Japan has lost far more than it will gain from the Olympics

Nine years ago this week, London was on the verge of hosting the summer Olympics. Where there might have been excitement, however, first there was foreboding.

I know this, because I had spent months arguing in print and on the airwaves in favour of London 2012: to little avail! The doom-mongers were in the ascendant. If anything could go wrong, it surely would. London would be gridlocked – or no one would come. The facilities would be unequal to the occasion; Team GB wouldn’t win any medals. It would rain (which it did for the first couple of days). And when the army had to be called in at the last moment after the security company G4S suddenly admitted it couldn’t recruit enough staff, it looked as though a lot of the pessimism was justified.

Then came the opening ceremony (with the Queen “parachuted” in and the NHS beds), and “Super Saturday” with Team GB’s unimagined success, and the rest is, well, history.

London 2012 remains one of the most successful projections of UK “soft power” in memory, and much of Stratford in east London has been transformed. Alas, what should have been Tokyo 2020 – and a similar boon for Japan – is turning out to be almost an inversion of London 2012.

What was gearing up to be one of the best-planned, best-organised Olympics of recent times has been derailed in every possible way as a result of Covid-19. It cannot even be absolutely guaranteed, as the games open, that they will run their full course.

No less a figure than the head of the organising committee, Toshiro Muto, said he could not rule out cancellation if there were a spike in cases. Depending what happened, he said, “we will think about what we should do”. Nor is his caution misplaced. As the incidence of Covid cases has risen in Japan, so plans for the public to attend have been reduced and reduced. Initially, it was just foreign visitors who were barred; then the number of spectators at individual events. Now, all competitions will take place in front of television cameras alone.

As for the opening ceremony, it is envisaged that fewer than 1,000 will actually attend – in a stadium that can accommodate 70,000. Commercial sponsors have reduced their exhibits and cancelled their television advertising, apparently seeing their involvement as more a liability to their reputation than an asset. They include the biggest sponsor, Toyota.

Senior business representatives have also pulled out of the opening ceremony, citing the absence of members of the public. The opening ceremony, meanwhile, has run into difficulties of its own. Less than 24 hours before the start, its director was sacked over 23-year old footage of a Holocaust “joke”. Kentaro Kobayashi apologised for his “stupid choice of words at that time” and expressed regret. Two others involved in the ceremony had earlier resigned for separate indiscretions. And all this came after the then head of the organising committee, Yoshiro Mori, had resigned in February after saying, essentially, that women talked too much.

The impression left with me is that, for all Japan’s high international profile,  some senior Japanese would benefit from a bit more familiarity with the global norms of today. Most dispiriting of all, perhaps, has been the extent to which the Japanese public – who were once hugely enthusiastic about showing off their country to the rest of the world – have lost faith with the whole project.

As the start of the Olympics neared, polls found that more than half of all Japanese wanted the whole sorry spectacle to be called off altogether for fear that it could become a super-spreader event. With scarcely a day having passed since the athletes started arriving without a smattering of would-be participants testing positive for the virus, they may well feel that their fears are justified.

All in all, if the International Olympic Committee had hoped that by postponing Tokyo 2020 for a year, it could minimise the losses (in every respect) – almost the opposite seems to be true. The pandemic may be starting to subside in the Western world, but it has been spreading again in the Far East. To postpone again, however, was never really on the cards.  

Athletes – whose training and ambitions are geared to the next Olympics – can maybe adjust to a year’s delay. Anything more, however, and many of those who hoped to compete will be ceding their place to the next generation and no longer have the form.

Then there is the international sporting calendar to consider: summer and winter Olympics in different years, two years apart. The football World Cup, the Athletics World Championships. These events are allocated and planned a decade in advance. One delay, and the whole calendar goes awry. Tokyo 2020 had either to be held this year or not at all. In 2024 the flame passes to Paris.

But no one will be deceived. These games will be a travesty of the real thing. Yes, there will still be lively competition; there will be records to beat and medals to win. But it is hard to believe that the empty venues will not detract from the experience – for participants, of course, but it is hard to imagine that the gap where the spectators should be will not dampen the spirits also of those watching on television around the world.

But the biggest losers will be Tokyo and Japan. The Olympics, especially the summer Olympics, provide a showcase for a city, a country and a nation. Until very recently Japan remained, and to an extent still remains, a country that was hard for many people – especially Westerners – to reach. It was hard to navigate once you were there,  not least because of the language, the script and the different way urban spaces and addresses work. And it was, and is, hard to understand: a highly developed country, economically and technologically, with very different presumptions about manners, aesthetics, its place in the world and the spiritual sphere.

Tokyo had an enormous amount invested in the 2020 Olympics. It had hoped to show itself off to the world, to make foreigners feel welcome and make it easier for them to travel around. Japan had hoped in a sense that the Olympics could make their country accessible in a way it had almost never been. All that is lost, and the next such opportunity will not come around very soon.

Over the years, cities have grown reluctant to bid for the Olympics. To be selected, of course, still brings cachet, but the costs are a deterrent to many, as are the risks – whether of a political boycott (Moscow, Los Angeles), of a terrorist attack (Munich, Atlanta) or of resentment on the part of the resident population, for all the pleasure that visitors may take away.

Regrettably, Tokyo 2020/21 will stand in a class by itself: the pandemic Olympics that took place against all the odds, but that should, in a wiser world, perhaps, not have taken place at all.