Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Conservative politicians in Japan seem to be unified on the position that the Japanese people—both at the national level and the local level—should have zero say on whether or not multi-billion dollar casino resorts should be built in their communities.
Both the 2016 IR Promotion Act and the 2018 IR Implementation Act were passed at the National Diet in clear defiance of public opinion and all of the opposition parties save Osaka-based Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party).
The notion, we must presume, is that conservative and rightwing politicians know better what is good for the Japanese nation than the Japanese people themselves. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe once made comments in 2015 in relation to his security legislation that essentially said as much.
More recently, we have learned that the mayors of Japanese cities where the huge Integrated Resorts (IR) including casinos may be sited (profoundly altering the nature of these communities for both good and ill) also believe that such weighty decisions cannot be entrusted to those residents whose lives will be most impacted.
Former Yokohama Mayor Fumiko Hayashi established what has now become the pattern: After citizen anti-casino campaigners collected something like three times the number of signatures needed to put a popular referendum on the agenda, she reversed earlier statements she had made and declared that a referendum was too expensive and entirely irrelevant. The ruling conservatives in the City Council then voted the IR referendum initiative down.
In some measure of justice, Hayashi lost her reelection bid precisely over her disingenuous, undemocratic IR policies.
But this week Wakayama Mayor Masahiro Obana followed suit, making essentially the same arguments as Hayashi against a referendum in his city, garnering the support of conservative members of the City Council to kill the referendum initiative.
Only the Japan Communist Party, it would seem, believes in grassroots democracy, as they supported the notion that a majority of the people should decide whether or not a multi-billion dollar casino resort should be located in their small city of some 350,000 residents.
A similar referendum movement is now underway in Osaka—though no one is in any doubt about the committed pro-IR stance of Mayor Ichiro Matsui and the policy position of locally dominant Osaka Ishin party that he leads.
The only local jurisdiction where we don’t hear much about a referendum is Nagasaki, which also happens to be the only prefecture in Japan where a plurality of the public seems to be in favor of IR construction, according to local newspaper polls.
The truth of the matter is that building a major IR will bring both benefits and drawbacks to local communities, and for the most part both sides of the Japanese debate are routinely dishonest about this fact.
Nevertheless, it has become very difficult to the tolerate arguments of pro-IR forces who—whether they admit it or not—believe that they are a superior elite whose judgments should overrule democratic majorities. It’s especially galling when these same people have personal career and financial interests staked on getting their own way.
Construction of some IRs in Japan might, on balance, bring more benefits than drawbacks in many cases, but the democratic consent of the local people should be a precondition for such experiments to be launched.
If the conservative elite fears and opposes referendums, it only shows their lack of faith in ordinary people and their own powers of democratic persuasion. They deserve to meet failure, as did Mayor Hayashi.
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Source: Akihabara News – You Say You Want a Referendum
