The Tokyo 2020 Games and the End of Olympic History

Introduction

On 24 July 2019 International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach stepped to the dais at the Tokyo International Forum and opined, “I have never seen an Olympic city as prepared as Tokyo with one year to go before the Olympic Games” (Bach 2019). He praised the pace of ticket sales, business sponsorship levels, and the volume of volunteer applications. Bach failed to mention the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown of March 2011, a destructive trifecta etched in Japan's collective memory. This oversight was all the more conspicuous because Japanese organizers have dubbed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics the “Recovery Games.” To get the point across, organizers chose Fukushima to start the Olympic torch relay, where, beginning in March 2020, the “Flame of Recovery” will wend its way through the radioactive countryside under the banner “Hope Lights Our Way” (TOCOPG, n.d.). Of course, Bach also failed to mention that sports mega-events like the Olympics have become flashpoints for anti-capitalist struggle, with the Games’ negative social and ecological repercussions becoming increasingly evident.

Earlier that day at a gala media event, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed the “Recovery Games” theme hard, telling the assembled journalists, “We want to showcase the affected regions of the tsunami.” Bach echoed the prime minister: “You will see that people in the devastated areas will benefit from the infrastructure brought by the Games and they will benefit from the hope that the Olympics bring” (Zirin and Boykoff 2019a). The ritualized concern for “the affected regions” and “the devastated areas,” without mentioning Fukushima by name or alluding to the nuclear meltdown, came across as scripted euphemizing in service of the Olympic spectacle.

The events marking one year before the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics drew the usual herd from the International Olympic Committee, including IOC Coordination Commission Chair John Coates of Australia, IOC member Alex Gilady from Israel, and Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi. They were joined by Japanese power brokers like Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and Yoshiro Mori, the former prime minister and current President of the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee. Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra and the Yoshida Brothers provided the entertainment. The event brought glitz and glam, pomp and pageantry, setting the mood for Olympic-sized consumption (Takahashi 2019).

In contrast, hours after the Olympic back-slapping, a transnational band of anti-Olympics activists staged a protest rally and march in Tokyo's Shinjuku shopping district. People from former and future Olympic host cities—Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Pyeongchang, South Korea—converged to spotlight what Olympic powerbrokers glossed over: the “Recovery Games” don't and won't help recovery from Fukushima's 2011 nuclear disaster. The scene in Shinjuku was lively and the buzz from the protesters rang out through the neon-lit streets. One banner read in French, Japanese, and English: “No to the Radioactive Olympics in Tokyo!” Another suggested to “Boycott the Radioactive Olympics.” Other signs read, “No Nukes!! No More Fukushima!!!” and “Another Fukushima Is Possible!” The mobilization was the culmination of a weeklong anti-Olympics summit that included public lectures, research workshops, media strategy sessions, and a press conference. The anti-Olympics group Okotowari organized a day-trip to Fukushima prefecture where activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars—including us—witnessed the enduring devastation and spoke with those who continue to live with the consequences of nuclear disaster (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Anti-Olympic protesters gather in Shinjuku, Tokyo in July 2019. Photo credit: Takane Suzuki.

Japan sits on one of the most earthquake-prone areas in the world. Located along an extremely active segment of the “Ring of Fire,” it is rocked by more than 1,000 earthquakes a year. On 11 March 2011—or what the Japanese call “3–11”—the Pacific Plate jerked downward and the North American Plate clicked upward. The Richter scale gave it a 9.1—a jolt big enough to tilt the earth's axis. Honshu, Japan's main island, grew three feet in an hour. The US Geological Survey figured that the shifting plates released enough energy to power Los Angeles for a year (Lochbaum, Lyman, and Stranahan 2014, 1, 3–4). What would become known as the Great East Japanese Earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit the woefully, if not willfully, unprepared TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The ensuing mayhem caused more than 20,000 deaths and displaced 164,000 to 185,000 residents. 40,000 people remain displaced (CNN 2011; World Nuclear News 2019). Fukushima is only 140 miles north of Tokyo, the world's largest metropolis and host of the 2020 Summer Olympics. Recovery will take decades, the trauma will play out over generations (Farmer 2019).

