The Olympics Brought Colonialism to Japan
After Centuries of Resisting European Colonialism, the Land of the Rising Sun Became a Victim of the International Olympic Committee
When Team USA shortstop Nick Allen singled to right field with two outs in the top of the ninth inning on Saturday, Japan’s chance of achieving its first Gold Medal in its nation’s most popular sport encountered a brief moment of doubt. Allen’s third hit of the game — no cheapies among them — brought the potential tying run to the plate in the form of Boston Red Sox farmhand Jack Lopez, a twenty-eight-year old center fielder and minor league journeyman. The chance of an American comeback briefly flickered.
With one pitch to Lopez, Japanese right-handed reliever Ryoji Kuribayashi flicked out that flame. With Lopez well out in front of Kuribayashi’s belt-high outside curveball, the right-handed hitter could merely slap at the ball with his hands, grounding weakly to second baseman Ryosuke Kikuchi, who flipped the ball to shortstop Hayato Sakamoto. Once Sakamoto stepped on second base to retire Allen and end the game, euphoria and emotion engulfed not just the Japanese players, but the entire stadium.
Some Japanese fans wept tears of joy. Hundreds of others stormed the field, mobbing their country’s players. They carried Kuribayashi off the diamond while clawing at his uniform and lovingly tearing it apart, a scene reminiscent of when Red Sox fans flooded the infield at Fenway Park on October 1, 1967, and carried Boston pitcher Jim Lonborg off the field, tearing away his jersey. Lonborg and left fielder Carl Yastrzemski had just led the Red Sox to a 5–3 win over the Minnesota Twins in the final game of the regular season, a victory that assured them — at a minimum — a share of first place in the American League. Then, when the California Angels defeated the Detroit Tigers in the second game of a doubleheader later that day, the Red Sox had won their first pennant since 1946 and just their second since 1918. The previously moribund Boston franchise had achieved the “Impossible Dream” of reaching the World Series.
Now, in 2021, a similar scene played out in Tokyo, in a nation where baseball is as popular as it once was in America. The stands thundered and the ground seemed to shake as Japanese baseball fans realized a goal generations in the making. It would be, perhaps, the most indelible image of these Olympic Games.
Oh, wait …
There was no such scene, because while Japan indeed captured its first Olympic Gold in baseball by defeating the US, and while the game indeed ended on Jack Lopez’s groundout to second against Ryoji Kuribayashi’s curveball, there were no paying fans whatsoever. Indeed, the only spectators in the stands were some fellow Olympic athletes who had already finished their events. And for as much as the outcome will prove glorious and historically resonant for the home country, it was also bittersweet, lacking the cinematic denouement that dozens of sports movies have taught us to expect.
Ostensibly, of course, the culprit was COVID-19, the novel virus that continues to plague the globe. But the other looming menace was the International Olympic Committee, which — with support from its organizing allies and lackeys in Tokyo — insisted that the games take place rather than being deferred by another year. According to opinion polls in Japan, a country struggling with repeated COVID surges in 2021 due largely to a poor vaccine rollout and low vaccination rates, the Japanese public disapproved of the Tokyo Olympics taking place this summer (https://www.newsweek.com/olympics-2020-tokyo-games-78-percent-japanese-oppose-ipsos-poll-1609534). The IOC could have shown its concerns and sensitivity to the ongoing health crisis by delaying the games again. After all, staging them in the summer of 2022, when Japan’s vaccination rate figures to be much higher and the world may have turned the corner on COVID, would have probably allowed for packed houses and cheering throngs at baseball games and all manner of other events in Tokyo. A boisterous atmosphere would have also enhanced the Olympics’ attractiveness on television, where NBC’s ratings instead sagged dramatically (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/media/nbc-olympics-tv-ratings.html). And if the Olympics could be postponed by several years due to two World Wars in the twentieth century, surely they could be delayed by just two years in this cycle.
Sure, an athlete here or there might have been hurt by advancing age and the drawn-out nature of the preparation. But those concerns are more than overwhelmed by the cases of an Olympic athlete testing positive for COVID and having to miss their chance at glory. A case in point was twenty-nine-year old US beach volleyball player Taylor Crabb, who tested positive despite being vaccinated and had to sit out the games despite proving asymptomatic (https://people.com/sports/tokyo-olympics-team-usa-volleyball-player-tests-positive-for-covid-19/, https://apnews.com/article/2020-tokyo-olympics-lifestyle-sports-health-coronavirus-pandemic-74d54096c680f6ed2c8d052742a54c16).
