2023 | 7 min read
The heat and humidity rarely get to me anymore. That’s because I’ve learned to copy all the summer habits of the strolling Tokyoite. Some of these are obvious: wear single layers, walk in the shady bit. Others rely on site-specific knowledge: go underground, make detours through air-conditioned buildings. Others seem counterintuitive: keep moving at a steady pace – this generates airflow around the body and gets you to your destination faster – and don’t just freaking stand there taking a rest or gawping at something out of the ordinary.
One time though, something out of the ordinary stopped me in my tracks. While walking in the hills above Nakameguro, I heard shouts from an overpass above. Shielding my eyes from the Sun, I could just about make out the backs of two heads up there, a woman and a man, both waving. Waving, shouting, standing still, during the day, on a street, on a bridge: none of these are normal Tokyo behaviours.
Another man stopped beside me to register the commotion. The shouts had risen in pitch and now sounded more like cheers. Is there something going on, I said, turning to this man. Definitely seems to be, he replied, while weighing up several possible explanations. It’s probably the Olympics, he said finally, before shrugging and continuing on his way.
Right, the Olympics. It had, after all, been a topic of conversation for some years and was bound to happen eventually. The cheers grew louder. Some kind of motorcade seemed to be passing overhead. A helicopter swam into view and drowned out the cheers with its rotors. I took the man’s lead and continued walking, but the road was unfamiliar. I stopped at a hobbit’s cottage of a police box and asked for directions to Daikanyama. The cop stepped outside and politely pointed the way, but his eyes seemed to fix on me for an unusually long time.
Have you heard the news, I said to my wife that evening: the Olympics have started. Turn on the TV, she said. Sure enough, NHK was broadcasting the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games. Against the mosaic backdrop of an empty stadium, two men in lycra were battling to recreate a set of pictograms. My wife and I smiled. It was entertaining. And even when it wasn’t, something else quickly took its place.
The ceremony was a kind of variety show performed live to a global audience, the ideal stage for Japan to show what it does best, from quirky humour to subdued elegance to heartfelt emotion. Later, every Japanese person I meet will mention the opening ceremony as a source of embarrassment. They don’t want to be the world’s quirky cousin. They long to be equal among nations, big hitters. They wanted to see a million paper cranes dancing in unison. They wanted to see a cyborg Shohei Otani smash a home-run over North Korea. I’d like to keep you as my quirky cousin, I wanted to say.
It was now the turn of Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, to make a speech. Bach strode purposefully to the podium like a global CEO about to address an underperforming regional branch. He shared visions of sacrifice, higher purpose, helping others achieve their dreams. He surveyed his minions and saw only blank faces. Well then, he’d just have to say it again. He spoke for a long time. My wife began to fidget. The interpreters changed shifts. Bach was drowning in his own speech now. Flailing, he circled back to his core themes. We do this for others, not for ourselves. Think of the athletes. Think of the children, the athletes in waiting. Think of the athletes yet to be born. Guys, help me out here. OK, raise a hand if you agree. Nope? You with the flag, wave it. See, she gets it. Everybody gets it, right?
Somewhere in the city, there was a firework display. I made a note of the Olympics, but then promptly forgot about it the next day. Tokyo was, after all, too big to comprehend. You could only stay sane by screening out most of it. If the Olympics could be successfully hidden anywhere, it was here.
The 2020 Olympics were already 12 months behind schedule and backrooms had been busier than usual cutting deals to ensure the games would actually take place. Political legacies were at stake. The national advertising agency had pressed all of its corporate clients into meaningless sponsorship arrangements. The broadcasting rights had been sold to the highest bidders. Yet the venues stood empty, still too dangerous to enter. Like most political decisions felt to be just that bit too important, the Olympics would have to take place behind closed doors.
Japan’s borders remained sealed, but passage was granted to athletes and their entourages. I didn’t see any evidence of their presence, let alone any sporting action, possibly because I work from home and I’m just not that interested in sports. But in the second week, I decided it was time to head out into the city and capture something of the social history of the games.
The nearest Olympic venue was the equestrian park. Known locally as Baji-kōen, it had long been a public park with horse-riding as one of the attractions. Now though, the entire park was sealed off behind walled partitions and guarded by private security men. Not far away, local residents sipped iced lattes and fanned themselves with handkerchiefs in a branch of Starbucks. “That Bach-san is unbelievable,” more than one person told me. “We didn’t have tickets anyway,” became something of a theme. “I personally don’t care, but I wanted my kids to see it.”
You could sense disapproval of a party in the neighbourhood that was fanned further by annoyance at not being invited. The business model of the Olympic movement trades in scarcity. Its key margin is the human lifespan. Look on this while you can, it says, you won’t be seeing it again in your lifetime. Who could turn down a ringside seat at history in the making? By this point, most people couldn’t care less, but they wanted their kids to see it.
The other prize being dangled is national rebirth. This is what Tokyo had really signed up for as a host city. Its citizens had been proud of, but had now possibly grown weary of hearing about, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and how those famous Games had both presaged and confirmed the rebirth of the nation, making it alright again to be Japanese. Those industrious Showa folk with their expressway-building in no time! If only they’d stop reminding us though.
Once again, Japan needed a new year zero, an escape from its own past. It got one, but it happened out of sight and at double the sticker-price. The majority of Tokyoites wanted the Games cancelled, and indeed this would have been the wise decision, the “event” being more about the anticipation and the buildup, the monumental reset promised by that elegantly proportioned figure of 2020, than any feats an actual human athlete could muster.
It’s now two years later and the 2020 Olympic Games have no real legacy to speak of, unless you count the various corruption scandals that have since done the rounds. (A depressing yet all-too-familiar outcome in Japan, where backroom dealing is often the price of social cohesion.) The equestrian park remains closed off to the public. The official merchandise has been stashed away as an investment strategy. In place of any formal Olympic legacy, Tokyo now radiates a beguiling sense of peace-with-itself and breathes an audible sigh of thank-god-it’s-over.
Freed from the burden of making history – something it was never that good at anyway – Tokyo bristles with a spirit of anything-goes. The page has been turned to a chapter not written, a time of maybe just seeing how things go for a change. There’s renewed interest in living well, in focusing on the small things. Big goals will have to wait. All expos are off, and there’s zero public appetite for yet another multipurpose skyscraper. Meanwhile, the construction boom continues. But it’s based on plans drawn up during the 2010s, the heady tens, an era that increasingly seems like a fever-dream.
The new spirit of freedom, of tending to the self, looks set to continue and could even come to define this decade. That is, until the day some new political figure emerges from the provinces, some determined and slippery charlatan with a claim on the nation, some well-greased backroom-dealer ready to proclaim that what this country really needs, if it’s ever to recapture its former glories, is another Olympic Games.
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