Reinterpreting Olympic legacies: the emergent process of long-term post-event strategic planning of Hakuba after the 1998 Nagano Winter Games

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the process by which long-term legacies of a sporting mega-event (SME) are managed to the benefit of a host community. The literature demonstrates that ex-ante legacy planning may not thoroughly consider the long-term consequences of hosting an SME. Little research, however, has explored the process by which the experience of hosting an SME may lead to positive changes in tourism over a prolonged period of time. This study examines how Hakuba, one of the five host municipalities of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games, dramatically recovered from the initial downturn after hosting the Games. This study focuses on a post-event period of nearly two decades. Using interviews with key stakeholders and document analysis, we consider (1) how Hakuba’s business community adjusted their strategies by responding to the changing environment over that period, and (2) how the legacies of the Games functioned in the evolving process of strategic planning. We find that Hakuba’s disproportionate success in attracting foreign visitors may be attributed to the emergence of processual strategic planning. Soft-infrastructural legacies were the foundation of the learning process that reinforced Hakuba’s leveraging competencies, which enabled constant reinterpretation of the values of hard-infrastructural legacies as strategic resources. We argue that the long-term assessment of post-event strategic planning focused on the changing roles of legacies should be encouraged in order to understand the resilience of host communities faced with the pragmatic challenge of dealing with the inevitably long-term nature of Olympic legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic planning
• leveraging
• mega-event legacies
• Winter Olympics
• Nagano 1998

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Leverhulme Project and the leader of the project, Jonathan Grix. We would like to thank the participants in the conference on ‘State strategies for leveraging sports mega-events’, University of Birmingham, the UK for their comments that greatly assisted the research, three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and interviewees in Nagano for their kind cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To be sure, the report does not state the exact amount; however, national newspapers commonly cite the number as 2.5–3 billion yen, whereas the total estimate of construction costs will reach 100 million yen between 2014 and 2020 with the number of visitors increasing to 33 million by 2020.

2. Baum and Lockstone (2007) explore possible approaches to research volunteering in relation to mega-events. More recently, Taks (2013) and Taks et al. (2015) have turned to non-mega sport events and their impact on social sustainability.

3. A number of researchers applied and expanded this leveraging framework (Chalip and Costa 2005, O’Brien 2006, 2007).

4. They included: the city of Nagano, Karuizawa-machi, Nozawaonsen-mura, Yamanouchi-machi and Hakuba-mura. Hakuba-mura hosted the alpine events and Nordic skiing.

5. We could not find any evidence that showed that the Japanese government leveraged the event with a clear political purpose in an international diplomatic context, although it was a popular idea with some scholars that a state often used SMEs to demonstrate the ‘soft power’ of the country (Grix and Lee 2013, Brannagan and Giulianotti 2015, Grix et al. 2015). In the case of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, Shimomura, the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, mentioned about a relationship between the Games and soft power in the meeting held on 11 October, 2013 (http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/tokyo2020_suishin_honbu/kankeikaigi/dai1/gijiroku.pdf, accessed on 11, April, 2016). However, we could not encounter such kinds of evidence so far.

6. This could be considered as an early example of destination management organisation (DMO) in Japan.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Japan Travel and Tourism Association, the Leverfulme Trust (IN-2014-036) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI (JP16K01697).

Notes on contributors

Hidemasa Nakamura

Hidemasa Nakamura is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Commerce and Management at Hitotsubashi University. He was awarded PhD in Commerce and Management from Hitotsubashi University. His research interests are strategy formulation, organisational effectiveness and institutional change in sports and tourism industry

Naofumi Suzuki

Naofumi Suzuki is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi University. He was awarded PhD in Urban Studies from University of Glasgow. His research interests are sport and development, urban regeneration and social exclusion and inclusion