Introduction to "Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: Design, Culture, and Urbanity in an Era of Dissonance"
Introduction to "Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games:Design, Culture, and Urbanity in an Era of Dissonance"
This special issue focuses on the design milieu of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which were held a year after they were scheduled, in the summer of 2021. In an era plagued by a synergy of social vulnerabilities and institutional failures to address natural and manmade disasters, the Olympic ideals hardly offered a platform that Japanese society or the world at large could aspire to as a place of collective reflection and action. The aim of this issue is to discuss how the material production of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics both reflected and affected the changing socio-political and cultural context of Japan from the bid for the Olympics to its realization, and further contributed to the experience of dissonance and lack of faith in the Olympics and institutional structures. Included here are examinations of architecture, urban design, fashion, and graphics produced for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, as well as conversations about the influences and repercussions of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on the broader public realm of Japan as a physical, cultural, and discursive space, up until the fall of 2021 when the papers were written.
The Olympic cultural and design milieu comprises overlapping realms of action: it includes design work performed by those commissioned by the Olympic committee to design products that are necessary for the Olympic operation, such as stadia, emblems, pictograms, and athletes' uniforms as well as the work of defining Olympic design policy. It also includes cultural and other design practices employed by a wider milieu beyond the obvious Olympic actors. In addition to the central national or supra-national agents that manage the Olympics, the Olympic milieu also encompasses private agents that participate in the "Olympic industry," such as corporations that are part of public-private partnerships that produce new urban agglomerations in the host city, or corporate sponsors that act in synergy with the Olympic organizers. But it also includes "unauthorized" actors and cultural agents who utilize design, art, and material action to question, resist, or celebrate the Olympics, including the local citizens who are called upon to host and [End Page 1] support the Games often against their will,1 or whose actions and ways of being are obstructed because of Olympic ideology.
From the Bid to the Games
Perhaps the least celebratory of all Games in Olympic history, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were not only underwhelming as an event in their festivity, but operated under conditions of multiple disasters. From the beginning, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were met with lukewarm enthusiasm and cautiousness and affected by layers of successive controversies and disasters: from the triple disasters of 2011 (Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident) to the COVID-19 pandemic.
After an unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Games, Tokyo was chosen to host the 2020 Olympics in 2013, beating the other two finalist cities, Madrid and Istanbul. This was the third Olympics awarded to Tokyo (the first being the canceled 1940 Games, followed by the 1964 Games), and the fifth for Japan (including the two Winter Olympic Games, Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998). The Tokyo 2020 Olympics promised to "expose the Japanese people to social changes and diversity in a way that could be a priceless legacy for the country's future."2 The aims of the 2020 Olympics were "soft" and included maintaining and improving existing infrastructure, streamlining operational management logic, improving certain aspects of the economy such as productivity and diversity, and promoting Japan's normalization and recovery from the disasters of 2011. These made for sharp contrast with the "hard" legacies of the 1964 Olympics, as well as other recent Olympics such as Beijing 2008 or Rio 2016, which introduced major infrastructural and urban changes in the host cities.
The support of the Games by Japanese citizens slowly declined and dropped to 17% in May 2021.3 The reasons leading to polarization and disagreement are multifaceted and were further compounded by a variety of internal and external events that unfolded in the eight years between the bid and the Games. The...
