TOKYO - The Japanese capital has won the
hotly contested race to become the country's
candidate site to bid for the 2016 Summer Olympic
Games, edging out its only rival, Fukuoka in
western Japan.
The decisive factors in
Tokyo's victory are its international high profile
as the capital, as well as its financial strength
and the perceived viability of its plan. But a
highly jubilant Tokyo still has a long way to go
before reaching the goal of actually hosting the
quadrennial sporting
extravaganza for the second time since it first
did so in 1964.
The International Olympic
Committee will select the host city in July 2009.
Among the potential host nations are the United
States, Spain, Italy, Brazil, India and Qatar.
A 55-member selection committee -
comprising 25 executives from the Japanese Olympic
Committee (JOC) and 30 representatives of sports
associations and other groups - voted by 33-22 on
Wednesday evening to field Tokyo as the nation's
candidate. The vote was held after the panel
members assessed a JOC evaluation report of the
sites, based on plans submitted by Tokyo and
Fukuoka, and heard the two cities' presentations.
The triumph of Tokyo, an odds-on favorite,
over Fukuoka, a regional city with a population of
1.5 million on the westernmost major Japanese
island of Kyushu, had been widely expected,
especially after the JOC evaluation report in
favor of Tokyo was made public five days earlier.
Pluses and minuses While
pointing out that Fukuoka had experience in
managing international sporting events and a
strong will to host the Olympics, the report
concluded that the JOC was unconvinced that the
city could acquire written consent from about 120
different landowners to sell their properties in a
district earmarked for construction of the main
arena. It also expressed concerns about the
feasibility of the plan.
Tokyo, meanwhile,
has already secured land for the construction of a
main stadium and accommodation facilities for
athletes. Another handicap for Fukuoka was the
lack of direct flights to and from North America
and Europe.
The JOC evaluation report
noted that Tokyo was globally recognized and had a
strong financial base to follow through on its
plan to prepare a fund worth 400 billion yen
(US$3.4 billion) by fiscal 2009.
Critics
have insisted, however, that the Tokyo plan is
sketchy overall and does not precisely address
traffic control. Tokyo, home to about 12.5 million
people, is notorious for its grueling traffic jams
and heavily overcrowded trains, especially during
rush hours. Sports associations are also said to
have given a slightly higher evaluation to Fukuoka
than Tokyo. Some of them have criticized the Tokyo
metropolitan government, saying it did not
properly understand their requests.
Apparently alarmed by the expression of
criticism by several sporting organizations, Tokyo
Governor Shintaro Ishihara changed his vacation
plans about a month ago to put himself in the
vanguard of the campaign for his city's bid.
Tokyo's plan calls for competition in 26
of the 28 sports planned for the Games to be
staged at 36 venues located within a radius of 10
kilometers, with effective use of existing
facilities, such as Yoyogi National Stadium, to
curb construction costs from being the main
feature. Tokyo has said it would seek the "most
compact Olympics in the world".
The JOC
apparently had been worried that it would be
difficult for Japan to win the Games unless it
were submitted by the capital city. This worry is
not unfounded. Nagoya in central Japan failed in
its bid for the 1988 Summer Olympics. And then
Osaka in western Japan missed the 2008 Games. The
1988 Summer Olympics were held in Seoul and the
2008 Games will be held in Beijing. Finalists in
the selection process for the 2012 Summer Olympics
last year were all major metropolises. London
eventually won.
War of words In
the run-up to the vote on Wednesday, Fukuoka Mayor
Hirotaro Yamasaki not only criticized Tokyo's plan
but trained his guns on Ishihara, an outspoken
nationalist and hawk on China.
Yamasaki
claimed that Ishihara's often-controversial
remarks could impede cooperation between Japan and
other Asian nations when it came to organizing the
event. "Tokyo has so many problems [with regards
to hosting the Olympics], but they have not been
revealed [to the public] yet," he said.
Japan's relations with its Asian
neighbors, especially China and South Korea,
remain at their lowest point in decades because of
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits
to the war-related Yasukuni Shrine, territorial
and other disputes, and differences over World War
II history.
Economic
benefits The 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo
were Asia's first. Judo and volleyball were
introduced to the Olympics then. Many middle-aged
and senior Japanese still remember, among other
things, Dutchman Anton Geesink's winning of the
open category in judo, barefooted Ethiopian runner
Abebe Bikila's becoming the first person to win
the Olympic marathon twice, and the Japanese
women's volleyball team's winning of the gold
medal. The volleyball team was known as the
"Witches of the Orient".
The 1964 Olympics
showed the rest of the world how rapidly Japan had
recovered from the ashes of World War II, with its
much-vaunted "Shinkansen" bullet train making its
debut between Tokyo and Osaka just in time for the
opening of the event.
The Olympics also
heralded Japan's rise as a new economic power.
Japan joined the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, a grouping long
dubbed the "club of the richest", in 1964. Japan
became the world's No 2 economy in terms of gross
domestic product, after the United States, only
four years later.
Japan's longest postwar
economic expansion of the 1960s, known as the
"Izanagi boom", started a year after the Tokyo
Olympics and ended with the 1970 Osaka World Expo.
The current expansion, which started in early
2002, will almost certainly continue past October,
outlasting the 57-month-long Izanagi boom.
Opinion polls show that a majority of
Japanese favor hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics.
According to one poll, conducted by the Mainichi
Shimbun, a major national daily, 72.9% of
respondents said they supported the move. As
reasons, the largest group - 30.4% - cited a
positive overall economic effect.
In July,
the Tokyo metropolitan government announced its
estimates of an economic ripple effect Japan's
hosting of the Olympics would have. According to
the estimates, if the Games are held in Tokyo,
they will generate 2.83 trillion yen (nearly $25
billion) - 1.57 trillion yen in Tokyo and 1.26
trillion yen in the rest of the country.
From 1964 to 2016 The 1964
Olympics were held at a time when Japan was
rapidly ascending as a new economic power. But
when the 2016 Games are held - wherever they are -
Japan's economic power, which has already lost
much of its luster in the past decade or so, will
almost certainly have declined further in relative
terms.
In the late 1960s, the average life
expectancy of Japanese people was 69.2 years for
men and 74.7 years for women, compared with 78.6
years for men and 85.6 years for women in 2004.
People aged 65 or over accounted for only about 7%
of the total population in the late 1960s, but now
they make up 20%. To be sure, the longer people
live, the better. But Japan is now at a historic
juncture demographically, with precipitously
declining birth rates as well as the rapid aging
of the population.
Japan's population
began to decline for the first time since World
War II last year, two years earlier than expected.
The working-age population had already begun to
shrink several years earlier. Not only is Japan's
birth rate already among the lowest in the
industrialized world, but its pace of decline is
the fastest, raising grave concerns about a
possible erosion of the economy's international
competitiveness as the population thins out.
Nobuyuki Okamoto, a professor at Tokyo's
Rikkyo University and supporter of the capital's
bid for the Olympics, said in a recent interview
that Japanese are now "regaining their confidence
once again after overcoming the depression of the
1990s", which followed the burst of the
asset-inflated bubble economy of the late 1980s.
He said hosting the Olympics would be a new goal
for them, as the 1964 Olympics were.
Okamoto said Tokyo's selling point in the
international competition for the Olympics was the
"multicultural" nature of the city.
Hisane Masaki is a Tokyo-based
journalist, commentator and scholar on
international politics and economy. Masaki's
e-mail address is yiu45535@nifty.com.
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