Takayoshi Kim still remembers exactly what he thought when they built the swimming pool for the 2020 Summer Games in the Tatsumi-no-Mori Beach Park. “It’s a waste, I thought,” he says and laughs. He lives in the neighborhood between the port, motorway bridges and greenery. The Tatsumi district in Tokyo’s Koto district is a strange mixture of idyll and the noise of traffic, but Takayoshi Kim, a blond-haired poodle owner in flip-flops and slacks, is amused enough to see the good in this contradiction. He has long made friends with the Tokyo Aquatics Center, which towers in the background like a huge, dark foreign body. He saw the games on television “because we couldn’t go ourselves” and found them to be an advantage for his business too. Kim is a taxi driver. He drove participants and employees of the event. He can’t complain anymore. “As a result, it was good that the games were there.”
Tokyo in winter after the summer pandemic games. What was? What remains? One year longer than planned, the metropolis was adorned with the Olympic and Paralympic symbols. Mighty tubular steel grandstands were part of the cityscape, on which hardly anyone was allowed to sit in the end. After the postponement from 2020 to 2021, Japan’s people were plagued by a festival that actually did not fit their security requirements due to the corona virus.
The taxi driver Takayoshi Kim in front of the Aquatics Center in Tokyo.
(Photo: Thomas Hahn / oh)
The final cleanup is now underway. The powerful wave of infections Japan experienced during the Games has ebbed. The emergency declaration was lifted at the end of September. The number of infections is low. Almost 80 percent of the 126 million Japanese are fully vaccinated. Everyone continues to wear their masks everywhere. And you have the feeling that after the whole pre-Olympic dispute, the negative polls and sharp expert warnings, the majority doesn’t want to follow up any longer. But tick off what was and look peacefully ahead.
The “Tokyo 2020” signs were recently removed from City Hall. The provisional stages have disappeared. Excavators are digging up the ground next to the swimming pool in Tatsumi, where a few months ago buses drove up and work containers were lined up. What is being done there? “Koen,” replies an old security guard curtly, “Park.” The Tatsumi-no-Mori Beach Park is getting some of its green back. Tatsumi resident Kim is not the only Tokyo resident who, in retrospect, doesn’t think the games are that bad. When Toshiro Muto, the managing director of the Tocog Organizing Committee, came to a conclusion before Christmas, which of course turned out to be positive, there were hardly any counter-arguments.
Olympic enthusiast from career paths: Toshiro Muto, Managing Director of the Tocog Organizing Committee.
(Photo: Sho Tamura / Aflosport / Imago)
Toshiro Muto, 78, once a finance officer and vice chairman of the Japanese central bank, was something of a rock in all phases of the game outrage. He seemed steadfast in a gentle way. And so it is at his press conference after the Tocog board meeting in the young high-rise forests of Harumi, not far from the Olympic Village. Organizing the games didn’t cost quite as much as estimated after the postponement, he reports. $ 13.6 billion instead of $ 15.4 billion. Thrift and the fact that no spectators were allowed would have had an effect. “That is proof of our diligence,” says Muto, “I think we can be proud of that.” What remains of the games? “The fact that we delivered the Games in these difficult circumstances is a legacy in itself.”
There has never been anything like the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021. The postponement was a strange feat. To go through with the event a year later, all the more so. Instead of athletes, everything revolved around the corona virus, so that the International Olympic Committee and fellow campaigners such as the Japanese marketing group Dentsu could fulfill their contracts with television rights holders and advertising partners. Protection against infection was more important than face-to-face encounter and participation.
Even without freedom, Olympia is a formidable television program
There were: no spectators, no going out for international journalists and other guests, invitations for everyone who did not necessarily have to come, the request to participants to leave the Olympic Village as soon as possible after the event. In addition: continuous mask requirement, safety clearances, constant tests, partition walls. There was no other way. Had the Japanese organizers not enforced the restrictions so consistently, the games would actually have become the global virus-thrower that experts and other critics feared.
