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Japan and the 2012 London Olympics:Ambitions and Anxieties of a NationAspiring to Reprise Olympic GlorySayuri Guthrie-Shimizua

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To cite this article: Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu (2013) Japan and the 2012 London Olympics: Ambitionsand Anxieties of a Nation Aspiring to Reprise Olympic Glory, The International Journal of the Historyof Sport, 30:15, 1758-1768, DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2013.796454

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The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2013 Vol. 30, No. 15, 1758–1768, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2013.796454

Japan and the 2012 London Olympics: Ambitions and Anxieties of a Nation Aspiring to Reprise Olympic Glory

Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu*

Department of History, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

This essay draws the contours of the Japanese response to the 2012 London Olympics and the Games’ perceived relevance to Japan’s sports administration in the coming decades. The analysis is based on Japanese mass media reports and press commentaries that appeared in Japan’s four leading national dailies (Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri and Sankei) and the Nippon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei; the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) before, during and in the aftermath of the London Olympic Games.

Keywords: Japan; gender; athlete support; social media; infrastructure development

The 30th Olympic Games held in London between July 27 and August 12, 2012 marked a

historic moment for Japan as well as for the modern Olympic movement itself. All 204

nations and regions that sent athletes to the London Games included women among their

ranks for the first time in Olympic history. With women competing in boxing, the last

bastion of male-only Olympism was now gone. For Japan, having sent its athletics to the

1912 Stockholm Olympics as the first nation outside the Europe–American world to do so,

the London Games marked the centennial of its participation in the modern Olympic

Games. Japan’s 293-member national team was the most diverse in age composition,

ranging from 15-year-old swimmer Kanako Watanabe to 71-year-old equestrian Hiroshi

Hoketsu, the most senior of all participants in the London Games.

The 2012 London Olympics brought mixed results to Japan. Before the games began,

the Japan Olympic Committee (JOC) publicly aimed to win 15 gold medals and place fifth

in the national medal count. Neither of these goals was fulfilled, however. Japan won only

seven gold medals – minus two from the Beijing Olympics – and was placed tenth in the

overall medal standings. Yet the JOC emphasised the fact that the 2012 Games were the

most successful in the total number of medals won by Japanese athletes. Collectively

winning 38 medals, Team Japan even outperformed its most successful predecessor

competing in the 2004 Athens Olympics. On August 20, the Japanese medalists’ victory

parade through Tokyo’s Ginza thoroughfare was feted by an astounding 50 thousand

adoring fans. Overall, the JOC considered the 2012 London Games to be a good jumping-

off point for the nation’s brighter future in international sporting competition and a boost

to Tokyo’s on-going bid to host the 2020 Olympics.1

*Email: shimizu@msu.edu

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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The International Journal of the History of Sport 1759

This essay draws the contours of Japanese response to the 2012 London Olympics and

the games’ perceived relevance to Japan’s sports administration in the coming decades.

The analysis is based on Japanese mass media reports and press commentaries that

appeared in Japan’s four leading national dailies (Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri and Sankei) and the Nippon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei; the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) before, during and in the aftermath of the London Olympic Games.

Gendered Competition at the London Olympics

Three key thematic strands quickly coalesced around Japanese media narratives about the

London Olympics, and the most ubiquitous was the prominent role played by female

Olympians from world over. The Japanese press across the ideological spectrum lauded

that all of the 204 nations and regions participating in the games sent female delegates,

including socially conservative Muslim nations Qatar, Brunei and Saudi Arabia. The two

women representing Saudi Arabia received particular notice: 800-m runner Sarah Attar,

a dual US– Saudi citizen and a junior at Pepperdine University, and Wodjan Ali Seraj

Abdulrahim Shahrkani, a 16-year-old who competed in Judo.2 As a key member of the

International Judo Federation, Japan had been intimately involved in the preceding debate

over whether to allow Shahrkani to wear her religiously prescribed head scarf during

Olympic matches. The August 10 edition of Mainichi, Sankei and others also shined a spotlight on the Hijab-wearing 20-year-old Palestinian runner Woroud Sawalha in the

800-m event. The IOC’s adoption of women’s boxing was also widely heralded in the

Japanese mainstream media as an important step forward in achieving true gender equality

in Olympic sports. Thirty-six female boxers representing 23 countries were newly enabled

to bout in three weight classes (fly, light middle).3

Japanese media stories on these historic landmarks in women’s sports edified their

readers that the Olympic movement, despite its rhetoric of universalism, had never been

known for its openness to gender equality. No women participated in its inaugural games in

