September push by local business for Nagasaki casino

Aug 01, 2019 Newsdesk Japan, Latest News, Top of the deck  

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Local entrepreneurs in Japan’s southwestern prefecture Nagasaki (pictured) say they will soon give new impetus to their drive to have one of the first casino resorts in Japan built there. In that country such facilities are known as integrated resorts or “IRs”.

Sasebo city’s business council and an allied body, the Nagasaki Marine IR Promotion Council, issued jointly on Thursday a written statement saying they will make new efforts in September. The statement said the public and private sectors would work together on them.

In June at an event called the Kyushu-Nagasaki IR Business Connect seminar in Sasebo that was attended by GGRAsia, the governor of Nagasaki, Hodo Nakamura, said his area was one of the “most advanced” in Japan in terms of garnering public support for the idea of hosting a casino resort.

The first of the new private-sector initiatives in support of the idea will be an open seminar to help companies draw up business plans to use their resources to develop long-lasting relationships with operators of casino resorts.

The Sasebo Chamber of Commerce and the Nagasaki Marine IR Promotion Council expect 50 to 100 Nagasaki business people to attend.

The speakers will be representatives of vendors that already do business with international operators of casino resorts. Those speakers aim to help the audience come up with plans for building relationships with operators of casino resorts and ultimately to engage with them.

The second new effort will be a digital presentation by the chamber and the marine body, aimed at existing casino resort operators.

It will explain in detail the ideas the chamber and council have about how the operators of casino resorts can engage with Nagasaki businesses.

Staffing, training and local procurement will be covered, with a view to operators of casino resorts including in their strategies aspects of what they hear and see in the presentation.

Representatives of companies belonging to the Sasebo Chamber of Commerce and the Nagasaki Marine IR Promotion Council will have the chance to speak directly to the operators of casino resorts.

In June, GGRAsia’s Japan correspondent outlined that the governors of Nagasaki and the other six prefectures on the southwestern island of Kyushu had jointly declared themselves in favour of a casino resort in Nagasaki.

In April, the operator of the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo and the governments of Sasebo and Nagasaki prefecture struck a deal to have land at the theme park reserved to enable construction of a casino resort there.

To begin with, a maximum of three places in Japan will be allowed to have casino resorts.

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