Full Description
This book situates the 2020 Tokyo Olympics within the social, economic, and political challenges facing contemporary Japan.
Using the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a lens into the city and the country as a whole, the stellar line up of contributors offer hidden insights and new perspectives on the Games. These include city planning, cultural politics, financial issues, language use, security, education, volunteerism, and construction work. The chapters then go on to explore the many stakeholders, institutions, citizens, interest groups, and protest groups involved, and feature the struggle over Tokyo's extreme summer heat, food standards, the implementation of diversity around disabilities, sexual minorities, and technological innovations. Giving short glimpses into the new Olympic sports, this book also analyses the role of these sports in Japanese society.
Japan Through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics will be of huge interest to anyone attending the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020. It will also be useful to students and scholars of the Olympics and the sociology of sport, as well as Japanese culture and society.
Contents
1. Understanding Japan through the lens of Tokyo 2020 2. Olympics and the media 3. Skateboarding: "F*** the Olympics" 4. Political games 5. Number games: The economic impact of Tokyo 2020 6. Climbing: New sport on the block 7. Advertising the Games: Sponsoring a new era 8. Karate: Bowing to the Olympics in style 9. Herculean efforts: What the construction of the Olympic Stadium reveals about working conditions in Japan 10. Tokyo 2020 and neighborhood transformation: Reworking the entrepreneurial city 11. Ho(s)t city: Tokyo's fight against the summer heat 12. Tokyo's architecture and urban structure: Change in an ever-changing city 13. Success story: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics 14. San'ya 2020: From building to hosting the Tokyo Olympics 15. Baseball/softball: One more homer for Japan 16. Outdoor sports in the periphery: Far from the compact games 17. Surfing: Taken with a grain of salt 18. Tokyo's 1940 "Phantom Olympics" in public memory: When Japan chose war over the Olympics 19. Upgrading Tokyo's linguistic infrastructure for the 2020 Games 20. Sexual minorities and the Olympics 21. The Paralympic Games: Enabling sports and empowering disability 22. Sex in the city 23. Games of Romance? Tokyo in search of love and Unity in Diversity 24. The 2020 Olympic mascot characters: Japan wants to make a difference 25. Olympic education: How Tokyo 2020 shapes body and mind in Japan 26. Sex in the Village 27. Volunteering Japan-style: "Field cast" for the Tokyo Olympics 28. The difference between zero and one: Voices from the Tokyo anti-Olympic movements 29. Beyond 2020: Post-Olympic pessimism in Japanese cinema 30. Tokyo 2020 from the regional sidelines 31. Olympic leverages: The struggle for sustainable food standards 32. Security for the Tokyo Olympics 33. The Olympic and Paralympic Games as a technology showcase 34. Tokyo 2020: Connecting the past with the future