Athens in 1896. A handful of female athletes began tomake forays after the second games in

Paris, but women remained long excluded from track and field competition, forcing top

female runners to hold their own international meets in 1922 and 1926. Even among the

participants in the previous London Olympics in 1948, only 9.5% were women.4

In his August 21 article, Takayasu Ogura of the Mainichi Shinbun attributed the great stride made in women’s sports in general and in the Olympics in particular to the

determined work of three American women: former tennis Grand Slam champion Billie

Jean King, judo’s Rena ‘Rusty’ Kanokogi and Anita DeFrantz, a member of the IOC. King

famously dedicated her life to equalising prize money in professional tennis and continues

to promote women’s sports and enhance recognition for female athletes through her

foundation. Throughout her competitive career, Kanokogi battled the tradition-bound IOC

as well as her opponents on the judo mats and was instrumental in having women’s judo

adopted as an Olympic event in 1992. Judo’s reluctant embrace of women opened the way

for other contact sports (Taekwando, wresting and boxing). DeFrantz, the former captain

of the US rowing team at the Montreal Olympics, has striven to reform the IOC from

within. In 1986, she became the first American woman to be appointed to the international

organisation and has been a powerful advocate of women’s sports within that exclusive

club of sports officials. Ogura reported that DeFrantz was behind Saudi Arabia’s decision

to let the two female athletes represent the country in the London Olympics.5

Female athletic exploits were also foregrounded in Japanese media reports on the

London Olympics’ #1 medal winner, the USA. In post-game wrap-ups, American women

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were lionised for raking in a total of 58 Olympic medals, far outperforming their male

teammates who collectively won 45 medals. To the universal chagrin of the Japanese

public, the US women’s soccer team won back the top honours after their loss to the

Japanese in the 2011 World Cup. American women also reigned supreme in other team

sports such as basketball. Two teenagers, Missy Franklin in swimming and Gabby

Douglas in gymnastics, won combined six gold medals. These achievements by female

Olympians provided an opportunity for Japanese sport commentators to highlight the

critical role played by the so-called Title-IX in generating equal opportunities for girls and

women to participate in sports in the USA. The Japanese press also variously noted that

women had been also prominent as flag bearers in the London Olympics, highlighting

Professional tennis star Maria Sharapova leading the Russian delegation and war-torn

Somalia’s flag bearer, 400-m runner Zamzam Homamed Farah.6

Japan considered itself at the forefront of this worldwide surge in women’s sports. Of its

293-member national team, 156were women.Four of Japan’s sevengoldmedals werewonby

women. Its flagbearer waswrestler SaoriYoshida,who, alongwith her teammateKaoru Icho,

went on to win her third consecutive Olympic Gold Medal. The Japanese media was also

awashwith a heroine narrative built aroundOhara Hitomi, third wrestling goldmedalist, who

overcame a clinical depression and debilitating injuries.7 Japanese women were also praised

for doing well in team sports, as exemplified in their medal feats in soccer, table tennis,

archery, badminton and volleyball. Women’s Olympic exploits generated press

commentaries, like an op-ed piece by Hideo Tsuchiya in the conservative Nikkei calling for greater use of women’s talents in other social arenas such as the workplace as a key to Japan’s

regeneration.8Also woven into the gendered media narrativewas Japanesemen’s judo.Mired

in hind-bound tradition and fast losing relevance in the internationalising competitive field,

the once-dominant Japanese male practitioners of the sport were widely denigrated for their

inability to bring home a single Gold Medal when their female teammate Kaoru Matsumoto

won Team Japan’s very first. The Japanese government’s plan to institute a multi-faceted

programme to train female coaches and athletic supporting staff received a prominent play as

supplementing a yet-to-be-defined new systemof greater support for women’s sports in Japan

roughly equivalent to America’s Title IX.9

Elite Athlete Training System

Along with women’s athletic prowess at the London Games, the question of elite athlete

training and the government’s role in it wasmost extensively discussed in Japan newspapers’

London Olympic reports. In this national conversation, China, winning 38 gold medals and

placing second in the national medal count, was a frequently cited reference point. Various

pronouncements by China’s Director of State Sport Administration Liu Peng received

prominent coverage. The modernisation of China’s athlete training system, manifest in

scientific training and the aggressive recruitment of foreign coaches, was held up as an

example Japan should follow. The copious state remuneration of Chinese Olympic medalists

and world champions was also a frequent topic, albeit one that was referenced with

ambivalence. Commentators also widely speculated about the long-term impact of the

