After a year and a half of stress and tension due to the COVID-19 crisis, the “2020” Tokyo Olympics are finally here. I traveled from Gunma to Tokyo so I could experience the event up-close, or as close as I can get, and report on it to everyone. Let’s learn more about Japan’s strange, cursed Olympic games!
Japan Won the Olympics with “Omotenashi”
In Japan, the career considered to represent the pinnacle of grace and beauty for females is a TV announcer, a stylish and intelligent woman who can elegantly report the news and even interview famous guests from abroad using foreign languages. One of the most celebrated of these announcers was Christel Takigawa, the half-Japanese, half-French Fuji TV announcer who is celebrated even more for speaking fluent French. When it came time for Japan to make its bid to host the 2020 summer games in Tokyo in 2013, her promise of omotenashi (hospitality) won the judges over. Tokyo was chosen as the site of the games and Takigawa was hailed by the nation for her efforts.
And so it was that just two years after Japan suffered one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, Tokyo’s second Olympic games had been decided. That’s great news, right?
Anime fans were extra happy about Tokyo being chosen as the site of the 2020 Olympics, because it fulfilled a prediction made in Katsuhiro Otomo’s influential manga and animated film Akira, with events set during the construction of the Olympics stadium in Neo Tokyo. Having such a famous fictional event become real seemed perfect. In Japan, every owner of a shop, restaurant, or bar spent thousands of dollars to renovate their space so they could serve the huge rush of foreign visitors that would be showing up as part of the Olympics.
The Cursed Olympics
Things got off to a rocky start almost immediately. The logo that had been designed had to be withdrawn due to accusations of plagiarism. The original plan to renovate the old 1964 Olympic Stadium rather than build a new one had to be scrapped, and the government scrambled to finalize a stadium design that could be built on time and within their budget. Several Olympic staff members were forced to resign for making inappropriate comments in public. A stadium worker committed suicide due to overwork. The guy who composed the Opening Games theme had to resign. And so on…
Then the unthinkable happened, with the sudden appearance of a new virus from Wuhan, China. While all of us were struggling with social distancing and wearing masks in public, the Tokyo government was desperately trying to form a plan that would allow the Olympics they’d spent so much money and human capital on to go forward. But there was no way around it: the 2020 Olympics would be moved to 2021.
Want to see what Tokyo was like in March 2020? I’ve got a blog post for you!
Government Ignores Demands to Stop the Olympics
With the arrival of vaccines, everyone breathed easy, assuming that things would be back to normal in time for the summer games. But while vaccinations went extremely smoothly in the U.S., rolling them out has been a much more challenging process in Japan, a country where one in four people is over the age of 60. (Mrs. J-List and I finally got our first doses two weeks ago.)
Without a faster rollout of vaccines, the number of new COVID cases has steadily climbed as the date for the games got closer, forcing Tokyo to issue new emergency declarations and require bars to close and restaurants to stop serving alcohol. Finally, at the breaking point, there was a mass uprising of Twitter users who demanded that the government #CancelTheOlympics, if they couldn’t be held in a way that wouldn’t turn Tokyo into a super-spreader event.
And yet, the show must go on. While I understand the frustration the average Japanese person — who can’t even order a beer at his favorite bar — feels, I also know that whenever money is budgeted for a project in Japan, that project must go forward no matter what. Such a huge mass of people moving towards a goal is sometimes unstoppable.
Another aspect of the Olympics is how very much Japan loves to dress herself up for foreign visitors, who will oo! and ah! at how beautiful and technically advanced Japan is. With no foreigners coming in because of the lockdowns and travel restrictions, that aspect of the games is out the window, but at the very least Japan can do its best to look good in front of the world on television.
Thanks for reading this post on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Best of luck to your country’s athletes, and may we all have fun and get through this safely.
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