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.
Table of Contents
1. Understanding Japan through the lens of Tokyo 2020, Barbara Holthus, Isaac Gagné, Wolfram Manzenreiter, Franz Waldenberger
2. Olympics and the media, Wolfram Manzenreiter
3. Skateboarding: "F*** the Olympics", Wolfram Manzenreiter
4. Political games, Axel Klein
5. Number games: The economic impact of Tokyo 2020, Franz Waldenberger
6. Climbing: New sport on the block, Wolfram Manzenreiter
7. Advertising the Games: Sponsoring a new era, Isaac Gagné
8. Karate: Bowing to the Olympics in style, Wolfram Manzenreiter
9. Herculean efforts: What the construction of the Olympic Stadium reveals about working conditions in Japan, Steffen Heinrich
10. Tokyo 2020 and neighborhood transformation: Reworking the entrepreneurial city, Ralph Lützeler
11. Ho(s)t city: Tokyo’s fight against the summer heat, Jan Lukas Kuhn
12. Tokyo’s architecture and urban structure: Change in an ever-changing city, Florian Purkarthofer
13. Success story: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Torsten Weber
14. San’ya 2020: From building to hosting the Tokyo Olympics, Hanno Jentzsch
15. Baseball/softball: One more homer for Japan, Wolfram Manzenreiter
16. Outdoor sports in the periphery: Far from the compact games, Daniel Kremers
17. Surfing: Taken with a grain of salt, Wolfram Manzenreiter
18. Tokyo’s 1940 "Phantom Olympics" in public memory: When Japan chose war over the Olympics, Torsten Weber
19. Upgrading Tokyo’s linguistic infrastructure for the 2020 Games, Peter Backhaus
20. Sexual minorities and the Olympics, Maki Hirayama
21. The Paralympic Games: Enabling sports and empowering disability, Katharina Heyer
22. Sex in the city, Maki Hirayama
23. Games of Romance? Tokyo in search of love and Unity in Diversity, Nora Kottmann
24. The 2020 Olympic mascot characters: Japan wants to make a difference, Jan Lukas Kuhn
25. Olympic education: How Tokyo 2020 shapes body and mind in Japan, Wolfram Manzenreiter
26. Sex in the Village, Maki Hirayama
27. Volunteering Japan-style: "Field cast" for the Tokyo Olympics, Barbara Holthus
28. The difference between zero and one: Voices from the Tokyo anti-Olympic movements, Sonja Ganseforth
29. Beyond 2020: Post-Olympic pessimism in Japanese cinema, Jan Lukas Kuhn
30. Tokyo 2020 from the regional sidelines, Isaac Gagné
31. Olympic leverages: The struggle for sustainable food standards, Sonja Ganseforth
32. Security for the Tokyo Olympics, Sebastian Polak-Rottmann
33. The Olympic and Paralympic Games as a technology showcase, Franz Waldenberger
34. Tokyo 2020: Connecting the past with the future, Round table discussion with Munehiko Harada, John Horne, Wolfram Manzenreiter
