Alessandra Tarantino/AP Photo
Mexico's Luis Alvarez releases an arrow at the Yatumenoshima Park Archery Field during the mixed team competition at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, July 24, 2021.
There were no screams or chants to be heard last week, as I walked through a grove of trees near my apartment in Shin-Yokohama, toward Nissan Stadium where an early-round soccer match between Brazil and Côte d’lvoire was underway. Instead, the deafening buzz of male cicadas seeking mates high in the canopy has replaced throngs of cheering humans at the Tokyo Olympics. Near the stadium’s entrance, skateboarders practiced tricks, weaving around couples out for a sunset stroll. Whenever the cicadas took a short break from their frenzied screeching, I heard the murmurs from the noise machine inside the stadium, attempting to simulate the match’s rising tension. But there was no sudden eruption of electronic cheers either, just steady white noise as the match wound down to a 0-0 draw.
Despite a record-shattering number COVID-19 cases in the Tokyo area, the first week of Olympics unfolded with few interruptions. Through careful messaging—Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga insists that the surge has nothing to do with the Games— the Japanese government has tried to persuade residents and the wider public that all the necessary precautions are in place.
It’s been a tough sell.
After Shin-Yokohama, a small district in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, hosted the 2019 Rugby World Cup, city officials were satisfied that that the rugby planning could be modified for Olympic soccer crowds. In the fall of 2019, 70,000 fans came to Shin - Yokohama, a small district 20 miles south of Tokyo, to watch England take on South Africa in the Rugby World Cup final. Singing national anthems loud enough to be heard blocks away, groups of mostly men linked arms, swarmed into the bars near the stadium, and filled nearly every available trash can along the route with Heineken cans. Police parked an empty prisoner transport bus near bars to discourage bad behavior and expedite the removal of any troublemakers. There were few incidents. Japan was ready.
Then the world changed.
If COVID-19 had forced the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics, the jolt could have dented Japan’s opportunity for a swift post-COVID economic recovery. The country had already spent around $27.5 billion, including private sector investments, with television and advertising contracts providing most of the revenues for Japan and the International Olympic Committee that tightly controls every aspect of the Games. So, the IOC’s insistence on going forward with at least a scaled back version of its “exclusive property” is not surprising.
The 83-page contract between Japan and the IOC shows that if Japan were to decline hosting the Olympics, the IOC would not be responsible for any financial reimbursement or insurance payments—and this proviso would apply to any and all future Olympic venues . (Los Angeles lawyers, pay attention.) In a sense, the three-month prelude to the opening ceremony on July 23 was one long game of chicken between Japan and the IOC—and the organization was not going to swerve off the road.
The government’s decision led to weeks of tense demonstrations. The night before the opening ceremony, 23 groups, coming from as far away as Okinawa University—a 3-hour flight—started at Tokyo’s Harajuku train station and walked for one hour toward the National Stadium where the ceremony was held. The crowd of nearly 1,000 people chanted “Go-rin imasugu yamero!” or “Stop the Olympics immediately!” They waved banners and signs calling for the IOC to cancel (chushi) the event. Many belonged to the Zengakuren, a left-leaning student-led organization that has been protesting events as far back as 1960 (when the controversial U.S.-Japan Security Treaty negotiations led to fierce anti-American protests that led to President Eisenhower cancelling a planned trip to Japan).
The 2020 Okotowari (‘rejection’ in Japanese) movement condemned the Olympics’ impacts on Japan. Many Japanese are furious about problems ranging from the astronomical costs to the host city to millions of dollars in corporate sponsor ships, the overworked and under-compensated mostly-student volunteers (they receive a per diem of $9) to the eviction of public housing residents (and the demolition of their homes) to build a new National Stadium. But COVID-19 is their most immediate concern: “Forcibly holding the Olympics during a pandemic in a country where the medical infrastructure is so fragile will surely lead to the collapse of the health care system and many deaths,” the group stated in their Tokyo Olympics Guidebook, a bold and impressive declaration of opposition to the Games.
This Olympics drama is a lose-lose situation for Prime Minister Suga. He has been blamed for not cancelling the Games as well as unnecessarily postponing the vaccine rollout. (My wife and I received our vaccination notice by mail on July 10, as did many others just outside the Tokyo area.) These dual criticisms will haunt Suga, whose frustrating passivity led Yuriko Koike, the head of the Tokyo metro area government, and Yuji Kuroiwa, the head of Kanagawa prefecture south of Tokyo, to take a more active public role during the pandemic. As frustrated as many Japanese voters are with Suga’s unwillingness to unilaterally cancel the Olympics, the IOC, insulated as it is from the host-country politics, appears to have absorbed most of this criticism with little concern.