Japan's triple-whammy catastrophe teed up an archetypal opportunity for what Naomi Klein (2007) calls “disaster capitalism.” Disasters—wars, typhoons, floods, terrorist attacks—thrust a population into a state of shock that leaves it susceptible to capitalists who seize the pandemonium to privatize, deregulate, and marketize. A disaster brings “a total merger of political and corporate elites in the name of security” in ways that justify and bolster neoliberal capitalism (Klein 2007, 399). Similar dynamics can also emerge during collective states of euphoria like the Olympic Games—or, “celebration capitalism” (Boykoff 2013). Both disaster and celebration capitalism torque the normal rules of politics and law, creating opportunities for well-connected political and economic elites. During the former there is the spectacle of ruin, the latter is a ruinous spectacle.

As Japanese officials and the IOC prepare to stage the 2020 Summer Olympics wearing the conspicuously green cloak of the “Recovery Games,” we identify a potent synergy of disaster capitalism and celebration capitalism. This turbocharged blend reinforces and fuses nationalism, consumerism, and “disaster recovery,” refashioning them into a powerful political-economic spectacle driven by Olympic ideology—a collective, feel-good way forward in uncertain times. Yet, the Olympics cannot, by design or desire, accomplish these goals. To the contrary, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics are amplifying global ecological, social, and political crises.

Olympic “Sustainability” and Five-Ring Greenwashing

Tokyo's bid for the 2020 Olympics contained grand, if nebulous, sustainability promises. The Tokyo 2020 Bid Committee (2013, 48) wrote that, “Tokyo 2020 would place major emphasis on cooperation and consultation with the many stakeholders involved in the sustainability and environment-related field.” The bid (2013, 61–62) offered three “pillars” of environmental sustainability: (1) a “minimal impact Games” to achieve carbon neutrality, (2) environmental urban planning to create more green spaces in the city, and (3) vague sport-based efforts to “raise environmental awareness and encourage action, with sport as a driving force.”

The Tokyo 2020 candidature file was stuffed with assurances that hosting the Games would be a therapeutic elixir that the Japanese people desperately needed. For instance, then-Governor of Tokyo, Naoki Inose, wrote,

The earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 deeply affected the Japanese people, and we are in need of a dream we can share that will strengthen our solidarity. A dream can give us strength, and with strength we can build a future.

He added that if Tokyo were named 2020 host, Japan could “demonstrate to the world how far we have come in rebuilding our country, and give courage especially to those who are confronted with a challenge of hardship” (Tokyo 2020 Bid Committee 2013). Olympic boosters entwined greening the Games with redeeming the country in the wake of environmental calamity.

In a letter accompanying Tokyo's candidature file, Tsunekazu Takeda, then-president of Japan's Olympic Committee (JOC), a member of the Japanese royal family, and the head of the Tokyo 2020 bid, blended well-worn Olympic tropes with themes of motivation and gratefulness:

Over many years, Japan has understood the unique power of sport and witnessed its ability to inspire and unite … Today, when thousands in the north-east of our country continue to recover from the disaster of March 2011, we understand that power even more. (Tokyo 2020 Bid Committee 2013)

The two-pronged message was clear: Japanese powerbrokers insisted that hosting the Olympics would inspire those in Fukushima whose lives were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami (no mention of nuclear disaster) and that staging the Games would be a way of thanking the world for its support and would give hope to those living under conditions of extreme radioactivity.

It was clear from the outset that the Tokyo bid deserved skepticism. In December 2013, only two months after the IOC voted Tokyo as host of the 2020 Games, Naoki Inose resigned after acknowledging he had received money from someone embroiled in vote-buying allegations (Ogura and Ng 2013). But by then Tokyo had already sealed the deal with the IOC—Tokyo would host the 2020 Games. Then, in January 2019, Takeda was indicted on corruption charges for $2 million in bribery payments he allegedly authorized to secure IOC votes for the 2020 Games. Later that year Takeda was forced out of the Japanese Olympic Committee (Slodowski 2019).

While corruption and the IOC are old bedfellows, lesser known are the ways in which the IOC makes promises and fails to deliver. The vague environmental gestures nestled in Tokyo's Olympic bid are part of a longer history of dubious sustainability practices going back to the early 1990s when the IOC started bringing environmentalism into its vernacular. As with many multinational corporations in the 1990s, the IOC was forced to reckon with public criticism of the negative environmental impacts of its business model (Cantelon and Letters 2000).

