Japan’s already gone crazy for fish ’n’ chips and gold medals. Now Team GB must ride Olympic mania
IN one of the rooms on the first floor of a building at Keio University’s imposing Hiyoshi campus in Kawasaki, the students have pinned a series of messages on the walls as part of their preparations for greeting the British team when they arrive to use the facilities ahead of next summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games.
‘ We sold fish ’ n’ chips at the cafeteria,’ one of them says. ‘Its aim was to increase awareness within Keio University students towards Team GB coming to Hiyoshi Campus for their pre-Games preparation camp — 600 fish ’n’ chips were all sold out.’
At the campus of one of Japan’s most prestigious universities, there is the same appetite to welcome their British visitors. Signs that say ‘ Go GB 2020, Friends of Great Britain’ have been erected on the perimeter hoardings that border the athletics track. The same slogan has been painted on the stairs above the swimming pool.
And on the way to the vast indoor sports hall where Britain’ s gymnasts, fencers, boxers and weightlifters will hone their routines in the days before the Games, students have lovingly cultivated a butterfly and flower garden as a way of integrating British culture into the campus. ‘Omotenashi’, it says on the fence outside, the word that encapsulates Japan’s proud determination to offer hospitality without expectation of reward.
The mood is the same at the Yokohama International Swimming Pool, the superb complex where Adam Peaty and the rest of Britain’s swimmers will train before their events, always among the first of the Games. A large sign dominates the entrance hall. ‘Team GB,’ it says in big capital letters, ‘Welcome to Yokohama City.’
AT both venues, officials greeted the British Olympic Association delegation that visited this month with the kind of solicitude that spoke of their pride in hosting the team. That pride was also reflected in some of th elite rat ureKeio University produced.
‘As Team GB finished second and Paralympics GB second at the 2016 Rio Games in the overall medal count,’ one pamphlet reminded its readers, ‘this is a valuable opportunity for Keio students to come into close contact with some of the best athletes in the world.’
Britain will find it hard to get close to its astonishing haul of 67 medals from the Rio Olympics, the first time since the modern Olympic era began in 1896 that a country has increased its medal tally at the summer Games immediately following one it hosted.
But the atmosphere at the training venues and the quality of the facilities is testimony to the BOA’s meticulous preparations for Tokyo and their determination to provide their athletes with the very best support when they get to Japan. It is also a reflection of the special place that the Olympics have in Japanese history and the sense of excitement about their approach that is growing by the day.
The Rugby World Cup has been well supported here, aided by the emotional outpouring of support for the Brave Blossoms during their intoxicating run to the quarter-finals but, even though the Olympics are still nine months away, the Games already have a far higher profile.
The first signs you see when you walk through arrivals at Haneda Airport are for Tokyo 2020. Japan Railways have an extensive advertising campaign based around the Olympics in their stations. The wifi password at a leading hotel chain in the capital is Tokyo2020.
It is hard to appreciate just how much it means and just how well supported it will be until you get here. London 2012 was a platform for the British to show just how much we loved sport. Already, there is a feeling here that Tokyo 2020 will match that mania and then exceed it. Rio was dogged by suggestions that Brazilians were not engaged in the Games. That will not be an issue here.
At the Japan Olympic Museum in the shadow of the beautiful new Olympic Stadium, built i n the centre of the city in the green space around the Meiji Shrine, on the site of the arena that staged the 1964
Games, a fascinating exhibition charts the country’s history with the Olympic movement.
Tokyo would have staged the Olympics in 1940 but the Japanese government withdrew their support for the Games because they were preoccupied with the costs of their 1937 invasion of China. The Olympics were then awarded to Helsinki before they were cancelled because of the outbreak of the Second World War.
When Tokyo became the first Asian city to stage the Games in 1964, it was a symbol of Japan’s rehabilitation after the atrocities it had committed in China, its attack on Pearl Harbour and the horrors that were visited on its own civilians by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The museum has photographs of the Olympic t orch bei ng carri ed through Hiroshima. And there is footage of the flame being lit at the opening ceremony by Yoshinori Sakai, an athlete born on the day of the destruction of Hiroshima.
Hosting the Olympics was seen as an opportunity to readmit Japan to the international community as a democratic and peaceful nation and the 1964 Games remains one of the most significant events in the history of modern Japan. Two years after they staged a lavish opening ceremony on October 10, 1964, the Japanese government declared the date a national holiday.
At Keio University, one of the officials hosting the BOA delegation mentioned that she had always had a day off on her birthday because she was born on October 10. The holiday is still in place, although it has now been adjusted so that it happens on the closest Monday to the anniversary of the 1964 opening ceremony, al l owing Japanese workers a long weekend.
It is easy to sense already that this will be an exuberant, celebratory Games, embraced by their host nation. There will be controversies in the run-up because there always are but, unlike the Games in Rio, it is hard to see it being anything other than a unifying factor.
Across the road from the museum, they are working on the Olympic Stadium, due for completion early next year. At Keio University, they are preparing for another run on fish ’n’ chips.