Tokyo Notes [1] :: Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Japan)

On March 21^st, 2020 — a Sunday that for many other cities entailed isolations and even police enforced quarantines — an estimated 52,000 people gathered outside the main train station in Sendai, Japan to see the Olympic flame on display. In spite of official advice to avoid large gatherings of people in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the allure of the flame still drew a crowd, which waited for hours in a line over 500 meters long to see it.

The flame had just arrived from Greece to begin its tour of the northeastern region devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster ahead of the scheduled July 24^th start of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The the successful bid for the 2020 Olympics and Paraolympics was sold to the Japanese public as “recovery” events for Japan. They are also key symbolic event for the administration of current PM Abe Shinzō, who has staked his legacy on hosting this global event. It is thus ironic that there is a strong chance that the “recovery” Olympics may be postponed or even cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had already prompted Australia and Canada to announce that they will boycott the Games if they proceed as planned.

Another irony that strikes me, however, is how this global pandemic has the feel of a “fire on the opposite shore”—a disaster happening far from one’s daily life — for those living in Tokyo at the moment. While hosting the Olympics and Paraolympics have been proposed as a way to secure Tokyo’s place as a cosmopolitan center, domestic concerns about the consequences of potentially postponing or cancelling the event due to a global pandemic have been phrased almost entirely in terms of what that would mean for Japan alone. Estimates about the economic effects of postponement or cancellation also seem to ignore that much, much larger global economic impacts of COVID-19, and the fact that Japan’s economy—its supply chains, its export markets, its inbound tourists—is inextricably bound to the rest of the world.

– 24 March 2020

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Chelsea Szendi Schieder is a historian of contemporary Japan and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her book, Co-Ed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left, is forthcoming on Duke University Press.

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The Teach311 + COVID-19 Collective began in 2011 as a joint project of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia and the Society for the History of Technology Asia Network and is currently expanded in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science(Artifacts, Action, Knowledge) and Nanyang Technological University-Singapore.