Chinese government’s decision to allow its top athletes to train overseas.10 The unintended

consequences of the athlete’s greater exposure toWestern liberal values and ways of lifemay

well be a fundamental shift in their worldviews and become a force for welcome change in

China.11

The real focus of Japanese ambivalence about state-driven elite athlete training,

however, was South Korea, which won 13 gold medals in London. Among the sport­

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attuned Japanese, South Korea’s centralised national system of athlete recruiting, training

and rewarding since the 1970s are fairly common knowledge. Although some of South

Korea’s government-funded incentive programmes for elite athletes, such as exemption

from military service or lifetime pensions, were not directly applicable to Japan, their

systematic elite athlete training system was studied extensively when Japan established its

own National Training Centre (NTC) in Tokyo in the new millennium.12

More than the role to be played by direct government subsidies to sports, Japanese press

commentaries at the time of the London Olympics focused on South Korea’s private

corporate donations to elite-level athletics. Examples often cited included South Korea’s

invincible archery team sponsored by the Hyundai Corporation and SK Telecom’s

sponsorship of the national fencing team which won two gold medals. In gymnastics where

South Korea got its first Olympic Gold Medal in London, Posco, a steel manufacturer, was

the key patron. In many cases, the top executives of private corporations are often appointed

to leadership positions in national sports federations, the kind of corporatist model of elite

sport policy that the Japanese press expressed divided opinions.13

The phenomenal rise in Great Britain’s standing in the national medal tables also drew

extensive Japanese press attention. A total of 65 medals claimed by British Olympians (29

gold, 17 silver and 19 bronze) far exceeded anything the Japanese had come to expect of

British athletics for years. The Japanese press was particularly impressed by the way those

British medal hopefuls in such events as bicycling and swimming performed up to their

pre-games reputations and national expectations. The secret of Britain’s success, again,

was identified as a state-sanctioned system of promoting elite athletics. The 1996 Atlantic

Olympics were an ego-crushing experience for British sports because their national team

was able to bring home only one gold medal. To avenge this humiliation, the nation where

modern amateur sports had originated introduced a programme to use revenues from

public lotteries to subsidise elite-level sports. In 2005, London successfully won the right

to host the Olympics, and a national project called Mission 2012 was launched 2 years

later. The British government began spending about 100 million pounds annually to elite

athlete training. UK Sports, an organisation devoted to elite sports also paid about 55,000

pounds a year for medal hopefuls in selected events to cover coaching fees, doctors’ bills,

costs of training camps and overseas tours. The events that received concentrated

allocations such as bicycling, track and field, and rowing produced many gold medals at

the London Olympics. Viewing these shining British records, the Japanese press opinion

appeared unanimous in acknowledging the undeniable reality of global elite sports: money

begets medals and world records.14

In this regard, Russia provided added evidence for the veracity of this equation to

Japanese observers. The erstwhile communist sport superpower won a total of 82 medals

including 24 gold medals, if trailing behind the newly ascendant Britain in the number of

gold medals. For the Russians, at least as Japanese see it, the moment of real humiliation

came at the Vancouver Winter Olympics when their standing in the national medal tables

sank to a humiliating sixth position. With the Sochi Olympics 2 years away, the Russians

were fast revamping their state-supported elite athlete training regime which had all but

crumbled during the post-communism economic transition. As far as the Japanese were

concerned, Russia’s revived system yielded the greatest dividends in London in men’s

judo. Russians won a total of five medals including three gold medals, a far cry from what

their disgraced Japanese opponents were able to do.15

Japanese understood that in the USA, the champion in the national medal count, the

government does not directly interject itself in the business of elite athlete training. The

role of the US Olympic Committee (USOC) is limited to administering and allocating

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privately raised funds among national sports federations clamoring for resources. As in

Japan, the prolonged recession caused a major drop in corporate sponsorships, forcing the

USOC to re-evaluate its allocations and reduce funding for minor sports such as

weightlifting as a result. Track & field, swimming and gymnastics are extremely popular

in the USA thus received lion’s shares of the money and did correspondingly well at the

London Olympics. The Japanese had historically followed this American model of elite

sports, relying almost exclusively on private-sector initiatives.16 One of the lessons of the

London Olympics which Japanese came away with appears to be that this old model must

be jettisoned if Japan was to recapture its place in the sun in international sports.