Others might point to the irregularity of staging the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris just two years after holding the Tokyo Olympics in 2022, had the IOC made that prudent and respectful decision. Such critics should remember that, in an attempt to hold a set of Olympic Games every two years, the 1994 Winter Olympics arrived just twenty-four months after the 1992 Winter Games. Pretty soon, the excuses for not deferring these Tokyo Olympics by one more year start to run out.
The real irony comes in how the IOC essentially exploited Tokyo and Japan in the way that European colonialists exploited indigenous peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas for generations, if not centuries. Japan, of course, constituted one of the only Asian nations — and by far the most significant — to successfully resist European (and, in some cases, American) colonialism and imperialism. (And, yes, largely for that reason, Japan became a cruel imperialist hegemon itself in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, sparking the Pacific theater of World War II.) But in this case, Japan failed to mount an effective resistance to the IOC’s commercial manipulation, which acted in much the same manner as European colonialists from eras past.
According to government audits, the cost of the Tokyo games approached $25 billion, over three times the original estimates. (See “Tokyo Rift,” by Kenji Hall, in the May 2021 edition of Sports Illustrated, or read the article’s online version here: https://www.si.com/olympics/2021/04/12/tokyo-rift-olympics-opposition-daily-cover.) Another report regarding those audits, in the Wall Street Journal in late July, suggests that the cost is closer to $20 billion, but either way, the price overruns are staggering (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tokyo-olympics-staggering-price-tag-and-where-it-stands-in-history-11627049612#:~:text=The%20Tokyo%20Olympics%20are%20set,its%20bid%20for%20the%20Olympics). And because the pandemic and Japan’s low vaccination rates deprived the games of ticket-buying, revenue-creating spectators, the financial losses figure to be gargantuan for the nation and the city. According to a study conducted by Katsuhiro Miyamoto, a professor emeritus at Kansai University, the Summer Olympics will leave the host nation as much as $22 billion in the hole. (Again, see Hall’s “Tokyo Rift.”) Although the newly constructed or renovated athletic venues may decrease this deficit over the coming decades, the overall financial cost figures to be massive for a long time to come. And in addition to the sheer, unredeemed public outlays, there are the private businesses, restaurants, and vendors who figured to enjoy the economic opportunities provided by the Tokyo Olympics, only to see those chances dwindle dramatically due to the absence of spectators.
Just as significantly, the residents of Tokyo and Japan were unable to directly enjoy the fruits of their labor, or at least their hard-earned taxpayer dollars, by attending the games and basking in the world’s attention. Instead, to experience the athletic events, they had to watch them on television like everyone else, paying the cost and receiving none of the reward. The comparison to colonialism, in which European powers forced indigenous peoples to mine resources or construct infrastructure in their own countries that would be used primarily by the white colonialists, is inescapable. The IOC, a clubby cabal of white elites based in Switzerland, made out like bandits, while the Japanese people could not benefit from their own labor and money and instead lost billions and billions on the deal.
One might protest, of course, that this turn of events did not represent the plan, that COVID caused this calamity. One might also note that the Japanese organizing officials in Tokyo still sought to host the games this summer, regardless of the widespread public disapproval (usually expressed in polling, not protest, as Hall writes). But even though the IOC did not intend this result, it still showed a level of insensitivity and inflexibility that speaks to an ethnocentric mindset. And colonialism or imperialism, of course, always enjoyed or cultivated its indigenous lackeys, human scaffolding that would prop up, or cover for, the exploitation of the masses.
In the end, as in colonialism, the perspective and concerns of the people proved irrelevant, smugly dismissed by the exploitative elites from outside the country. And as in colonialism, those ruling elites extracted massive amounts of wealth that they profited from, while the indigenous people enjoyed little-to-no benefit. Regardless of the initial intention, the parallel patterns resonate too deeply to simply be characterized as coincidental. In other words, colonialist mindsets linger, and colonialist results repeat in a de facto sense.
Ultimately, the International Olympic Committee used Tokyo, turning the city into a trinket, its citizens into ghosts. If a country, a city, and its denizens decide to host an exorbitant extravaganza such as the Olympic Games, the least that they could expect is the chance to enjoy the events, to attend them as spectators, to profit from the brief surge in business opportunities, and to display their cultural heritage to the world, potentially increasing tourism for years to come. And although the vagaries of COVID variants prevent absolute certainty, such a scenario likely would have emerged by the summer of 2022. At the very least, the people of Tokyo and Japan deserved that chance. But its booty already secured, the IOC proved unmoved. After all, the parasite is just in search of profit.
