Olympic game of 1964

CDC to update guidance on masks as free tests for schools could start arriving this month. The games attracted young people to Shibuya, Yoyogi and Harajuku—neighborhoods that today remain ground zero for Japanese youth culture. National broadcaster NHK built new headquarters nearby, drawing in other networks, businesses and shops. Eventually the Olympic Village was converted into Yoyogi Park, one the few large city parks suited to activities like jogging and picnicking, and hugely popular for its proximity to Shibuya and Harajuku.

Luxury hotels also helped turn the area into a destination for leisure and business travelers. In , Japan was determined to use the Olympics to prove its economic and technological prowess. The urban planning agenda for Tokyo is far less ambitious, by design.

Facing mounting criticism about the games' cost and negative impacts, the International Olympic Committee was eager to show that mature cities can hold the event with minimal disruption.

A more modest structure was completed in , but the controversy dampened enthusiasm for the games. Meanwhile efforts to cut bloating costs by using existing, more remote sports facilities undermined the goal of a limited ground plan. A hydrogen-powered Olympic Village on the landfill island of Harumi—which was supposed to be up and running as a residential development already—has been hit by delays as a result of the pandemic.

It will remain as a ghost town, closed to the public, until the athletes finally arrive. More positively, the government has improved accessibility for wheelchair users and others across the city. Projects around the station include mixed-use commercial facilities like Shibuya Hikarie and Shibuya Scramble Square, both more than 30 stories tall. The Shibuya River has been redirected and a pedestrian promenade installed.

Miyashita Park, once known for its homeless population, has become a mall with green space on its roof. When the first railway line between Tokyo and Osaka had opened back in , the journey had taken 16 and a half hours. Preparations did not go entirely to plan, however. Enthusiasm for the Games in some quarters was focused primarily on their pocket-lining potential. Speculators were quick to buy up land along the planned routes of expressways and shinkansen lines, holding up construction and pushing up costs as they haggled with their leaders — in appropriately democratic postwar fashion — over the prices at which they might sell.

Some projects had to be scaled back as a result, though elsewhere innovation was given a useful nudge. The simple single-unit moulded bathrooms — toilet, sink, bath — that later generations of tourists would come to associate with Japanese hotels were a product of this period, designed so that they could be built elsewhere and then lifted by crane into hotel rooms while still under construction.

The men seen meticulously cleaning the Tokyo pavement that Saturday in October were members of the avant-garde art collective Hi-Red Center. Another of its works was Shelter Plan, in which volunteers — including a young Yoko Ono — were measured up for their own personal atomic bomb shelters, the resulting product looking very much like a coffin.

Their message: the Japanese were too ready to take prosperity in exchange for meaningful political control, sacrificing the early democratic promise of the Allied occupation in favour of political and cultural conservatism, closely aligned with Cold War US interests. By day they were subjected to the government hammering away at their behaviour, so that foreign visitors might form the desired opinion of the Japanese.

Men were enjoined not to urinate in public mobile toilets were hurriedly ordered to help facilitate the request , while taxi drivers were told to cut down on their horn-honking. Sex workers, beggars, pickpockets and homeless people were cleared out of the city, as was much of the criminal element. Completing the cleansing of Tokyo were rain showers on 9 October, ending an unusually long dry patch and helping to clear away some of the air pollution created by the non-stop preparation efforts of recent weeks.

When 75, visitors gathered in the National Stadium for the opening ceremony, everything seemed to come together. They had arrived via shiny new methods of transport, helped through the immaculately clean streets of Tokyo by locals pre-drilled in how to offer directions in excessively polite English. And they were witnesses to easily the most expensive opening ceremony in the history of the Games thus far, blending cutting-edge innovation with a revamped Japanese traditionalism.

There were kimonos, cherry blossoms, chrysanthemum perfume pumped in from dugouts, and an exhibition of traditional art and crafts nearby. Thanks to the Ministry of Education, there was also a carefully choreographed comeback for four major Japanese symbols, tainted just a generation before by colonialism and war.

The first of these symbols was the emperor. Gone was the fearsome focal point of Allied wartime propaganda, replaced by a slightly awkward man in an ill-fitting suit — the work, it was said, of a tailor forbidden from touching his exalted client. The Hinomaru national flag — a red disc on a white background — and national anthem, Kimigayo, had likewise lost their status after the war.

Here again the Games came to the rescue. The Hinomaru was one of the national flags of competing nations displayed around Tokyo, while also forming part of the official logo for the Games, placed above the five Olympic rings. That logo was pinned proudly to the chest of the young athlete who carried the Olympic torch up the steps to light the cauldron at the start of the Games. Yoshinori Sakai, it was made widely known, had been born on the day when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, his role an artful combination of sport, pacifism, regeneration and the suggestion that the Japanese had been victims in that terrible war.

Despite the massive scope and scale of the production, Tokyo Olympiad is as committed to highlighting minutiae as to presenting spectacle. The curious sight of Japanese hurdler Ikuko Yoda placing a lemon on the starting block. And the blistered and bleeding soles of marathon runners who collapse after they limp to the finish line.

Ichikawa dedicates as many close-ups to spectators as he does to competitors. He delights in watching officials scrambling to ensure events run smoothly. He crafts impressionistic interludes: a frenzied montage of typewriters in the press room; a melancholic passage showing the rain beginning to fall. The city is hardly shown. His stance was consistent: he celebrated the underdogs and the losers as much as the winners; he privileged individuals over the nations they represented.

American Billy Mills won the 10, metre race, but in Tokyo Olympiad images of lesser athletes linger just as strongly. A competitor from Ceylon now Sri Lanka comes dead last, but receives a rousing ovation as he runs the final lap alone. Elsewhere, Ichikawa devotes a lengthy section to the middle-distance runner Ahmed Issa, one of just two representatives from the newly independent Chad.

He follows the athlete as he arrives in Tokyo, wanders the streets, runs his race, and eats alone in the mess hall after bowing out of the competition. The celebrated Japanese director Naomi Kawase has been commissioned to make the official documentary.