Protesting legacies: Anti-Olympic movements in Japan before and after Tokyo 2020/1

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021 will be remembered as the first Olympics to be postponed and held without in-person spectators during a global pandemic. The mega-event was also highly unpopular among the Japanese population in the weeks before the opening, but only a limited, yet consistent group of activists took to the streets to protest against it. Drawing on insights from ethnographic fieldwork at numerous protest events in Tokyo in the years 2019–2022, I analyze how the legacies of Tokyo 2020/1 are contested and evaluated from the activists’ perspective and what the implications are for the future of their activism and public protest in Japan in general. What are the legacies of Tokyo 2020/1 for Japanese social movements? Many of the activists’ more radical criticisms seem to lack connectivity with the wider public, which still maintains a safe distance to mass demonstrations. This alienation is likely exacerbated by the criminalizing effect of performative police repressions during demonstrations, legal prosecution of activists, and a lack of (fair) representation of protests in mainstream media. Therefore, I conclude that we cannot yet consider anti-Olympic activism the beginning of a new protest cycle in Japan. Nevertheless, it follows a resurgence of other protests in recent years against nuclear power, securitization, nationalism, and militarist policies. Its burgeoning transnational connections might lay the foundational groundwork for Japanese activist linkages with larger global movements that share similar concerns surrounding capitalist exploitation of humans and nature, climate crisis, and planetary environmental breakdown.