1992 was a seminal year for the global environmental movement. That year the United Nations held its first Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. This “Earth Summit” helped establish the importance of environmentalism as a key field requiring concerted, global action, and enshrined in its concluding “declaration” ideas such as the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle (Ennals 1993; Jordan 1994).

Although the Earth Summit made a positive splash in the press—with the New York Times proclaiming “the new-found prominence of the environment as an international issue, bidding to rank with economics and national security” (Stevens 1992, A11)—rampant environmental destruction has obviously continued apace (Cantelon and Letters 2000). Social and economic sustainability have barely entered the IOC's equation and the narrowing of the terms of debate has allowed for control and consolidation of the “green Olympic” narrative, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in Pyeongchang (Sung-won 2018), Rio (Gaffney 2013), Sochi (Gaffney and Wolfe 2016), London (Boykoff 2013), and Vancouver (Whitson 2012).

While there has undoubtedly been some progress towards raising global consciousness about the ecological consequences of capitalism and unbridled consumption since Rio 1992, the public understanding of the relationship between elite sport and environmental devastation has lagged behind. This is partly because the IOC has successfully marketed its “sustainable practices” by discursively baking “environmentalism” into its core mission (Boykoff and Mascarenhas 2016). During the lead-in to every Olympic Games, the IOC's green lingo is perfunctorily dusted off and the latest slate of environmental remediation tactics are sold to local, national, and global consumers as a palliative for ever-expanding commodity chains.

The contradictions of capitalism are particularly evident in Japan where the very solution to the problem of carbon emissions—a reliance on nuclear power—resulted in an ecological, social, and political catastrophe with no end in sight. If the TEPCO Daiichi meltdown was a result of pursuing a green alternative to fuel Japanese growth, then the rhetorical device of the 2020 Olympic Games to mark the end of a nuclear disaster is the height of cynical expediency.

Greenwashing—displaying concern for the environment and claiming credit for providing solutions while in reality doing the bare minimum, if anything, to make material ecological gains—anesthetizes the public to the environmental impacts of the Olympics. It duplicitously insinuates that individual consumer choices will ameliorate the unfolding ecological crisis, even as humanity rambles down the garden path towards cheap goods (sometimes in the furry form of cuddly Olympic mascots), mass extinctions, and an overheating planet. Since the IOC has notched up the volume and frequency of its environmental claims, Olympic events have become ever-bigger, their impacts ever more extensive (Müller and Gaffney 2018). Greenwashing reminds us to forget that elite sport is a consumer choice, a sharp-clawed tentacle of global capital that leaves indelible marks on cities and citizens, ecosystems, and our collective future.

Tokyo 2020: Ecological Crisis, Slow Violence

In 2013, when Tokyo's Olympic boosters were bidding on the 2020 Olympics, Fukushima was fresh on the minds of many. To quell global anxieties, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe directly addressed the situation in his pitch to members of the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires: “Some may have concerns about Fukushima,” he said. “Let me assure you, the situation is under control. It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo” (Whiteside 2013).

But back in Japan, people with direct knowledge of the situation were not as sanguine. Firsthand accounts from marine ecologists and local residents bluntly contradicted the prime minister's claim that radioactive water gushing out of the Fukushima plant and into the Pacific Ocean was being contained (Hobson and Dewit 2013; Yogeshwar 2014). On the day of the Rio 2016 Paralympic opening ceremony, former Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi was unequivocal: “Mr. Abe's ‘under control’ remark was a lie” (Sieg and Lim 2016). Credible sources have challenged the claim that Fukushima could not affect the Tokyo metropolis (Victoria 2015). One study found that Fukushima's radioactivity levels are two to four times higher than those of Chernobyl. Also, cases of thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima have risen (Katsuma 2016).

In other words, Abe and the Japanese government did not have the situation under control in 2013. And yet, the IOC selected Tokyo over Istanbul and Madrid. Jacques Rogge, the Belgian yachtsman and orthopedic surgeon who was the president of the IOC at the time, extolled the city as “a safe pair of hands” (Whiteside 2013). Six years later, when we visited Fukushima in July 2019, one year ahead of the Olympics, locals were still seething about Abe's claim that everything was “under control.”

