Tokyo: A Subdued Olympics Closing

The central field of the new National Stadium was, in the words of JapanToday.com, transformed into a “grassy space resembling a Tokyo park to allow athletes, who were unable to go out to see the sights, to get a virtual taste of life in the capital.”

As the athletes from around the world who were still in Tokyo (most were required to return home after their events finished) milled around the space, they were entertained with musical performances, both live and recorded, by Japanese artists, including the famous Takarazuka all-women theatrical troupe. As many observers noted, the closing ceremony featured more Japanese culture than the the opening ceremony did, including remotely traditional “bon odori,” a communal dance to celebrate the obon festival, when the living meet briefly with the dead. The closing ceremony coincided with obon season, which seems fitting given the circumstances surrounding Tokyo 2020.

Most media remarked that the closing ceremony was more upbeat than the opening ceremony but only because it seemed to fall into the pattern expected of it: “the usual set of speeches, performances, parades and tributes,” as the New York Times put it. It was thus a fitting finale to a very odd event, where the host city was not only largely excluded from the festivities due to concerns over exacerbating the spread of COVID-19, but struggling with the fifth wave of the pandemic that its government had promised would be over by this point — it was the whole rationale for convincing the Japanese people to go ahead with the games. 

For sure, many citizens enjoyed the sporting events from the comfort of their own homes via TV and streaming services, especially since Japan won more medals than it ever won before. 

In addition, the superspreader event that many feared didn’t materialize, with an extremely small portion of the people related to the Olympics testing positive for the virus, and most of those were Japanese. Nevertheless, many experts pinned the sharp increase in infections in Tokyo during the games — cases increased more than threefold in a week’s time — to the influence of the Olympics, since many residents of Tokyo ignored the authorities’ plea to stay at home and not patronize eating and drinking establishments so as to minimize the effect of the Delta variant that accounted for the majority of new infections. 

Instead, people tried to get into the spirit of the Olympics and collected in groups on the street, drinking and partying. Local media who talked to these people found that most were young and not particularly interested in the Games. Nevertheless, they felt left out of a celebration that they were in many ways paying for and so didn’t feel they had to follow the government’s orders. For the most part, police were more forceful with organizations who were actively protesting the Olympics than they were with people who were having fun without observing proper social distancing protocols. In that sense, it may be a few weeks until the Japanese people can really be sure that, as the organizers claimed, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were “safe and secure.”