In October, the government announced that it wants to establish a casino management body and that the deadline for that is set to be Jan. 7. They have taken the first step towards making that possible by nominating who they think would be the most appropriate people for the role.
According to Japanese media, the person nominated to be the chairman of the committee is Michio Kitamura. His main job would be to oversee the entire process of choosing operators and places for integrated resorts. Moreover, he would need to oversee the building process as well as control the integrated resorts once they are built.
Kitamura has a lot of experience as he has worked as the inspector general of legal compliance for the Ministry of Defense in Japan. Moreover, he also did stints as the Offices of High Prosecutors in the cities of Sendai and Fukuoka. Kitamura is 67 years old.
Naturally, he is not the only one to be nominated as a candidate for the casino management committee. Other names include Hiroyuki Ujikane, a former regional taxman, Michiko Watari, a psychiatrist, Noriko Endo, a professor at Keio University, and Tateshi Higuchi, a former police superintendent in Tokyo.
The government hopes that all nominations will be approved during the ongoing legislative season, which ends on Dec. 9. However, there are a couple of opposition parties that might oppose these nominations, as Jiji Press reports. However, the reasons why the opposing parties would object to the government’s decision is still not specified.
A Difficult Job Ahead
The people who get elected and form the committee will have no easy job. In fact, one of the main things they will have to do is select applicants for the three planned integrated resorts. In other words, they will have to choose who gets the license — and that’s no easy thing to do, especially now that there are many interested parties, and some of them are world-class operators with close ties to the most powerful people on the planet.
Therefore, a lot of pressure is going to be put on the committee, which will have to choose what’s best for Japan and its residents.
After a long period of empty talk, the Country of the Rising Sun finally decided to take the first step towards creating a casino market back in July 2018 when it prepared the legislative basis for three initial integrated resorts. Many operators are in the game, and some of them are offering big money to put their respective offers in front of the competition.
However, some of them seem to have started worrying that these promises might be too much after all.
