Tohoku vs. Olympics: Which Way Will It Go?

A trio of recent stories in the New York Times reminds us that, two and a half years after the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis in northern Japan, 83,000 refugees are still evacuated from their furusatos, many of which are now ghost towns. Question is, how will Tokyo’s pick for the 2020 Olympics affect efforts in Tohoku? Some home that the increase in international media attention will pressure the Japanese government to speed up decontamination and resettlement efforts. Others fear that the Tohoku clean up will have to compete for construction workers with Olympic preparations in Tokyo

Watch “Losing Hope in Fukushima”.

Read “Japan’s Nuclear Refugees, Still Stuck in Limbo”

View “Near Fukushima, A Human Crisis Quietly Unfolds“

Tokyo 2020: Spare a Thought for Madrid and Istabul

Raphael Minder and Ceylan Yeginsu report in the NYTimes on the mixed reactions of Olympic “hopefuls” in contender cities Madrid and Istanbul. In the former, facilities begun in the recent bubble economy go underused; in the latter, many citizens celebrate the defeat of a distraction from Turkey’s pressing social problems. “We’ve been tear-gassed too many times to have any Olympic spirit left in us,” Ali Turan, member of the Boycott Istanbul 2020 campaign, is reported as saying.

Tokyo 2020: a “safe pair of hands”

 

A roundup of recent Summer 2020 Tokyo Olympics stories that have caught my eye…

 

So more details come out about the IOC’s choice of Tokyo to host the Summer 2020 Olympic Games…

 

Jere Longman and Martin Fackler report in the New York Times that the IOC saw Tokyo as a “safe pair of hands”, at least compared to Istanbul and Madrid. Put succinctly, they write

For the International Olympic Committee, environmental concerns in Japan appeared less urgent than the Syrian war on Turkey’s border, a harsh crackdown against antigovernment protesters recently in Istanbul and Spain’s economic recession and high unemployment.

 

Of course, as several commenters to that article point out, the nuclear crisis at Fukushima is far from over; it was only one week ago that the CBC reported the Japanese government

is funding a costly, untested subterranean ice wall in a desperate step to stop leaks of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant after repeated failures by the plant’s operator.

However, as Hiroko Tabuchi and Joshua Hunt write in the NYTimes, the Olympics will put Japan, and Tokyo in particular, under greater international scrutiny, and may lead to effective action on the radiation leaks into the ocean at Fukushima and government deficit spending to support the ageing population.

 

Part of Tokyo’s winning bid was apparently it’s motto of a “compact Olympics”. As Gizmodo, and others, report, Tokyo’s plan includes retrofitting three of the sites built for the 1964 Olympics: the Olympic National Stadium (redesigned by Zaha Hadid Architects), Nippon Budokan (where I saw Sigur Ros perform back in May), and the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. Apparently, according to Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan’s Gizmodo report, other venues are to be built in central Tokyo to make the most of existing transit infrastructure, and includes plans for a Metabolism-inspired athlete’s village on Tokyo’s waterfront.