In Fukushima we witnessed the chasm between the “Recovery Olympics” brand and a region in dire need of material aid. Survivors of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown are still struggling to rebuild. Satoko Itani, a professor of sport, gender and sexuality studies at Kansai University, called the “Recovery Olympics” tagline ironic since “the money and human resources they are spending in Tokyo could help people who survived the 2011 disaster and make communities more resilient to future catastrophes.” Instead, Itani continued, “this Olympics is literally taking the money, workers, and cranes away from the areas where they are needed most” (Boykoff and Zirin 2019).

Our visit to Fukushima was, like the other events we attended during a full week of anti-Olympics activities, extremely well-organized and chock-full of riveting information. Our tour guides provided us with protective masks, although we rarely saw local residents wearing them. We were accompanied by scientist and professor Fujita Yasumoto who wielded a dosimeter, a device that measures radiation levels. With every kilometer we drew closer to the Daiichi reactor, his dosimeter crept upwards, eventually peaking at the TEPCO decommissioning archive center and museum where radiation levels were eighteen times higher than the recommended standard. The dosimeter readings were also too high at the J-Village: the national football training ground, future Olympic training area, and the site where the Olympic torch relay was slated to kick off in March 2020. We were not in significant danger, as our visit was brief, but what about the Japanese youth teams that were there for intense workouts and the Olympic teams that are to follow? What about the people who live in Fukushima, marinating in radiation-riddled air, drinking tainted water, eating poisoned fruits?

As we drove through the towns of the Futaba District (equivalent to a county in the USA, Fukushima Prefecture is roughly equivalent to a state), we passed thousands of plastic bags stacked into what locals call “Black Pyramids”: massive piles of radioactive topsoil. Men wearing not much more than a jumpsuit and paper mask were stuffing, hauling, and stacking the contaminated soil. Trucks transported some bags away to distant areas; we saw dozens of these macabre pyramids along the side of the highway. Many of the bags were bursting as sprouting seedlings poked through the plastic. When it was windy, the contaminated soil blew into the air. When a typhoon hit in October 2019, some of the bags from the the black pyramids washed into nearby rivers (Kotegawa 2019) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. “Black Pyramids” in Fukushima. Photo credit: Christopher Gaffney.

As our Japanese colleagues led our group from site to site, we intermittently passed roads barricaded by gates and guarded by police. These were the “difficult to return zones” where radioactivity was so high that the federal government has prevented residents’ return. This is despite the fact that the Abe government raised the allowable standard for exposure to radioactivity from the international benchmark of 1 milisilvert (mSv) annually to 20 mSv. Residents in the region receive well over the legal limit per annum. There is a general sense in Fukushima that, as Scientific American reported, “Abe's determination to put the Daiichi accident behind the nation is jeopardizing public health, especially among children, who are more susceptible” (Little 2019). The Tokyo Olympics provide a dose of urgency to rush the process of returning residents to Fukushima, preparing the area for global TV consumption, regardless of what this may mean for the safety of the local population.

It's hard not to view Fukushima as a “sacrifice zone,” a term that emerged during the Cold War to denote a space made unlivable by nuclear fallout (Holifield and Day 2017). Fukushima is a modern-day capitalist sacrifice zone for the climate-disruption era, and one in which people are being forced to inhabit, practice, and perform in the name of spectacle. For Olympic visitors—and for researchers like us—the high levels of radioactivity north of Tokyo may not pose lasting health risks. For residents, however, the tragedy continues. The scenes of abandonment and desolation were heart-rending. We traveled past home after abandoned home, with cars and tricycles left rusting in driveways. We saw shuttered businesses, empty gas stations, and abandoned rice fields. These drastic changes kicked into motion on the night of 11 March 2011, and the struggle to recover—emotionally, economically, socially, ecologically—is ongoing. The Olympics are not helping.

