Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Voters have decisively rejected plans to build an Integrated Resort (IR) including a casino at Yamashita Pier by electing opposition-supported university professor Takeharu Yamanaka as mayor by an unexpectedly wide margin.
In a field of eight candidates, Yamanaka gained 33.6% of the vote, well ahead of Hachiro Okonogi, the experienced politician backed by the prime minister, who gained 21.6% of the vote.
Performing much weaker still was incumbent three-term Mayor Fumiko Hayashi, who emerged with only 13.1%, nearly falling to fourth place.
Analysts agree that Yamanaka’s uncompromising anti-casino stance was one of the keys to his impressive victory. While Okonogi also said that he would cancel the Yamashita Pier IR bid due to its unpopularity, he left a lot of ambiguity about his precise plans for the future, and this may have weighed against him in some voters’ minds. Meanwhile, Hayashi’s openly pro-IR stance and the disingenuous way that she had conducted it doomed her reelection bid.
Other major factors contributing to Yamanaka’s victory were his keen focus on Covid pandemic control and possibly the desire on the part of some voters to send a message of protest to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, whose electoral district is in Yokohama city.
Upon his victory, Yamanaka did address the IR issue, saying, “We will issue a formal statement soon making it clear that Yokohama will not make a hosting bid.”
Thus it is believed just a matter of time before Yokohama formally withdraws its existing IR plans. Hotel and entertainment facilities may still be built at Yamashita Pier, but a casino will not be included.
Genting Singapore and Melco Resorts & Entertainment led the two business consortiums that were still in the running in Yokohama as of election day.
The departure of Yokohama will leave only three candidate locations in the race for the three available IR licenses—Osaka, Wakayama, and Nagasaki—all of them in western Japan.
None of these other bids are in a particularly good place at the moment either, with Osaka and Wakayama both having selected their operator consortiums from only a single applicant (MGM Resorts in Osaka’s case and Clairvest in Wakayama), and the Nagasaki bid was recently hit by a series of dramatic allegations of misdeeds.
Japan’s entire IR development scheme, though formally approved and written into law, has suffered one major blow after another since 2019.
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