Asian casino operator Melco Resorts & Entertainment (MRE) has seriously upped the ante in demonstrating its desire to win a Japanese integrated resort (IR) license.

On Thursday, MRE CEO Lawrence Ho and some of his top execs traveled to Tokyo in a bid to impress upon local officials the company’s fervent desire to land one of the coveted Japanese IR licenses. They achieved this goal in dramatic fashion by pledging to relocate MRE’s corporate HQ from Hong Kong to Japan if its IR bid was successful.

MRE recently established a Japanese subsidiary, MRE Japan, whose staff will be headed up by Japan office president Ako Shiraogawa. But Ho (pictured, center) underscored his personal commitment to the project by saying that if MRE was to win a Japanese license, “Japan would be 100% of my time. I will move here … and move the headquarters to here.”

MRE Japan’s IR project has been given the name The City of the Future, with designers opting for an appropriately “futuristic façade that seamless integrates into the surrounding environment while subtly expressing key motifs in Japanese landscape design.”