If the black pyramids, abandoned businesses, and fallow rice paddies were potent symbols of the environmental and economic consequences of nuclear disaster, a local “shop” in the Okuma district was a grim reminder of the human costs. Although the magenta sign outside read “Gift Shop,” inside the building, we found nothing resembling tourist souvenirs. Instead, we encountered rows of display cases featuring personal effects left in the wake of catastrophe. A volunteer organization had emerged to organize the items that fleeing families left behind: house keys, teddy bears, timepieces, handbags, shoes, jewelry, sporting equipment, religious icons, ashes of loved ones. Neatly arranged gnomes and Buddhas sat on one shelf, vases and plastic tchotchkes on another. One cabinet held shelves of medals and sporting trophies, vestiges of talent and promise whisked away by the storm, a reminder that amateur athletes were among the dead and displaced. Each item was accompanied by a meticulously printed label denoting where the object was found. A docent who greeted us at the door said that more than 2,300 items had been reclaimed by more than 700 people (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Medals in “Gift Shop” that were found in Fukushima in the wake of the disaster. Photo credit: Christopher Gaffney.

We were invited to Okuma Town City Hall to talk with Masumi Kowata, an elected official on the town's 12-person council. She decimated Prime Minster Abe's “under control” remark with the power and precision of someone in the know. Challenging the Olympic-recovery narrative, she said,

Things are absolutely not ‘under control’ and nothing is over yet. The nuclear radiation is still very high. Only one small section is being cleaned. The wider region is still an evacuation zone. There is still radiation in the area. Meanwhile, we’re [hosting] the Olympics. (Zirin and Boykoff 2019b)

Kowata expressed frustration with a monomaniacal Olympism that she viewed as interfering with the cleanup in Fukushima. She delineated a litany of despair: the federal government had plans to eliminate exemptions on the payment of property taxes for residents in her district after the Olympics, meaning homeowners would have to resume paying taxes on uninhabitable homes in towns to which they cannot safely return. The Reconstruction Bureau would expire in 2021 and federal recovery funds along with it, further weakening municipal recovery plans. She described how depopulation has resulted in an increase in wild boar populations, making it unsafe to walk in the forests. High radiation meant difficult reproductive choices for local couples. She gestured to city employees toiling at their desks and said that most were commuting from more than 100 kilometers away to avoid the radiation and that municipal services were so strapped that city officials were forced to double as firefighters. The earthquake and tsunami may have been inevitable, she said, but the nuclear meltdown was the result of poor planning and substandard governance in equal measure.

The decision to prioritize infrastructure and technology for the Tokyo 2020 Games over recovery in Fukushima relates to what Rob Nixon (2011, 2) theorizes as “slow violence,” or “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” This incremental violence ramifies and amplifies ecological catastrophe and can shatter communities like Okuma Town. Nixon (2011, 22) pings a key dynamic nestled at the nexus of the Olympics and Fukushima when he notes, “the time frames of damage assessment and potential recovery are wildly out of sync. The deep-time thinking that celebrates natural healing is strategically disastrous if it provides political cover for reckless corporate short-termism.”

From Fukushima to Tokyo: Legalized Corruption and Surveillance Capitalism

If the slow violence of Fukushima is a constantly unfolding trauma exacerbated by Tokyo 2020, the Olympic-inspired changes to Tokyo's urban fabric are consolidating political and economic power while civil liberties wither. This comes in the form of inflated budgets, subsidized real-estate developments, redundant infrastructure, white elephant stadiums, and the expansion of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls “surveillance capitalism.” Unlike the illegal corruption that Japanese Olympic powerbrokers allegedly carried out through vote-buying, these dynamics, in combination, amount to a potent brand of legalized corruption that defines the Olympic business model.

The 2020 Summer Games will be among the most expensive in history. Tokyo 2020 bidders initially pegged overall costs at $7.3 billion, but after the ink was dried on the host-city contract, costs did a quadruple somersault to around $30 billion. Under pressure from IOC members concerned with bad public-relations, organizers made cutbacks by eliminating line items. True to form, in 2017 IOC Vice President and Tokyo 2020 Coordination Commission Chair John Coates appeared to be less concerned about what the Games would cost Japanese taxpayers than the optics of a high-budget Olympics, which could reduce global interest in doing business with the IOC (Gallagher 2017). In a visit two years later Coates was demanding further cuts (Agence France Presse 2019). Even though the cuts will impact operations and some sports, the price tag is still more than three times higher than the original bid (McCurry 2016; Benjamin 2018).

