Tokyo Successfully Avoids Hosting 2016 Olympics

Kyodo News was just one of many news outlets to report on Rio's successful bid for the 2016 Summer Games. The more I examined news coverage of the bidding process this week, the more it seems that Tokyo might have been better off without them. Not to take anything away from Rio, because it's nice to see South America get their first shot at hosting the Olympics, it's just that Tokyo never really seemed to be taken seriously in the first place. If that's the case, then who needs them?

In an era where politicians and voters seem reluctant to make the real sacrifices needed to limit the damage of climate change, it is unsurprising that Tokyo's efforts to promote itself as the host of the first "Green Games" were dismissed by one IOC official with this bizarre statement quoted in the Mainichi [Edit: Broken link], "We're not the United Nations." Remember that responsibility abdicating quote when low lying land starts to disappear under the oceans.

All of which leads me back to a curious feature I saw in The Toronto Star on Thursday (sorry, couldn't find a link on their website) that unintentionally reveals a branding crisis that might have been at the heart of Tokyo's failed bid. In what was admittedly presented as a "lighthearted look at the four cities in the running," very little of the information presented about Tokyo had anything to do with the city, while the other three cities were relatively spot on.

To wit...

Tourist Site: Rio (Christ the Redeemer Statue), Madrid (The Prado), Chicago (Tribune Tower), Tokyo (Ancient Shrines) Ancient Shrines? Could we have been any more vague? Meiji Shrine perhaps? Come to think of it, in a city that has been tragically destroyed by fire many times, what ancient shrine might the writer have been referring to? Personally, when I think "ancient shrines" and Japan, my first thought is Ise, which is nowhere near Tokyo. My second thought was that there is no tourist site that can be said to best symbolize Tokyo. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, it is a city with an empty center, with a series of satellite downtowns swirling around it, each with its own defining tourist site.

Sporting Symbol: Rio (Soccer), Madrid (Real Madrid), Chicago (Wrigley Field)--no argument here. Tokyo (Ichiro Suzuki). Huh? He wasn't born in Tokyo and he spent his Pro Yakyu career playing in Osaka. If any current baseball player represents Tokyo to the world, it is Hideki Matsui. It probably would have been better to just name the Yomiuri Giants or Sumo anyway.

Wild-card (sic) Factor: Rio (tiny bathing suits), Madrid (Tapas bars), Chicago (Topless bars), and Tokyo (Geisha girls). OK, Chicago has a legitimate complaint here. I think they are far more famous for the blues than peelers. But Geisha girls and Tokyo? Come on, they are the symbol of Kyoto, plain and simple.

Obviously this list wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but it does suggest that Tokyo has an image problem when a selection of Japanese symbols can be so easily, and erroneously, conflated with symbols of Tokyo.

Hosting another Olympic Games would do little to solve Tokyo's apparent inability to brand itself internationally, but there is a part of me that would still like to see it happen again this century. What Japanese director would rise to the occasion as Kon Ichikawa did with his visceral documentary of the 1964 Games? What will Tokyo look like by then, following a transition in which Tokyo and Japan have been forced to deal with the effects of a declining population? If 1964 was Tokyo's announcement that it had rebuilt and returned to the world stage, would 2024 represent an elegy or a remarkable transformation that surprises those who fear that deflation and depopulation will prove to be insurmountable challenges in the twenty-first century? Given the Japanese ability to make the most out small spaces, somehow I think they will find a way to make the most of a smaller population too, but it remains to be seen how the politicians and its hard-to-manage bureaucracy will meet the challenge.