 )



Because the World’s best casino company Las Vegas Sands announced that ‘IR investment into Japan may be 10 billion dollars or more possibly’, Melco Resort in Hong Kong said that ‘they won’t set any upper limit for investment on Japan’s IR’ and an executive of the major American investment bank Morgan Stanley said that ‘If IR is built in the metropolitan or Osaka region, the amount of investment would be 10 billion dollars’, 2017 was such a year where we had to pay attention to casinos in Japan.



In such a situation, the Japanese government mentioned that the core facilities for IR should be the casino itself, a recreation facility for events and such as International conferences and exhibitions, shopping malls and art museums, a domestic travel help center and hotels and it has been working on a strict system on both casino operators and users.



Firstly, for casino operators, they announced that they would screen conservatively in terms of getting operation licenses on aspects such as financial situation, officer relationships, regular updates, money laundering, survey authentication for gambling addiction prevention and the establishment of the independent administrative institution Casino Management Committee, so a plan is in progress to exclude antisocial forces strictly and thoroughly.


Also, they made a policy where they set up various regulations for Japanese casino users as well, for example, the requirement of showing your My Number Card for Japanese users, a limited number of entries, the upper limit size of the game floor, a chip purchase limit only in cash (no credit cards), no ATMs set into the casino.



Especially, in terms of strengthening measures, gambling addiction received the most attention in 2017 with a lot of discussion.


In June 2017, the basic bill about gambling addiction measures was submitted by LDP and Komeito the Clean Government Party, however, it was discarded because of dissolution of the lower house of parliament.


So, that affected the existing gambling addiction measures and the family report program was installed on the 1st of December for pachinko (pinball games) and slot machines as there are a lot of players in Japan.


Until then, the upper limit of spending for pachinko and slots used to be the player’s decision, but now with this new program, the number of entries into stores and the hours of play can be applied or prohibition of entry can be applied for by the family of players.



So 2017 was a year that focussed on gambling addiction measures and 2018 will involve more discussions on authentic addiction bills and if the IR Implementation Bill is approved, then steps will be taken such as the selection of a local public organization, operator selection by a local public organization, eligibility screening and operator licenses given by the country and development and the start of casino resorts by the operators.






So, it sounds like they will start IR operations in two to three places on trial and when the reviewing time comes in seven years after the approval, then it may become a maximum of up to 10 places as a facility on a wide area block possibly based on a regional system.


For that reason, it may become like Australia Casino where they have a facility at each major city.



Well, according to the estimation done by CLSA, the trading company in Hong Kong, if 10 small sized casinos are made throughout Japan in 2024 in Tokyo and Osaka and throughout Japan after 2025, the casino market of Japan will reach 25 billion USD and is estimated to become another big market after Macau plus the Japanese casino market scale by Capital and Innovation Corporation after 2020 is estimated to be about 12 billion USD if there are three IRs and about 22 billion USD if there are 10 casinos.



★ A list of Japan’s casino candidate places
≫ Where are Japan’s Casino candidate places and main attractive places?