The New National Stadium is emblematic of the larger problem with Tokyo 2020. After significant wrangling about whether to modernize the iconic 1964 Olympic stadium or to destroy it and build from scratch, Japanese organizers forced through a new stadium designed by Zaha Hadid (Pollock 2014). The costs quickly doubled before Hadid's agency resigned and Tokyo organizers swapped the project for Kengo Kuma's less-expensive stadium (Wainwright 2015). But the cheaper design came with human costs. According to a report issued by the Building and Wood Workers’ International (2019, 2), almost half the construction workers at the National stadium lacked formal employment contracts; some reported working up to twenty-six consecutive days. Environmental NGOs revealed that the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee sourced timber from Indonesia and Malaysia that was contributing to rapid deforestation (Nelson 2018).

While the architect swap grabbed headlines, local developers worked behind the scenes to leverage the Olympic state of exception to relax longtime height restrictions on building in the neighborhood around the National Stadium. In 1970, city officials established a 15-meter height limit to control development around Meiji-era imperial structures. But in 2013, to accommodate the new National Stadium design, the legal building height was raised to 80 meters (Inagaki 2019). This Olympics-induced regulation pried open urban terrain for well-positioned developers. Celebration capitalism trumped imperial tradition.

The change in zoning laws also cleared the way for the elimination of public housing units. While in Tokyo, we met residents who had been forcibly removed from public apartment buildings in Kasumigaoka. Of the 370 residents evicted, 60 percent were over 65 years old and many were widows in their 80s and 90s (Villar and Oh 2013). Meanwhile, the Japanese Olympic Committee built a glass-encased tower near the site where high-end high-rise apartment buildings have also sprouted. The developers, landlords, and gentrifiers are benefitting at the expense of the poor and elderly—and while the numbers of forcible dislocations are not as high (or as violent) as in Rio, London, or Beijing, the levers of lucre are pulled by similar hands.

The Olympic Village, which will house athletes during the Games, emerged as another opportunity for private profit subsidized by the public purse. The reclaimed land on which the Olympic Village sits was originally owned by the city, and after infill was completed in 1964, it was used for parking and industrial storage. But in 2016 the city sold it at cut-rate prices to eleven well-positioned developers who will convert the Olympic Village into condominiums that will anchor a “new town” of 12,000, with schools, fire stations, commerce, and 750 security cameras (Inagaki 2019). There is currently no public transportation to the Olympic Village, no businesses, and no nearby residential enclaves. This is indeed a new town that will need to bring wealthy residents from other parts of Tokyo to live in an isolated, sterile environment—with some green space around the edges. The subsidized land and tax abatements made it easy for real-estate developers to speculate as they direct urban development towards the bay and into their pocketbooks. Forbes called the construction boom of Tokyo 2020 “redundant upgrades” to an already hyper-modern urban space (Pesek 2019).

As with previous Olympic hosts, Japanese lawmakers leveraged the Olympics to pass a suite of terror laws that impinge on civil liberties. The new laws criminalize civil disobedience—which is already difficult enough to practice in corporate, patriarchal Japan—and expand wire-tapping and surveillance measures that the Japanese courts will be unlikely to limit if challenged by civil society organizations (McCurry 2017). We saw some of these new laws in action during the protest in Shinjuku where undercover police took photos of everyone involved in the demonstration. There was consensus among our Japanese colleagues that the police were using a relatively light touch during the protest march because of the presence of so many foreigners—previous protests were met with much more truculence.

Olympic security officials have teamed up with Japanese tech giant NEC to deliver facial recognition technology to all Olympic venues for the first time in the history of the Games (Werthan 2018). NEC biometric technologies including face, iris, fingerprint, palm print, and voice detection will also be available for identity authentication and other scenarios. Tokyo Metropolitan Police are working with Olympic sponsor Panasonic to deploy a high-tech crowd forecasting system. According to one tech journal,

Front-line security monitoring at Tokyo 2020 will see robots replacing the police patrols of previous Olympics. Japanese security company ALSOK's emotional visualization system will monitor crowds via cameras mounted on squads of autonomous roaming robots. The system does a lot more than identify suspicious packages—it also looks for ‘the jitters’. (Synced 2019)

These technologies will be turned on Tokyo residents after the Games, allowing for more state control and the expansion of data mining operations.

