Japan gaming advisor Toru Mihara argues that the Japan Casino Regulatory Commission (JCRC) is regulating on matters that he says they don’t yet understand. Mihara was among the presenters of the Japan IR Forum which concluded its two-day run on Thursday.
A panel discussion on the second and last day of the Forum, which included Peter Cohen, David Green, Billy Ng, Brendan Bussman, and Bo Bernhard, provided a mostly upbeat assessment of the future of Japanese IRs. While acknowledging the challenges of an environment in which the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic remains unclear, the speakers all seemed to feel that the underlying potential of the Japanese market would prevail in the end.
The final two sections with Toru Mihara, first on his own and next under questioning from Koji Ishikawa, were harder edged. In contrast to the praise that the Japanese government received from the foreign panel, Mihara made tougher comments about what he saw as the “typical Japanese bureaucratic thinking” he perceives in the draft regulations by the Japan Casino Regulatory Commission (JCRC) as well as indications that they are making rules about matters that he says they don’t yet understand.
