CHINO, Japan, July 19, 2021—It happened before: At the 2008 G7 Hokkaido Toyako summit, the 2010 APEC conference, Trump’s 2019 visit to Japan, and several other smaller international events over the past 20 years that mobilized tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of police, local city office employees, and other public servants, a majority of them subserviently doing what they are told to do to collect othertime pays.
All those events were, according to planners that are bureaucrats and their cronies, supposed to promote Japan’s shrinking local communities and local brands, tourism and services. Lake Toya, the venues where heads of state from 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, briefly became a Japanese tourist attraction after the May 2008 conference, filling up the hotel where the conference was held. Bookings have been tapering off since then. The 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic skating rink also has been underutilized since the games were held.
As such, many in the private sector that cooperated with the government to host the events have been obliged to stomach the pain of shrinking business and struggle for survival, while bureaucrats and maniple employees, who collected fat overtime pays during the events, forget about the past in search of new undertakings, such as green tourism.
The 2021 Tokyo Olympics is exactly the reincarnation of many past events. The national government is fielding hundreds of thousands of police, health, sanitation, logistics officials for security and other necessary arrangements to accommodate athletes. That’s creating huge loads of work for those public and quasi-public servants. Those that register good performances are expected to be promoted, on top of getting overtime pays.
The financial daily Nihon Keizai July 19 front-paged an article, Can the Tokyo Olympics in the Pandemic Give Lessons to the Future? That’s a wishful thinking. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were credited for Japan’s resurfacing from the World War II rubbles and enabled reentering the rich countries’ clubs, such as G5 and OECD. Examining closely, the games did more and countless damage to Japan than rewarding the country of 126 million.
The Nihonbashi Bridge, where highways to all destinations, was canopied under the expressway so passersby won’t recognize the famous bridge, many canals used for centuries for transport were buried underground, street car tracks that linked the city extensively were replaced by roads for ‘Kamikaze’ taxis and cars, and community parks were sold or leased to businesses, making Tokyo look like an urban desert with little green.
Those were executed by central government and city offices, where as Akira Kurosawa’s Film ‘The Bad Sleep Well,’ public servants laughed, were well-fed, and slept well.
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Insight Into the Future