These technologies—and the dynamics they kickstart—lie at the core of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019, 8) calls “surveillance capitalism,” a mode of capital accumulation that “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” Behavioral data is plunged back into products or services to improve user experience, but the bulk of it is treated as “proprietary behavioral surplus” that tech firms use to create “prediction products” that are exchanged in “behavioral futures markets,” in the process creating windfall profits for surveillance capitalists. Surveillance capitalism, she argues (2019, 513), is a profoundly “antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut” that is tantamount to “a market-driven coup from above.” The Olympics are enabling this coup in Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, Milan, and Los Angeles where future Olympic Games are slated to be staged.

It is not only the physical, legal, and financial travesties of Tokyo 2020 that should have us questioning the Games, but the human ones, too. Tokyo organizers opted to hold the Olympiad in July and August, months notorious for their deadly blend of heat and humidity. In 2017 and 2018, more than 1,000 people (including a laborer on the National Stadium project) died from heat-related matters, with tens of thousands heading to the hospital. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, in the ten years ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics the average daily temperature for August was 26.6 degrees Celsius (79.9 Fahrenheit), while the most recent decade averaged 28.0 degrees Celsius (82.4 Fahrenheit). Sensibly, Olympic organizers in 1964 opted to hold the Games in October, but in the 21st century, athlete and spectator health and well-being are less valuable than broadcasting rights. The consensus villain is US broadcaster NBC, which forked over $12.13 billion to screen the Olympics between 2014 and 2032 (Branch and Rich 2019). NBC does not want the Olympics to clash with the US sports fall schedule and effectively calls the shots on Olympic scheduling.

As we discovered to our sweaty chagrin, Tokyo is a sauna in July. Olympic proposals to deal with the heat are quizzical at best, farcical at worst. Japan's Environment Ministry floated the idea of enlisting office buildings and shops to open their doors and blast their air conditioners in order to cool off marathon runners and spectators, which hardly chimes with the Games’ stated environmental aspirations (Tsutsui 2019). The plan became moot in October 2019 when the IOC unilaterally decided to move the marathon and race walking events north to Sapporo, where daytime temperatures during the Olympic period are on average around five degrees centigrade cooler.

New plans emerged in August 2019, after more than fifty people died of heatstroke and more than 18,000 landed in hospitals with heat-related conditions. During an Olympic test event that month, snow cannons designed to blast a frosty mixture into spectator areas proved ineffective (Bogage 2019). There is hope that the advanced technology sector that powers the Japanese economy will come up with a more effective cannon before next summer. Spectators can also buy Tokyo 2020 umbrella hats which they can strap onto their heads as they rise before dawn to attend early-morning competitions. The Tokyo Games will be grueling competition for the spectators, a survival-of-the-fittest tourist experience that stretches the limits of human credulity.

Destructive Destruction and Activist Fightback

Researchers of Olympic urbanism have unveiled how the infrastructure demands of the event unleash a wave of creative destruction (Gotham 2005). This is a misnomer. The Olympics are better characterized as a force of “destructive destruction” whereby existing facilities, apartment blocks, and neighborhoods are razed to foster specific forms of urbanism designed to extract maximum rents. In Tokyo this has taken the form of destroying public housing units and creating new zoning laws that maximize the newly-inflated land values around the new National Stadium. For residents of the Kasumigaoka apartment complex, the destruction of their homes to make way for high-end real-estate scrambled their lives while their community was trampled by the Olympic Trojan Horse and its high-flying capitalist jockey. The insertion of face-recognition technology and security robots that can read human emotion into Olympic spaces is not accidental, but a collaborative strategy between business, government, and sport. Nor are these technologies temporary; after the Games they will be integrated into quotidian policing practices.

