Japan and the 2020 Olympics: Party like it’s ’64

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

ITS bid to host the 2016 Olympic games was doomed by a lack of enthusiasm. After years of rising economic insecurity and public debt, residents of Tokyo, the world’s biggest city, were reluctant to put on the world’s costliest sporting extravaganza. There was no such problem this time around. For a buttoned-up place, the tears and the hugs were infectious.

In beating Madrid and Istanbul for the right to host the 2020 games, Tokyo impressed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with a bid backed by 70% of residents, a big increase in local support since an earthquake and tsunami wrecked Japan’s north-east coast in March 2011 and caused a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant.

It might seem strange that it took disaster to rekindle Tokyo’s passion. But the city government relentlessly sold the idea that the Olympics would help Japan recover. In the event, a string of abiding problems at Fukushima, 230km (145 miles) from the capital, put Tokyo’s Olympic organisers on the defensive in the final days, as the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, scrabbled to find $470m-odd to stop radiation leaks and reassure the IOC that athletes would be safe.

Tokyo will now build 22 of 37 planned Olympic venues from scratch, while refurbishing the national Olympic stadium, the centrepiece of Japan’s 1964 games. The government reckons all this will cost ¥409 billion ($4.1 billion), to be offset by a ¥3 trillion Olympic windfall. But that seems wildly optimistic, even before considering the odds of a huge earthquake under Tokyo before 2020, which experts deem high.

Still, construction and property firms do not mind. The 1964 games famously triggered the building of key infrastructure, including the Tokyo-Osaka bullet train and the capital’s elevated expressway. More ominously, it got Japan hooked on issuing government bonds to cover growing deficits. Total government debt now stands at over 200% of GDP.

The question of cost will loom large over the next seven years. For now, the prime minister can claim to have put the gleaming capital back on the world stage. And the choice of Tokyo may be the shot in the arm his growth strategy needs. But after seven prime ministers in as many years, Mr Abe is unlikely to be around in 2020 to take the blame should the costs of the Olympics turn out to be a beleaguered economy’s final straw.

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