In this respect, Toshiro Muto is already right: Tokyo 2020 has shown that, against all concerns, you can dim the world’s largest sports festival so that it floats past a global health crisis like your own planet. In other words: even without freedom, the Olympics broadcast a formidable television program. For Olympic sutlers, this may be comforting. For people who value freedom, it’s rather scary. And various medical professionals continue to deny that the games this summer were a really good idea.
The pictures look good even without a spectator: Here the Kazakh gymnast Alina Adilkhanova.
(Photo: Antonin Thuillier/AFP)
For example Masaya Takahashi, head of the Tachikawa Sougo Hospital. He was always against the Olympics. He’s not reconciled and he wants to follow up. “When I read that the authorities were calling the Olympic Games a success, I couldn’t stop being angry,” he wrote via email when asked. He recalls the great wave of infections in August with more than 5000 new corona cases per day in Tokyo alone, the overstrained health system and the government’s requirement that Covid-19 patients without a severe course should generally not go to hospital. His house had to refuse sick people every day. “In Tokyo, more than 30 people died at home in August without receiving any treatment,” writes Takahashi.
Naoto Ueyama, chairman of the Japanese Doctors’ Union, still thinks his criticism is correct. In mid-May, his organization wrote to the then Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to cancel the games due to the risk of infection and the risk of new mutated corona strains emerging at the world sports festival. An exaggeration? Not at all, thinks Ueyama. “Our work was important.” She contributed to the protection against infection “because afterwards public viewing projects were canceled and awareness of the risks of carelessness was sharper again”. Ueyama continued, “When infection control measures needed to be stepped up, the Tokyo government and city council failed to take appropriate infection prevention measures because they publicly announced that the Olympics were safe and secure.”
Leading medical professionals still assure today that their criticism of the Olympics was correct
At the time, the media reported more about Japanese medal wins than about the new negligence. For Ueyama, these are the reasons for Japan’s record wave of infections during the Games: “It is impossible to scientifically quantify the impact of the Olympics on the fifth wave. But it is clear that the number of infections and deaths in the fifth wave would be without the Olympics Games and having strict infection control measures against the delta strain would have been significantly lower. “
After all, as things stand, there were no new coronavirus mutations because of the games. I was lucky, says Naoto Ueyama. His Olympic message sounds very different from that of Toshiro Muto. The medical professional finds, “According to the Olympic Charter, high-risk Olympic Games should not be held at a time when a pandemic is breaking out and people around the world are suffering.”
That sounds like a story with no happy ending. It goes without saying that Tokyo’s Olympic drivers want to tell a completely different story. Campaign posters hang in Kokuritsu-Kyogijo Metro Station in Kasumigaoka Tokyo Forward. The metropolitan government is thus cultivating the memory of the games as a stage for inclusion, environmental technology, sustainable urban development, infection control, sports education and human warmth. Outside, the renovated national stadium is in the winter sun. The high fences that surrounded it for a long time before the opening of the Olympics are gone. You can stroll under the wood-paneled grandstands past young trees across the wide forecourt. Idyll in the middle of the huge city. That is rare.
Photo wall of Japan’s Olympic starters in the Olympic Museum in Tokyo.
(Photo: Thomas Hahn / oh)
And in the Olympic Museum, across the street, you can see the smiling faces of the Japanese Olympic team. A photo wall honors Nippon’s athletes. A small exhibition shows shoes and jerseys, in which some of them had their very own personal gaming experience. Everything here pays homage to the madness of pulling through the games. And to the question: Would it really have been better if they hadn’t happened?
In any case, Takayoshi Kim in Tatsumi is no longer upset, even if there are still good arguments to speak of waste. The construction of the Tokyo Aquatics Center cost the metropolitan government 56.7 billion yen, the equivalent of 436.2 million euros. According to information from the newspaper Asahi she expects an annual loss of 638 million yen (4.9 million euros) from the post-Olympic operation. With the exception of the Ariake Arena volleyball hall, none of the six sports facilities that were newly built for the games will generate an annual profit, according to forecasts. But you can’t scold forever. “I like the swimming pool,” says Takayoshi Kim. He laughs. Not liking them is of no use any more.
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