What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there, and senior citizens in Japan are profiting from it.

An elderly daycare centre in the Japanese capital of Tokyo, Day Service Las Vegas, has adopted a winning formula to keep its residents entertained with casino-style games, such as poker and pachinko slot machines.

“This place is the best. They have games. It’s great,” Yusai Urazumi, 92, said as he played poker with friends on Thursday.

Urazami begins his mornings with stretching exercises and a health check before rolling up to the cards table.

Gambling is illegal in Japan and no actual money changes hands, but the players say they participate for the sheer pleasure.

“Even if you don’t understand the game, it’s fun to play,” said Katsuko Kikuchi, 86, as she took a break from a round of mahjong at an automated table.

Kaoru Mori, president and director of ACA Next, which runs Day Service Las Vegas, said a visit to a Las Vegas casino hotel during a research trip to study seniors’ care facilities in the United States inspired the programme.

“A lot of elderly were playing so cheerfully and that made me think, ‘I wish I could bring that type of joy back to Japan,'” Mori said.

Demand for senior care institutions is growing in Japan, where almost 27 per cent of the population was older than 65 in 2015, the government says.

There are 15 senior Day Service Las Vegas centres in Japan, two of them in Tokyo, the company website showed.

SEOUL – Membership of North Korea’s ruling dynasty brings enormous privilege, but for anyone who falls foul of the power games there is a potentially fatal price to pay.

The assassination of leader Kim Jong-Un’s elder half-brother Jong-Nam in Malaysia is likely to leave other estranged and exiled relatives casting some increasingly anxious glances over their shoulders.

Chief among them is the murdered man’s son Han-Sol, who lived in exile with his parents in the Chinese territory of Macau, and who with his impeccable bloodlines could be seen as a rival figurehead in a state roiled by bloody purges.

“As Kim Jong-Un’s reign of terror continues, some elites in Pyongyang have started to think about possible alternatives,” said Koh Young-Hwan, a former North Korean diplomat who is now a Seoul-based commentator on North Korea affairs.

“So Kim Jong-Un must have concerns about such figures. Now Jong-Nam is dead, you can say his son is also in great danger.” Han-Sol, 21, is believed to have graduated from his studies at the Science Po University in France but his current whereabouts are unknown.

Some analysts believe China was keeping the family under its wing in case it needed a friendly figure to serve as replacement leader in the event of upheaval in the North.

“China has been protecting Jong-Nam and his family. Therefore, he was detested all the more by the North’s leader”, said Kim Sung-Min, a high-profile defector who operates an anti-Pyongyang propaganda radio station in Seoul.

Back in 2012, when at school in Bosnia, Han-Sol labelled his uncle Kim Jong-Un a “dictator” in an interview in which he appeared bright and articulate and hinted at a future role in his homeland.

“I have always dreamed one day I will go back and make things better, make it easier for all the people there,” he said.

“My dad was not really interested in politics,” Kim said when asked why his father was passed over for the dynastic succession in favour of his younger brother.

Ahn Chan-Il, a former North Korean military official and the head of the World Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul, said that after the death of Jong-Nam, his son now had a target on his back.

“He has remained quiet for a couple of years after criticising the North once. But now that his father has been poisoned to death, he will start speaking out again some day to criticise the regime,” he said.

The Kim family tree is littered with figures who met violent deaths or were forced into exile after being marked out by a regime which has never loosened its grip on power in three generations.

Jong-Nam’s death evoked the fate of Jang Seong-Taek, a one-time number-two and uncle of the young ruler, who was executed in Pyongyang in 2013 for treason and corruption in a brutal display of who was now in charge.

Jang is known to have served as Jong-Nam’s protector and provider, bankrolling the playboy’s profligate life style.

The Malaysian assassination may be straight out of the pages of a spy novel, but North Korea has a long history of spectacular targeted killings including a 1968 commando attack on South Korea’s presidential Blue House.

Yi Han-Yong, Kim Jong-Nam’s cousin, was shot dead by two assassins in 1997 outside his home near Seoul after he defected in 1982 and published a memoir revealing details of the Kims’ private lives.

Others have been sent packing despite posing no apparent challenge.

Kim Jong-Un’s uncle, 62-year-old Kim Pyong-Il, has been living in quasi-exile for the past three decades, mostly in Eastern Europe.

Currently serving as ambassador to the Czech Republic, he was once tipped as the North’s next leader.

“It’s long been a taboo to talk about him and any official who tries to befriend Pyong-Il is subject to punishment”, said the defector Kim.

Jong-Un’s brother Jong-Chul, 35, is also known to be living in near-exile, travelling abroad and keeping a discreet distance from politics. He was spotted watching British rockstar Eric Clapton perform in London in 2015.

South Korea’s spy chief said last year that Jong-Chul was living “in internal exile under tight surveillance” and was abusing alcohol and suffering from poor mental health.

“Although Jong-Chul is older than Jong-Un, it is highly unlikely that he will play any significant role in the North”, said Thae Yong-Ho, former North Korean deputy ambassador to London who defected to the South last year.