Perhaps the most egregious example of the damage that the Olympics impose upon cities is the targeting of specific zones for redevelopment, renewal, refurbishing, or renaissance (Gold and Gold 2008). Forced removals, gentrification, and dislocation are as much a part of the Olympic lexicon as altius, citius, fortius (higher, faster, stronger). As the Games have expanded, so have their impacts on host cities. Time and again we have seen functional stadia destroyed so that high-tech jewels of urban bling can sparkle, albeit briefly, for global audiences (Gaffney 2015). In October of 2019 a member of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee declared that the most expensive Olympic stadium ever has no post-Olympics use (Yamazaki 2019). The development of high-maintenance, low-return facilities—even if they meet the highest standards of energy efficiency—is an integral part of the destructive cycle. One may have thought the Japanese would do it better, but that is not how the Olympics work.

To be sure, Tokyo 2020 organizers talk a green game. They vow to institute environmentally conscious measures around the edges like using recycled plastic for uniforms, reusing wood from venues to build public benches, and forging Olympic medals from metal that has been extracted from mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Organizers have also stated that they’ll purchase carbon offsets (Chandran 2019). However, much as carbon offsets lack oversight and fail to address the climate crisis (Song and Moura 2019), the IOC does not enforce sustainability promises on host cities. Instead, IOC members jet off to the next Olympic city, the next five-star hotel (Chen and Hsieh 2011). For instance, as of March 2020, no high-ranking IOC official has returned to visit post-Olympic Rio de Janeiro. This creates space for host cities to renege on their environmental promises, circumventing their well-crafted green language, because neither they nor the IOC are held accountable. Plus, as Forbes noted, “The Olympic won't usher in a pro-growth energy policy that moves Japan away from coal and nuclear reactors” (Pesek 2019). Instead, the Tokyo Olympics are a harbinger of destructive destruction that will, by design, accelerate the global environmental crisis. Thanks to the horrific debacle at Fukushima, and how the IOC and local organizers have capitalized off the catastrophe to push an extraordinarily shallow ecological agenda, Tokyo 2020 may well be the most egregious greenwash in the history of the Olympics.

The Tokyo 2020 Games are a faith-based fairy tale designed to enrich the fabulously wealthy by extracting value from the world's largest city. These elite games for elite people deliver high-end, single-use urbanism for a global consumerist clientele. Even the Economist (2017), the house journal for corporate capitalism, has argued that “the business model for the Olympic Games is running out of puff.” The list of cities that have succumbed to the cudgel of Olympic development is well known, and yet, the destructive cycle continues. Best case scenarios are nowhere to be found. The worst-case is often the latest, as Tokyo 2020 demonstrates.

The yawning chasm between Olympic word and deed, and the continuous unfolding of Olympics-driven human-rights violations, urban destruction, and consolidation of elite privilege have sparked anti-Games campaigns in cities across the globe. The typical pattern resembles an activist version of Whack-a-Mole. The Olympics pop up in one city, generating dissent, and then quickly plunge beneath the socio-political surface, rearing their head in another city two years later. Protesters in the former host city tend to return to their pre-Olympics modes of protest, focusing on the issues—like gentrification and police militarization—that sparked their interest in challenging the sporty spectacle in the first place.

But the unprecedented international anti-Olympics summit in Tokyo that took place one year ahead of the actual Games, may have turned the transnational tide. The summit, which was largely organized by two Japan-based groups—Okotowari and Hangorin No Kai—as well as the group NOlympics LA of Los Angeles and protesters from Pyeongchang, South Korea, emphasized the importance of transnational solidarity. It brought together activists and scholars, including us, for a week of action, knowledge-sharing, and strategizing. Today, anti-Olympics groups from around the globe are combining forces, and in doing so, they are fast-forwarding the conversation about how the Olympics negatively affect everyday people and are making an ever-stronger case that the Games should be relegated to the dustbin of history (Boykoff 2020).

While the IOC doggedly markets the notion that human solidarity can be achieved through through the consumption of Olympic sport, despite its attendant sexual, ethical, and environmental abuses, everyday people around the globe have awoken to the idea that the International Olympic Committee—and those willing to do business with it—are extracting rents from cities and citizens, and that the IOC more resembles profit-gobbling cartel than an organization committed to environmental sustainability and human rights. Although the gnawing possibility of whipsaw global climate disruption lingers, globally organized anti-Olympics activists have injected hope into an otherwise dire situation.