The evening tabloid Nikkan Gendai, a stalwart of train station kiosks with a daily circulation said to be in excess of 1.6 million, spelled out in a recent article the conspiracy theory regarding US President Donald Trump and the establishment of IRs in Japan that seems to have exercised a degree of influence over the national political debate.

This is, of course, the conspiracy theory of a Japanese tabloid newspaper, and it is based upon little more than speculation and hearsay, but it does seem to represent the basic framework through which some portion of the general public, as well as the political opposition, is viewing the enactment of the IR Implementation Bill.

The three key figures in the story are President Trump, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson.

The story goes that the US president owes a great debt to Adelson for his major financial contributions, which amounted to tens of millions of dollars for the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Trump allegedly repaid this favor in part by encouraging Abe to legalize casinos and to give Adelson a big part of the business. Abe’s November 2016 and February 2017 meetings with Trump in the United States are supposedly when these requests were relayed.

A more recent development, based on the testimony of an anonymous economic reporter, goes as follows: “President Trump wants to enhance Adelson’s financial support in the US midterm elections in exchange for casino legalization in Japan. The autumn will be too late for that. It will be a big problem if the bill isn’t enacted in the current Diet session. It is reported that Adelson has already donated $30 million for the midterm elections.”