Ryan Ba­choo

Like it did six decades ago when it host­ed its first Olympics, Japan had hoped to do the same in 2020 with the stag­ing of the Sum­mer Games—use the glob­al event as a cat­a­lyst for a tech­no­log­i­cal and in­fra­struc­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion in the coun­try.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics was wide­ly re­gard­ed as a wa­ter­shed mo­ment in Japan’s his­to­ry. Not on­ly had it emerged from the dev­as­ta­tion of World War II less than two decades be­fore, but the Games of the XVI­II Olympiad had pro­vid­ed the coun­try with an op­por­tu­ni­ty to cut a path to­wards a sus­tain­able fu­ture. And that it did.

As Japan built to­wards the 1964 Games, the coun­try would nev­er be the same again. New hous­ing and ho­tels were con­struct­ed and parks climbed in­to sky, while cit­i­zens be­gan re­ceiv­ing an im­proved wa­ter sup­ply. Its road and rail up­grades would echo in­to decades to come. “The Bul­let Train,” the world’s fastest train at the time, was launched nine days be­fore the Olympics and af­ter the Games, was ex­pand­ed to oth­er parts of the coun­try.

The 1964 Olympics too, ben­e­fit­ted in un­prece­dent­ed ways.

It was broad­cast­ed on tele­vi­sion to a third of the plan­et, with some events be­ing shown in colour. The foun­da­tion of mod­ern-day Olympic broad­cast­ing was built in Tokyo 1964, with slow-mo­tion re­plays and ath­letes’ times be­ing shown on screen for the first time. Many things view­ers take for grant­ed to­day and have come to ex­pect from their broad­cast providers were born out of that Olympics in Japan.

Now, 56 years on, Japan is once again ex­pect­ed to lead the world in­to a new era of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and the coun­try’s am­bas­sador to T&T, Tat­suo Hi­raya­ma, feels the Games can still be a suc­cess de­spite the hic­cup of hav­ing to post­pone it from last year.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view, he told Guardian Me­dia, “The Tokyo 1964 Games com­plete­ly trans­formed Japan, en­hanced Japan­ese peo­ple’s aware­ness of the out­side world and sparked the rapid growth of Japan’s econ­o­my. The 2020 Games will en­able Japan, now a ma­ture econ­o­my, to pro­mote fu­ture changes through­out the world, and leave a pos­i­tive lega­cy for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.”

De­spite grow­ing calls for the Games to be can­celled, even from its own cit­i­zens, the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment has held firm on the mot­to of its bid in 2013 “A Safe Pair of Hands.” Japan’s bid and ul­ti­mate award of the Games came at a time of great geopo­lit­i­cal un­cer­tain­ty.

Am­bas­sador Hi­raya­ma fur­ther ex­plained, “As a sym­bol of glob­al uni­ty in over­com­ing COVID-19 and as a demon­stra­tion of Japan’s re­cov­ery from the 2011 Great East Japan Earth­quake, we are re­solved to hold the Olympic and Par­a­lympic Games in a safe and se­cure man­ner this sum­mer. This com­mit­ment of Japan is sup­port­ed by G7 and G20 coun­tries.”

Both the Lo­cal Or­gan­is­ing Com­mit­tee and In­ter­na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tee have ac­cel­er­at­ed their cam­paign in re­cent days to re­as­sure the world, and more so the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion, that the Olympics will be a safe one. The IOC said re­cent­ly that rough­ly 75 per cent of prospec­tive Olympic and Par­a­lympic ath­letes have ei­ther had their vac­ci­na­tions or are sched­uled to do so. It pre­dicts that over 80 per cent will be in­oc­u­lat­ed be­fore the Games be­gin. Sev­er­al play­books have been re­leased by the IOC to guide dif­fer­ent facets of the Games, in­clud­ing ath­letes, com­pe­ti­tion and me­dia in­ter­ac­tion.

The Am­bas­sador al­so sought to ad­dress the safe­ty of the Games, say­ing, “We are com­mit­ted to hold­ing the Games in a safe and se­cure man­ner. Prepa­ra­tions have been made to en­sure the safe or­gan­i­sa­tion of the Games from a sci­en­tif­ic and ob­jec­tive view­point by de­ploy­ing all pos­si­ble COVID-19 coun­ter­mea­sures with ad­vice from WHO and ex­perts.”