Zirin Olympics (16x9)
As I write this, I am preparing to travel to Tokyo, site of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. The purpose of the trip is to assess the state of preparations for next year’s Games: the hype, the pomp, the circumstance. It is also to investigate just how damaging the Olympics are expected to be for Tokyo itself.
Everywhere the Olympics nest—particularly the grander and more costly Summer Games—they bring a plague of debt, displacement, and hyper-militarization. The hope for Tokyo is that popular movements will mitigate the worst of this, that it won’t be another Rio or London or Athens or . . . frankly, take your pick.
Yet already, even at a distance from the United States, it is clear that the cracks are showing. Hell, you can see these cracks from outer space. Initially, the Games were supposed to cost $7.3 billion, expensive but in line with past Olympic Games. Yet by October 2018, the price tag had exploded to $25 billion, with talk of a final tally upwards of $30 billion—an astronomical figure rivaled only by the Beijing Games of 2008, which cost at least $40 billion.
As author and academic Jules Boykoff told me recently, “Tokyo 2020’s ballooning price tag emerged in part through the organizers’ decision to secure the services of celebrity architect Zaha Hadid, who designed a sleek yet spendy stadium with costs that escalated to around $2 billion.” Hadid died in 2016.
For a dollop of perspective, the garish, outlandish stadium of the Dallas Cowboys, funded largely by taxpayers for the benefit of their garish, outlandish owner Jerry Jones, cost roughly half as much.
In fact, Tokyo already has stadiums that could have been used, but chose to build one from scratch. It’s wasteful, environmentally unsound, and bloats the final costs, which get passed on to taxpayers.
I am headed to not only Tokyo but also Fukushima, site in 2011 of the worst nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl. Fukushima sits only 140 miles from Tokyo and there are several Olympic events planned to take place there, including softball. Even the widely watched journey of the Olympic torch plans on starting in Fukushima.
This is not an accident. It is part of the optics carefully constructed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, who aims to show off Fukushima’s recovery and assuage concerns that it is still a dangerous place to set foot. As Abe said in 2013, during the city’s Olympic pitch to the International Olympic Committee, “Some may have concerns about Fukushima. Let me assure you, the situation is under control. It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo.”
This belief was roundly contradicted by critics like Komei Hosokawa, a professor of environmental sociology and energy policy at Kyoto Seika University. “The situation is not under control,” he responded. “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”
On the very day the Rio 2016 Paralympics held its opening ceremony, former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared, “Mr. Abe’s ‘under control’ remark, that was a lie.”
Besides the cost and environmental concerns, Tokyo will be teaming up with NEC, a massive Japanese tech conglomerate, to bring facial-recognition software to every single Olympic venue for the first time in the history of the Games. This marks a turning point in event-security culture that is likely to become the norm.
The Tokyo Games will also mark the most widespread use of drones for any kind of sporting event. These drones will be public as a celebration of the nation’s technological prowess, but will also be used for security, again creating a new normal that will be difficult to unwind.
And, as always, the Games are resulting in people being pushed out. Tokyo was the site of the 1964 Olympics, fifty-five years ago. During my visit, I will be speaking to people who were displaced as children for the 1964 Games and now, unbelievably, are being displaced again.
This is what I know: We are already in a period of debt, displacement, and hyper-militarization. From a distance, it is already clear. I am traveling to Tokyo to bear witness myself to these processes and try to understand exactly why the people of Tokyo are abiding this madness—or if, in fact, there is already resistance thrumming in the streets.