Integrated gaming resorts in Japan would be the greatest development for international gaming since Macau. The coming Japanese Diet will hopefully be the one to pass the legislation making it official, though there is no need to jump on an investment trying to anticipate who will win the coveted licenses, sure to be extremely scarce and certainly big newsmakers.

It is generally agreed upon by gaming analysts that the first resorts won’t be online until the middle of the next decade, and that takes into account a strict gaming-industry-only perspective. From what these analysts know about their own industry and how long it generally takes parliaments to do anything to legalize it, 8 years is the accepted ballpark timeline. I see that as a minimum. It will likely take longer because there is no economy more bloated with dead weight in the world than Japan, and this by far.

The next recession—and there will be one eventually, certainly before 2026 when these new resorts are estimated to go live—will likely bring down the entire rickety scaffolding of the Japanese economy and the winners of these licenses may then have to delay their plans while Japan restructures and cleans house. Don’t get me wrong though – even though the monetary and fiscal picture in Japan right now is quite monstrous, Japan will recover. Its people are too resourceful not to and it doesn’t have a totalitarian culture like China. How fast Japan will recover depends on how fast the Japanese government can get out of the way.

My feeling is that since Japan’s government sector is so intensely bloated, when the credit fueling it dries up, it won’t have that much power to interfere in the economic restructuring to follow. It might want to, but it won’t be able to.