Tokyo 2020 Olympics
The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games, delayed for one year, opened here on Friday, July 23rd. Although some competitions had already begun in the middle of that week, the Opening Ceremony to an almost empty National Stadium began at 10:30 p.m. I intended to watch it on television, but I fell asleep. I woke up at 1:00 a.m. and missed it. Subsequently, I never saw any events broadcast on live TV. Were the Olympics even broadcast? I don’t know. I did see some highlights on the TV news during the last week of July, but not much. When I say “not much,” I mean that in the space of the last seven days of July I watched about 30-seconds of highlights on TV. No kidding.
The International Olympic Committee awarded these Games to Tokyo at its meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina in September 2013, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe himself attended to pitch Tokyo. The Games were supposed to be Abe’s swan song. (He retired early for health reasons in 2020. He would not have been in office beyond 2021 anyway.) They were also to demonstrate to the world Japan’s recovery from the horrible March 2011 mega-earthquake. But at no time did a majority of the Japanese public ever want the Games - the opposite of the prevailing excitement over the 1964 Olympics. The Games were unpopular in 2013, and ever since then right up until the present. Riddled with corruption, incompetence and delays, the process bled money from start to finish. During the July 23rd Opening Ceremony, anti-Olympic demonstrations were taking place on the streets outside that could be heard inside the stadium. Amazing. This whole Olympics thing was Shinzo Abe’s conceit.
Despite an awful coronavirus surge (a Fifth Wave) that happened during the Olympics, the decision was made by the IOC and the Tokyo and Japanese governments to go ahead. Too much money was at stake. The Games are too big to fail. I think many people here just resigned themselves to it. We wanted to get it over with before we lost any more money. But it shows us what the true Olympic values are, doesn’t it? The Olympic Games are less about joy, excellence, friendship and respect as they are about rabid greed and pride. Money.
The true Olympic values are greed and pride.
We should embrace the greed and the pride.
First, the Japanese government declared that overseas visitors (tourists) would not be allowed into the country. Then, the government announced that attendance at Olympic events would be limited to 10,000 spectators. Finally, a total ban on spectators was announced. For years, people hear anticipated a strong shot of adrenaline to the lethargic Japanese economy by spending from all those visitors. Instead, it was an economic disaster. Empty hotels, gift shops full of unsold merchandise, empty restaurants and bars, and all the service industry workers who studied hard to learn English for the foreign guests who never arrived. Shit!
I’ve said many times before that from a purely athletic perspective, the Olympics are entirely superfluous, and maybe even irrelevant. Certainly unimportant. They are not the pinnacle of sports! So long as we have the various (annual) championships and championship tournaments in each sport, why do we even need an Olympics? The Olympic champion and record might or might not be the World Champion and the World Record. It is not the Olympics’ prerogative to set world records and declare world champions. Those are the prerogatives of the World Championships, which the Olympics are not.
Having said that, I admit that I support holding the Olympics. First, because my tax yen were spent on it, and I want my money back, or my money’s worth (even though that can’t happen under the current circumstances). Second because, as I said, I recognize that the true Olympic values are greed and pride. We should embrace the greed and the pride.
The athletes and their trainers, and the media, and the Japanese public were kept in three “bubbles,” not interacting with each other for health safety reasons. I regret that, because my city is a great city, and I would like the world and visitors to see it. That did not happen.
In the summer of 2021, Tokyo was enduring its third “state of emergency” (“kinkyujidai, ” it was announced on Thursday, July 8th and went into effect on Monday, July 12th.) to combat the newest coronavirus infection surge. The state of emergency totally failed to retard the fifth wave, showing us two things: 1) the effective limits of hygiene, social distancing and the crowd avoiding strategy, and 2) the public fatigue with the never-ending emergency. Tokyoites pretty much went about their business freely while the Olympic athletes and media lived in their much stricter COVID control zones. It was a tale of two cities.
On the morning of Friday, July 23rd, the Japanese Air Self Defense Force acrobatic flying team, Blue Impulse, flew over central Tokyo for a time trailing Olympic-themed smoke and flying designs like the five Olympic rings in the sky. It was a cloudy day, though, so the aerial display was pretty mediocre, I thought. But it was exciting to see military jets flying in formation overhead. Every afternoon, civilian commercial passenger jets habitually fly over central Tokyo on approach to landing at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. (Not in the morning or the evening, but only between noon hour and 6:00 p.m.) So, I’m familiar with the sound and timing of those jets. But the Blue Impulse immediately caught my attention because their military fighters are so much louder than commercial jets, and because the time of their overflight was all wrong for commercial aircraft. I suspected what was going on, so I stepped outside to look. I’ve seen US Air Force fighters flying overhead in suburban western Tokyo, near the big Naval Air Station in Atsugi, so I knew their sound and their evil, arrowhead shapes in the sky.
The new Japan National Stadium is a sad disappointment. While it's okay as a stadium, it is tediously dull and mundane, and totally un-inspiring. It's boring! The story of the stadium is a bungled farce. The original, futuristic-looking design by British architect Zaha Hadid was accepted but later rejected for cost reasons. A new, Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, was chosen in December 2015. The original Hadid design was supposed to be finished by August 2019 and available for the Rugby World Cup, held in Japan that autumn, as a kind of dry run for the 2020 Olympics. That goal became impossible when the Hadid design was scrapped and an entire year was spent - wasted, maybe - soliciting new designs and choosing a new architect. When a new architect was chosen, the Olympic narrative changed. Now, everyone praised the stadium’s completion in December 2019 and stopped talking about the original timeline. They tried to make it sound as if everything was on schedule rather than a year behind schedule. The Zaha Hadid model, which somewhat resembled a bicycle helmet, was very exciting. The Kengo Kuma model is definitely not.