Are the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in Trouble?
With an out-of-control budget, bumbling leadership, and embarrassing scandals, the city of the future is looking to the past for guidance.
FEBRUARY 19, 2016There’s a sinking feeling in Japan about the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The city ditched its overly expensive centerpiece — a $2 billion stadium — and the official logo, underallegations of plagiarism. The preparations have been plagued by embarrassing cost overruns, ineffective leadership, finger pointing at all levels, and widespread doubts that a seemingly inept Japanese government will have everything ready in time.
This might be par for the course as far as recent games go, certainly in relation to budget overruns: Every single Olympic Games between 1960 and 2012 for which there are reliable data (roughly 60 percent)exceeded its budget — by an average of 179 percent. And though the 1976 Montreal Olympic Committee began confidently — Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, even proclaimed, “The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby” — they finished nearly eight times over budget. The price tag for the most recent Olympics, in Sochi, Russia, may have been an obscene $66.7 billion — more than five times over budget and surpassing Beijing’s 2008 Olympics as the most expensive games ever. No wonder no developed democratic country wants to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
But Japanese may take some comfort in knowing that Tokyo has already waded through these same problems before, in the run-up to the 1964 Olympics — which went on to be regarded as perhaps the most successful of all time. Indeed, it was these earlier games that galvanized Tokyo to accomplish one of the greatest urban transformations of modern times and opened the door for Japan to re-enter the world stage. However, although the 1964 games exceeded expectations, it left troubling legacies that seem to have been forgotten — and are on the verge of being repeated.
There can scarcely be a starker contrast with modern-day Tokyo, one of the most technologically sophisticated and efficient cities in the world, than Tokyo pre-1964, a war-scarred, dilapidated, diseased, and polluted third-world megalopolis. The harbor and the capital’s main rivers were thick with sludge from human and industrial waste. Only roughly 25 percent of the city’s residents enjoyed the luxury of a flush toilet; the rest were serviced by ubiquitous vacuum trucks that collected feces from under the toilets in Japanese homes and transported them to rice paddies for use as fertilizer. (During the U.S. occupation of Japan following World War II, American troops sarcastically nicknamed them “honey trucks” because of the powerful odor they emitted.) Hot water was infrequent, roads poor, modern hotel rooms scarce, and English speakers so rare that the children of foreign residents were recruited to teach conversation classes.