The push for change had originated before the London Olympics. According to JOC

Vice Chairman Tomiaki Fukuda, Team Japan was able to win medals in a record 13 events

at the London Games in part because of material support given to such ‘minor sports’ as

archery, badminton and fencing. Under a new regime of sports administration since the

enactment of the Sports Law in 2011, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science

and Technology (MEXT) spent 3.2 billion yen to athlete support in 19 medal-hopeful

events (17 summer Olympic events and 2 winter events). Of the 13 events that produced

medals in the London Olympics, Fukuda pointed out, all except weight lifting and boxing

were the recipients of this new government aid.17

Japanese press reports across the ideological spectrum also underscored the importance

of newly available material support in enabling Japanese Olympians’ medal-caliber

performances in London. The improvement in Japan’s elite support training infrastructure

was most visible in the construction of the NTC and the adjacent Japan Institute for Sports

Science (JISS) in northern Tokyo in 2001. The sport complex encompasses covered all-

weather track and field facilities, indoor swimming pools, specialised training sites for judo

and gymnastics complete with lodging facilities for athletes and coaches. About 27 trillion

and 400 million yen went into its construction including the land purchase. It was modelled

after similar national training facilities set up in England in 1951, in South Korea in 1966 and

in Australia in 2008. Sports journalists agreed with the JOC that this government-subsidised

permanent training site was particularly important to chronically under-resourced minor

sports such as archery and fencing.18

Japan was relatively slow to embrace direct government support of elite sports in part

because industrial teams had historically been the main locus of elite-level athlete training.

This model of sport administration worked reasonably well as long as the nation’s upward

economic trajectory kept resources flowing through the system. The slowdown of the

Japanese economy since the 1990s, however, forced many private corporations to terminate

their sports programmes.19 In 1967, there were 237 corporate-sponsored athletic teams, but

the number had shrunk to 87 by 2012. The political momentum for a new, more government-

driven regime originated in this sea change in Japan’s sportscape, culminating in the

legislation of the Sports Law. The 2011 legislation supplanted the 50-year-old predecessor

programme and specifically termed sports administration (both elite-level and mass

recreational) as a domain of government responsibility. With the London Olympics behind

them, the JOC and a caucus of parliamentarians concerned with sports called for the

construction of a new and more comprehensive NTC to support outdoor, winter and water

sports (such as canoeing).20 All of these expansions or new constructions, however, require

the diversion of more tax revenues, a difficult proposition amid the prolonged recession as

an Asahi article pointed out. The enviable performances in London by athletes from rival countries also generated a

discussion among the Japanese press about the system of rewarding Olympic medalists and

other world-class athletes. The JOCgifted 3million yen to London gold medalists, 2million

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The International Journal of the History of Sport 1763

to silver medalists and 1 million to bronze. The Japanese Swimming Federation’s official

corporate sponsors had pledged to pay 30 million yen to gold medalists. But the current

system was still no match for sport superpowers’ similar incentive programmes. One press

report noted that even Singapore had pledged to a gift worth about 8.5 million yen to the

nation’s first Olympic gold medalist.21

Against the backdrop of women’s prominence at the London Games, some Japanese

commentators, mostly women, raised the gender dimension of a new Japanese system that

might be designed to support and reward top athletes. For instance, journalist Keiko

Yashiro pointed out that only one member of the women’s national success squad was

married while eight of the men’s national team were. She saw this ‘marriage gap’ as

indicative of the kind of extra social challenge top female athletes face after retiring from

their competitive careers.22 Work – life balance is hard to achieve for anyone engaged in

elite-level athletic training, but in Japan where the burden of child care and caring for the

elderly tends to fall disproportionately on women, Yashiro noted, perhaps a different kind

of long-term support, rather than one time cash prize, might be more relevant for female

Olympians. Prof. Etsuko Ogasawara of Juntendo University similarly called attention to

the needs unique to female elite athletes involving marriage, child bearing and care, and

pondered how meaning support in these areas might be integrated into the government’s

future sports administration.23

Technology of the Olympics

How new technology is changing the Olympic Games is a third key theme that emerged

from the Japanese media opinion surrounding the London Olympics. The Japanese print

press variously noted how social media such as Twitter and Facebook forever changed the

way Olympics were experienced, both by athletes and their supporters. At the times of

