The Tokyo 2020 Olympics: From a “safe pair of hands” to a corrupt pair of claws

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics demonstrated to the world that the Games are not too big to fail; instead, they may be too big to succeed, especially during a public-health pandemic. Tokyo bidders promised they’d be a “safe pair of hands” for the Games. However, the Olympics brought astronomical costs, greenwashing, displacement, security militarization, and corruption – problems that have become endemic to the Games in general. Tokyo 2020 was originally slated to cost $7.3 billion, but the price tag escalated to approximately four times that, according to a government audit in Japan. Postponement added billions more, bringing the total to around $30 billion. The Games created space for local developers to leverage the Olympic state of exception to relax longtime height restrictions on building in the neighborhood around the National Stadium, thereby prying open urban terrain for well-positioned developers. Games organizers also generated credible allegations of greenwashing: publicly displaying concern for the environment while in actuality doing the bare minimum, if anything, to make material ecological improvements. Tokyo 2020 boosters coined a “Recovery Olympics” mantra, vowing the Games would supercharge Fukushima’s rejuvenation after it was struck by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The Tokyo Olympics incentivized a rushed process to return residents to Fukushima, regardless of public-health perils for the local population. Kowata Masumi, an elected official in Fukushima Prefecture’s Okuma Town, said Olympic construction actually slowed down Fukushima’s recovery. She stated in 2019, “The nuclear radiation is still very high. Only one small section is being cleaned. The wider region is still an evacuation zone. There is still radiation in the area. Meanwhile, we’re [hosting] the Olympics.” Before the Games started, social critic Koide Hiroaki framed the situation in clear moral terms: “The Tokyo Olympics will take place in a state of nuclear emergency. Those countries and people who participate will, on the one hand, themselves risk exposure, and, on the other, become accomplices to the crimes of this nation.” While Fukushima residents were encouraged to return to potentially unsafe spaces, the Olympics also displaced Tokyo inhabitants from their communities. The aforementioned change in zoning laws cleared a political path for the elimination of public housing units. More specifically, residents from the Kasumigaoka apartment complex, which sat in the