Tokyo 2020 was intended to show how Japan has bounced back from a devastating natural disaster, and the capital’s Olympics in 1964 had a similar theme of recovery. Philip Barker tells the tale of a Games which saw the host nation return to global acceptance after years of war.
T
he final film made by Hollywood star Cary Grant, Walk, Don’t Run, was set against the backdrop of the Tokyo 1964 Olympics. Grant’s character, Sir William Rutland, finds that every hotel in the Japanese capital is fully booked because of the extra number of visitors in town for the Games. Because of the ban on overseas spectators, this is not a problem expected at Tokyo 2020. This year’s Games were intended to be an emblem of hope and rebirth after the earthquake and tsunami which devastated the coast of Japan a decade ago, and Tokyo 1964 had similar symbolic aims. Japan’s first home Olympics came 16 years
46
after the country was banned from the Games in London in 1948, for their part in the Second World War. An Olympic preview in World Sports on the eve of the 1964 Games described Japan as a “phoenix risen above the ashes of the atomic bombs - spiritually, economically and socially”. “Sport will add its accolade to the reacceptance of Japan itself as part of the human race, with the arrival of the tiny flame of Olympia, and the rising of the doves above Tokyo’s National Stadium,” the magazine continued. Six years earlier, Tokyo played host to the 1958 Asian Games in a new National Stadium which was built with the Olympics in mind.
www.insidethegames.biz
When the International Olympic Committee gathered in Munich the following year to decide the 1964 host, Tokyo beat Detroit, Vienna and Brussels in the first round of voting. The Japanese duly set about transforming their city. The stadium itself was enlarged, and new venues including Kenzō Tange’s striking National Gymnasium were built. Twenty-two main highways were constructed as part of what officials described as “a comprehensive plan for highway and road construction”. The city’s subway system was also extended. At the time there were few signs in English in the city.
The No.1 Olympic news website in the world