Beijing Olympics, six million people worldwide used Twitters. Facebook was used by 100

million people. The diffusion of high-speed Internet access and smart phones in the

intervening years drastically altered the media environment of the Olympic Games. By the

time the London Olympics opened, there were 140 million Twitter and 900 million

Facebook users, creating a brave new world of experiencing the Olympics multi­

directionally, such as TV viewers and spectators at the competition sites twittering and

sharing their two cents while watching the games.24

The social media also allowed Olympians and fans to interact with each other in new

ways, and Japanese athletes were no exception. According to one survey, of the 293

Japanese Olympians, 125 (or 43%) used the social media tools during the London

Olympics. Fukumi Tomoko of women’s Judo shared with her fans and supporters the

pictures she took from the porch of her room in the Olympic Village. Gold medal hopeful

Kosuke Kitajima was constantly in touch with his 84,000 followers on his Twitter.

To facilitate this new forms of athlete– fan interaction, Yahoo Japan opened a special

Twitter site for the London Olympics.25

The newmedia technology created a novel set of challenges for sports administrators. The

IOC had initially exhibited unease about Olympians’ use of social media during the games.

One reason for this guarded attitude involved money. Since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics,

the commercialisation of the Olympic had accelerated apace and the money generated from

the lucrative TV contracts became a major revenue stream for the IOC under Juan Antonio

Samaranch’s headship. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the London Olympics combined

generated 3.9 billion dollars in this category of Olympic commercialism alone. Independent

uploading of audiovisual information and moving images by athletes could threaten the

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exclusive rights given to these TV networks. Prior to the LondonOlympics, the IOC switched

its positionanddecided to embrace the inexorable trend.Rather than trying futilely to suppress

it, the IOC issued guidelines about athletes’ use of the social media during the games. Since

the Olympic Charter forbids journalistic reporting of Olympic events by unauthorised media

outlets, the athletes’ twitters had to be restricted to diary style first person singular narratives.

Neither could they upload audiovisual images of the competition sites or theOlympicVillage.

One Japanese media expert commented wryly that the IOC had adopted a kind of double

standard, by encouraging the use of the social media by athletes to whet fan fantasies while

trying to dictate their contents.26

Regardless, the new technology was changing forever the way the Olympic Games as a

commodity were delivered to consumers. Japan’s chief holder of the TV contract, NHK

delivered free of charge via the Internet approximately 1000 h worth of ‘minor sports’

competitions typically not covered in the main TV programming. The IOC, on its part, set

up an exclusive Internet site called Olympic Athletes Hub through which fans could easily

access the Twitters and Facebook pages of their favourite Olympians. Many five-star

athletes such as Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps were registered in this officially sanctioned

outlet of delivering Olympic-brand ‘products’ for free. IOC’s communications director

Mark Adams explained this move as representing the IOC’s efforts to allow fans and

athletes all around the world to engage with the games more intimately.

According to Japanese media reports, the JOC was fanatic about complying with the

IOC’s new social media guidelines. Prior to the London Games, it assembled the managers

and captains of individual events and briefed them about the IOC’s newly established

regulatory regime regarding the social media. The Japanese athletes and officials were

instructed to take extreme caution about the content of their twittering and Facebook

uploads. In this pre-game workshop, the JOC cited as a cautionary tale a case in which a

British soccer player had been fined 10,000 pounds for criticising a referee’s judging on his

Twitter. The Japanese athletes were also informed that a Greek triple jumper had been

expelled from the national team for twittering a discriminatory comment. The JOC also

cautioned its athletes against the possibilities that whatever they put out in the social media

might be read by their foreign competitors to their detriment.27 It was clear to all parties that

the ‘Olympic experience’ now must be undergone, delivered or policed in whole new ways.

Conclusion: How Much is an Olympic Dream Worth?

In his editorial on August 15, the leftist Asahi’s senior editor Kinya Nishimura lamented

Japan’s ‘national obsession’ with its standings in the unofficial medal tables during the

recent Olympics. Nishimura wondered if this excessive concern with Olympic medals

reflected ‘the emotional immaturity’ of the nation of Japan and the city of Tokyo now

gearing up its campaigns to host the 2020 Olympics. To be sure, the NTC had much to

commend itself in providing top athletes with a better training environment and the JOC’s

‘Multi-Support House’ set up near the Olympic Village did appear to give a critical

competitive edge to Japanese Olympians. But did the 2011 Sport Laws not purport to

guarantee the right of all citizens of the nation to enjoy sports and promote their lifelong

engagement with athletics? Nishimura posited that the money generated under this

enabling legislation could be put to better use by promoting this aspect of the government

agenda, rather than assisting Tokyo’s renewed Olympic bid.28

If Japan’s multivalent media reporting on the London Olympics made one thing clear, it

was that no matter which side of the debate one situates his/herself, money and the Olympics

as a mega-event had become inseparable in the globalised world. Ruminations about the

