TOKYO The stadiums and arenas are empty. The conversations are through masks and plexiglass partitions, the contact anything but the prohibited close. Visitors must spit into plastic tubes at regular intervals. Their movements are tracked by smartphone apps that must be downloaded and the eyes of uniformed men on street corners, seemingly with the preeminent goal of preventing visits to restaurants or bars. Only the top halves of faces can be seen, but it is nonetheless clear: No one is smiling.
These are the Sensory-Deprivation Olympics: No fans. No natural crowd noise. No touching.
Those bearing official Tokyo 2020 credentials are kept separate from a resentful Japanese public that understandably, given the countrys continued struggles against the coronavirus pandemic regards them warily as potential spreaders of new and contagious variants. Everywhere, someone trails behind visitors to sanitize anything that gets touched, intentionally or inadvertently.
The Japanese people dont want this in polls, a clear majority of the public remains opposed to these Games, which, according to a recent editorial in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, were pushed through by force so that the International Olympic Committee could earn its billions from television rights. And the few official visitors, in introspective moments, are compelled to wonder whether their presence is warranted, justified or necessary.
The 2020 Tokyo Games may have been born as the Recovery Olympics, Japans chance to show the world how it bounced back from the triple disaster earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of 2011.
They may have been transformed into the Pandemic Games by the arrival of covid-19 in the spring of 2020, which forced a one-year postponement and kept the entire Olympic community guessing about the possibility of cancellation.
But now that some 15,000 athletes and 70,000 officials and media members are here, all having endured processing and coronavirus testing at Tokyos two international airports, and now that Fridays Opening Ceremonies are almost upon us, it is clear these Games are something else entirely.