Nearly everyone who attends pop concerts or closed-circuit televised horse-racing events wear masks, but there’s been growing resentment against these COVID rules. If I go see an audience-capped local concert with my mask on, so the reasoning goes, why can’t I see an Olympic soccer match?
One major reason for Japan’s slow vaccine rollout was that the Japanese government wanted more domestic trials completed before delivering final approval. It may also have been the government’s hope that their own companies could come up with an approved vaccine before Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. (The two major Japanese drugmakers, Daiichi Sankyo and Shionogi & Co, have plans to roll out their own vaccine by the end of the year, with Shionogi hoping to develop a once-a-day pill in the near future.)
IOC President Thomas Bach has declared the pandemic Olympics to be the “most restrictive sports event in the entire world," as if one can immediately calculate the effect of nearly 70,000 people from around the world descending upon Tokyo as the delta variant takes hold.
The Olympic Village bubble is holding, albeit tenuously. The COVID guidelines put in place prevented athletes from arriving at their residences no earlier than five days before their sporting events began. Each morning, athletes are required to spit into a tube and turn it over to Olympic officials for COVID testing. As British diver Tom Daley put it, “no news is good news.” After they finish competing, athletes are only allowed to remain in Japan for two extra days before leaving. So far, the majority of athletes, press, and other credential holders have been following the rules—as far as we know. As of August 2, only 24 athletes have tested positive, as well as more than 220 Olympics personnel and contractors. Japanese residents make up more than half of that group.
Japan’s high sanitation standards likely contributed to keeping the numbers of COVID cases relatively low compared to the rest of the world. In Japan, wearing masks to thwart disease transmission is commonplace. In the winter months before the pandemic, many Japanese residents were already wearing masks to protect themselves from the seasonal flu. To avoid bringing in germs from the outside, nearly all Japanese take off their shoes at the entrance to a home, slide their feet into slippers without touching the floor and then head off to wash their hands. Many people add gargling to this routine. In the streets, it’s not uncommon for me, while walking in Shin-Yokohama , to be overwhelmed by the smell of the chemicals used to clean sidewalks.
Yet even though the country is in a state of emergency, the delta variant is spreading rapidly, and wearing masks is mostly uncontroversial, many Japanese are fed up with other pandemic restrictions. About a 15-minute walk from Shin-Yokohama’s Nissan Stadium is the Yokohama Arena, where 5,000 largely female fans—the maximum number that can attend this event under local COVID-19 rules—lined up to watch J-Pop singer Koichi Domoto perform one of several concerts held as the Olympics got underway. Meanwhile, the nearby Japan Racing Association building is open as usual on the weekends and hundreds of eager, older men wait, betting cards in hand, to gamble on horse racing.
Nearly everyone who attends pop concerts or closed-circuit televised horse-racing events wear masks, but there’s been growing resentment against these COVID rules. If I go see an audience-capped local concert with my mask on, so the reasoning goes, why can’t I see an Olympic soccer match? Domestic spectators can’t attend any outdoor event, but they can sit indoors and listen to a pop group? This mixed messaging has generated nothing but confusion and prompted young people to take to the streets against the hypocrisy of it all.
How much control can the host country actually have when putting on an event which now seems so visibly to have become more of a corrupted corporate venture that must go on at any cost? Tokyo is not the first city that’s confronted massive controversies and faced long-lasting consequences. Crushing debt plunged Montreal into a financial hole that took 30 years to close. A bribery scandal tarnished the Salt Lake City Games. Disused venues dot neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. But the COVID pandemic is arguably one of the most serious threats ever to face an Olympic site.
These Games have certainly been bizarre. The athletes somehow have to find a way to block out the ongoing anxiety of the pandemic, face record-setting summer heat for the outdoor events, and cope with the debilitating stress of fulfilling your country’s expectations at empty locales filled with cameras. Talent and determination are taking a backseat to physical and mental health concerns. As Tokyo has discovered, the initial allure of the Olympics ends up forcing cities to make terrible decisions. It remains to be seen whether the IOC can continue to parachute into countries with an international sports product line that demands extreme sacrifices for an increasingly dubious honor.