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imagined fusion ofmoney and theOlympics tookmany forms in Japan. OnSeptember 7, the

MEXT announced its preliminary budget for fiscal year 2013 which included a record 26.2

billion yen in sports-related expenditures (2.4 billion more than 2012). This new budget was

particularly notable for promotion of women’s sports. A special category of spending 650

million yen in projected amount was set up for training and assisting elite female athletes.

This included 300 million yen in government aid to female medal hopefuls for the upcoming

Olympics to help defray the costs of overseas tours and training camps. A total of 200

million yen was earmarked as stipends for senior athletes.29

The business-minded Nikkei reported during the London Olympics that that IOC’s

revenues from corporate sponsorships and TV rights continued to grow to 5 billion dollars

despite the world-wide recession. The Nikkei Sangyo Shinbun, another industrial daily, similarly noted that the Olympics meant a bonanza for their corporate sponsors. General

Electric (GE) reportedly made an excess of 1 billion dollars in sales related to the four

Olympic Games between 2006 and 2012. The profits came mainly from its exclusive right

to provide infrastructure for power generation and to supply lightning and medical

equipment and facilities. The most profitable for GE was the Beijing Olympics for which

the American corporate giant sold 700 million dollars in wind power generation facilities,

water processing and other infrastructure construction and operation. In 2011, GE renewed

his sponsor contract with the IOC to run till the year 2020, the year of a proposed Tokyo

Olympiad. In the upcoming winter Olympics in Sochi, GE was contracted to provide two

gas turbines for power generation. The implied lesson was abundantly clear: the 11 top

official Olympic sponsors were making a killing and Japanese corporations should take

heed of that reality.30

Corporate Japan appears to understand that not every one was making profits off of the

global sports craze and what makes the crucial difference is the Olympic brand. An August

8 article in the Nikkei reported on the less than satisfactory performance by the three

leading Chinese sport equipment manufacturers. Anta Sports Product Limited, ‘a strategic

partner’ of the Chinese Olympic Committee, had registered a 12% drop in sales and a 17%

drop in net profit, despite its exclusive apparel supplier contract for the London Olympics.

Another high-profile Chinese sporting equipment manufacturer Li Ning was facing a

similar downturn. What Chinese sporting goods companies were confronting was the

negative fallouts of recent overproduction and overextension. And yet, the article pointed

out that Nike and Addidas were having no trouble expanding their market shares in China,

particularly in the affluent urban areas. What China’s domestic manufacturers lacked was

the brand power that comes most assuredly, if not exclusively, from official IOC corporate

sponsorship.31

The economic aspects of the modern Olympic Games were explained to young readers

of the Nikkei in a more subtle fashion. In the week leading up to the London Olympics, the

business daily carried a special didactic piece for its young readers about the economic

spillover effects of hosting the Olympics. The picture painted there was mostly positive:

tourism would expand and the hospitality business and various merchandising would

benefit from the enterprise. A pre-game estimate for the economic windfall of the London

Olympics was cited as 670 billion yen. If chosen to host the Games in 2020, the city of

Tokyo estimated the Olympics to yield roughly 3 trillion yen in economic benefits.

Besides the Game’s immediate economic impact, improvements in traffic infrastructure

would be universally beneficial, as the 1964 Olympics had led to the construction of the

Shinkansen bullet train and the metropolitan freeway network. The Olympics brought the

city of Beijing an expansion of the airport and subway networks. The host city would

enhance its visibility as an international tourist destination even after the Games were

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over. The construction and expansion of sport sporting facilities would facilitate mass

sport participation afterwards. The only potential negative discussed in the article was

Montreal’s experience: It took the Canadian city 30 years to retire the debt accrued from

the financial-disastrous 1976 Olympics.32

Since London and Tokyo are similar in that they are both ‘mature cities’ with extensive

preexisting transportation infrastructure and a previous experience in hosting the