“Had he been born to an ordinary family, he might have become a good guitarist”, he quipped.

SHANGHAI – China is closely following US President Donald Trump’s plans to create more domestic jobs by encouraging US companies to bring home or “reshore” their overseas production, but the government will not change its overall strategy, Industry Minister Miao Wei said on Friday. “Regarding President Trump’s efforts to revitalise US manufacturing and allow more US companies to move back to the United States, we are paying close attention to these policies but they will not affect the development of China’s manufacturing industry,” Miao said at a press briefing.

He said China would continue to encourage foreign enterprises to invest in China while at the same time encouraging domestic firms to go overseas. “We will not change our goal of opening up to the outside world,” he said.

Worried its export-dependent industries will suffer, China has repeatedly urged global leaders to reject protectionism, which Trump has championed with his “America First” campaign.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Chinese president Xi Jinping likened protectionism to “locking oneself in a dark room” and cutting off “light and air”.

China’s steel sector has been under particular scrutiny, with mills subject to increasing numbers of anti-dumping moves amid accusations that they were selling at less than cost and forcing foreign competitors out of business.

Vice industry minister Xu Lejiang said at the same press briefing on Friday that China’s decision to slash 65 million tonnes of steel capacity last year had already brought prices back up, with a composite index run by the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) rising 76.5 per cent in 2016.

Xu said the total number of loss-making steelmakers fell 51 per cent last year, while overall sector profits rose more than twofold in 2016.

China announced early last year that it would close as much as 150 million tonnes of production over the 2016-2020 period.

TOKYO – Successful hotel chain operator Toshio Motoya doesn’t mind if his denial of a notorious Japanese World War II military atrocity in China drives customers away.

Motoya not only penned a book calling the 1937 Nanjing massacre a lie but proudly displays it in guest rooms of his nationwide chain of APA hotels.

In protest, China and South Korea pulled their athletes from his inns for the Asian Winter Games that begin in northern Japan on Sunday. China has also told its tour businesses to stop cooperating with APA, essentially calling for a boycott.

Motoya has told supporters he “will never withdraw” the book under foreign pressure.

Such an attitude, analysts say, shows how those who whitewash Japan’s modern history are growing more emboldened by what they see as a tacit wink from hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Now in his fifth year in power, Abe makes no secret of his nationalist views. He says Japan must shake off past constraints, including altering its war-renouncing constitution imposed by American occupiers after World War II.

Tamotsu Sugano, an expert on Japanese rightist groups, said hotelier Motoya has close ties with ultra-conservative lobby Nippon Kaigi, or Japan Conference, which has published a dossier calling the Nanjing massacre a “false accusation”.

And while Abe does not question the massacre, he and more than half his Cabinet ministers hold membership in a parliamentarians’ league that supports the group.

“Since he was first elected to parliament, Abe has acted very closely with the core members” of Nippon Kaigi, said Sugano, who has written a book on the organisation.

Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo, says revisionism has been rising among politicians, the business sector and media since the late 1990s.

“Abe has been careful after becoming prime minister, but his firm foothold is these people,” Nakano said, calling him “their flag bearer”.

The prime minister, who once prevaricated over whether Japan’s wartime aggression amounted to “invasion”, has also appointed cabinet ministers with a revisionist bent.

And while Abe has stood by previous government apologies for the war, he said ahead of the 70th anniversary of its end in 2015 that future generations should not have to say sorry.

China says 300,000 people died in a six-week spree of killing, rape and destruction by the Japanese military that began in December 1937.

Some respected academics estimate a lower number of victims, but mainstream scholarship does not question that the incident, known as the “Rape of Nanking,” took place.

Motoya’s book, dryly titled “The Real History of Japan: Theoretical Modern History II,” uses the word “fabrication” to describe Nanjing.

“Revisionists in Japan are seeking to rewrite Japan’s shared wartime history in Asia and promoting an exonerating narrative that ignores what happened,” Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan, told AFP in an email.

Motoya has also come under fire for anti-Semitic comments made in an in-house magazine placed in his Canada hotels, asserting that Jews “control” key sectors of the United States.

His history book has elicited no condemnation from the Japanese government and little from media or broader society.

The nationalist Sankei Shimbun daily has rather applauded the government for “neither pressuring APA hotel nor urging self-restraint”.

The situation in Japan contrasts with Germany, where opinions expressing sympathy for Nazi rule are broadly considered unacceptable and displaying fascist symbols such as the swastika, or denying the Holocaust, are illegal.

Last year, an 87-year-old woman was sentenced to prison for denying that Auschwitz was a death camp.

The lack of vocal criticism over revisionist ideas in Japan, however, does not mean nationalist views resonate widely.

Indeed, voters have bet on Abe mainly for his promise to revitalise the economy. Polls show underwhelming support for his pet project of constitutional revision.

“The rise of China is stoking anxieties and nationalism in Japan, but nationalism doesn’t resonate powerfully among Japanese because they understand what can go wrong,” said Temple University’s Kingston.