Olympics, some Japanese commentators and pundits deemed Londoners’ experiences as

highly applicable to Tokyo in 2020. Lieutenant Governor of Tokyo Toshiyuki Akiyama

contributed an op-ed piece to the pro-Olympic Yomiuri on August 30 during the London Games that Tokyo had much to learn from London’s successful Olympic practices, for

example, issuing the ‘Travel Card’, a public transit pass with unlimited rides, to be sold in

a package deal with admission tickets. There would be a trade-off between the need for

security checks and the friendly and hospitable environment for visitors, but the lieutenant

governor ascribed the cumbersome security screenings by the military personnel at the

London Olympic facilities on a par with airport security to the ‘complicated political

circumstances’ unique to Great Britain. Free from such burdens, Tokyo should be able to

offer ‘a more open and tourist-friendly environment’ in 2020. As far as the city leaders

were concerned, potential earthquakes, improvements in the existing highway systems and

street beautification would be the real problems to worry about.33

Indeed, advocates of Tokyo’s Olympic bid were already busying themselves learning

from London’s ‘lessons’; for example, the question of what to do about the Olympic

facilities after the games. Extensive reports swirled through the Japanese media on how

London’s Olympic Park would be remodelled for ‘civic uses’ and many competitive

facilities were reusable for other purposes. The Olympic Village would be turned into a

3600-unit housing development and the Olympic hospital would be turned into nurseries

and schools. The aquatic centre consisted mostly of retractable seats. The basketball arena

was also re-adjustable to be used for smaller-scale domestic tournaments. In an age when

economic growth was only increment and the fiscal constraints remained for the

foreseeable future, money should be invested carefully and innovatively, even in a money-

maker called the Olympics. In that sense, one observer opined that Beijing’s extravaganza

was not the appropriate model for Japan and other industrialised countries to follow but the

London’s more frugal formula was.34

Before the London Games opened, some business interests in Japan had also spoken

sanguinely about an expansion in the information and communication infrastructure that

hosting the Olympics would spark in the nation’s capital. In that vein, the Nikkei

highlighted a promotional interview given by Ed Vaizey, British Minister of Culture,

Communications and Creative Industries. The Japanese learned, however, that with

opportunities come challenges. The massive traffic in social media data transmission

during the London Olympics created occasional logjams in the information networks. An

hour-long glitch on Twitters occurred due to a system trouble in the London Olympics’

data centre, affecting 140 million users. Closer to home for Japanese sports fans, during

the broadcasting of the men’s soccer game between Japan and Spain on July 27, they

experienced similar problems. The promoters of Tokyo 2020, Tokyo took to heart the

lesson that the technologically enhanced new styles of Olympic viewership and

spectatorship would place added burdens on the city’s IT infrastructure and solutions must

be found before 2020.35

Tokyo might aspire to the ‘London’ model of hosting the Olympics on the (relatively)

cheap, but it would undoubtedly snowball into an expensive proposition that would strain

the already fragile finances of the city and the nation, and many Japanese appear to be

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The International Journal of the History of Sport 1767

aware of that prospect. London’s estimated budget of 4 billion pounds at the time of

bidding in 2005 more than doubled in the end. An estimated 9.3 billion pounds was the

ticket price of the Olympics plus additional 6 billion pounds were needed for infrastructure

improvements. These costs had to be covered by taxpayer’s money and revenues from

lotteries. Citizens of Tokyo (and Japan) also needed to have realistic expectations about

the short-term economic stimulus effects of inviting the Five Ring Circus to town and look

carefully into the long-term legacies of the mega-event in the city’s social infrastructure

and the attendant question of equalising for its citizens the benefits – political, economic

and social – of investing public funds and resources into a ‘private’ enterprise.

On this point, even champions of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics appear clear-eyed. The

August 23 edition of the Yomiuri expressed a grim view of the direct economic spinoffs of

the Olympics, quoting the chancellor of the exchequer Mervyn King as stating that the

Olympics alone could not ‘change the grim economic realities’ of a city or a nation.36 But

as Akiyama suggested in his op-ed piece; the ultimate question to ask might be, how much

is a dream worth? The lieutenant governor of Tokyo posited that ‘Japan needs the power of

the dream (which the Olympics can bring)’. Tokyo hopes to use the Olympics as and the

power of sports to give hope and dreams to young generations of Japanese whose dreams

had been deflated by the decades of economic slump. The power of Olympic Dream would

also ‘accelerate the reconstruction of the Tohoku region’ destroyed by the earthquake

and tsunami 2 years before. And Great Britain won 29 gold medals in the London

Games, tailing only the USA and China. To Akiyama, this record proves that even an

ex-superpower can change and regenerate itself. MEXT vice minister Tenzo Okumura

defended his ministry’s new activist policy in elite sports promotion this way: ‘there is a

widespread sense of frustration and weariness at the moment; that’s all the more reason the

government should help generate hope and dream among the Japanese people through

(elite) athletes’ inspiring performances on the world stage’.37 Tokyo and Japan, how much

are your hope and dream worth?

Notes on Contributor Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu is a Professor of American History at Michigan State University. Her publications include, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Notes 1. Yomiuri Shinbun (YS), June 27, 2012, 20–1; Asahi Shinbun (AS), August 21, 2012, 1;

Mainichi Shinbun (MS), August 21, 1, 3; YS, August 13, 2012, 3; August 22, 2013, 23 and Nikkei, August 14, 2012, 3.

2. AS, August 13, 2012, evening edition, 10; MS, July 28, 1; August 10, 17; August 21, 2012, 10; Nikkei, July 28, 2012, 4 and YS, July 18, 2012, 15.

3. MS, July 27, 2012, 5; evening edition, 10; July 28, 2012, 10; August 9, 2012, 16; YS, July 13, 2012, 28; July 18, 2012, 15 and August 3, 2012, 3.

4. MS, July 27, 2012, 1 and August 21, 2012, 10. 5. MS, August 21, 2012, 10. 6. AS, August 13, evening edition, 10; MS, July 28, 2012, evening edition, 10 and August 14,

2012, 1, 16. 7. YS, August 13, 2012, evening edition, 15 and MS, July 27, 5. 8. Nikkei, July 23, 2012, 2004; August 13, 4; August, 27, evening edition, 1 and YS, August 12, 3. 9. Nippon Sangyo Shinbun, September 14, 2012, 10; Nikkei, August 13, 2012, 9 and YS, July 13,

2012, 28; August 12, 2012, 3; YS, August 13, 2012, 3. 10. AS, August 14, 2013 and MS, August 14, 2012, 16.

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11. AS, August 13, 2013, 2 and YS, May 1, 2012, 6; August 5, 2012, 7. 12. MS, August 14, 2012, 16. For a popular Japanese-language survey of South Korea’s elite sports

system, see Hirofumi, Koreansupotsu Kokunichisenso. 13. MS, August 14, 2012, 16 and YS, June 30, 2012, 13; August 14, 2012, 22. 14. AS, August 13, 2012, 3 and MS, August 14, 2012, 16. 15. MS, August 14, 2012, 16. 16. Ibid. 17. AS, August 13, 2013, 2. 18. Ibid. 19. For this point, see Sawano, Kigyosupotsuno Eikotozasetsu. 20. For the Sports Law and its background, Accessed March 1, 2013, see http://www.mext.go.jp/

a_menu/sports/kihonhou/. 21. Nikkei Sangyo Shinbun, July 24, 2012. Accessed October 30, 2012 https://t21.nikkei.co.jp/g3/

CMN0F12.do;jsessionid;IBD45623A. 22. Nikkei MJ, August 6, 2012, 5. 23. YS, November 7, 2012, 7. 24. Nikkei MJ, August 8, 2012, 7; Nikkei, July 28, 2012, 1; August 3, 2012, 32 and YS, July 17,

2012, evening edition, 15. 25. MS, July 25, 2012, 3; Nikkei MJ, August 8, 2012, 7 and Nikkei, August 3, 2012, 32. 26. MS, July 25, 2012, 3. 27. Nikkei, July 30, 2012, 3 and YS, July 17, 2012, evening edition, 15. 28. AS, August 15, 2012, 11. 29. YS, September. 6, 2012, evening edition, 12; September 8, 2012, 21. 30. Nikkei, July 28, 2012, evening edition, 3; Nikkei Sangyo Shinbun, August 1, 2012, 11. 31. Nikkei, August 8, 2012, 6. 32. Nikkei, July 21, 2012, 19. 33. YS, August 30, 2012, 11; Nikkei, August 18, 2012, 2 and AS, August 14, 2012, 9. 34. Nikkei, August 18, 2012, 2 and AS, August 14, 2012, 9. 35. Nikkei, April 25, 2012, 003; July 8, 2012, 7; July 30, 2012, 3. 36. YS, August 14, 2012, 5; August 23, 2012, 11. 37. YS, July 28, 2012, 3; August 30, 2012, 11.

References Hirofumi, O. Koreansupotsu Kokunichisenso. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2008. Sawano, M. Kigyosupotsuno Eikotozasetsu. Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2005.

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