SNA (Tokyo) — The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are now past. This is a postmortem.

Last month’s column talked about the “evil” of the Japanese government and International Olympic Committee (IOC) in forcing an unpopular Olympics upon Japan’s residents, all the while as Tokyo’s cases spiked during a global pandemic. But I also argued how host Japan in particular is trained by national narratives to see “outsiders” (including residents who don’t “look Japanese”—our Visible Minorities) specifically as terrorists, hooligans, criminals, and vectors of disease.

These fault lines have predictably exacerbated the endemic social disease of racial discrimination. International events just give people more excuses to create “Japanese Only” signs and rules.

That’s not to say that I boycotted the Olympics. In fact, I watched them assiduously, and upon reflection I have surprisingly deep connections to them. As a child I tried to understand the terrorism of the 1972 Munich Games, and have watched every Olympics I could since.

I attended the Montreal Games in 1976, in the stadium watching when decathlete Bruce Jenner won Gold, and joined the crowd in disagreement when gymnast Olga Korbut was robbed of Gold by Nadia Comaneci. I chowed down on as much free food from McDonald’s as I could when the United States opportunistically won a truckload of medals during the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Even as an adult the Olympics were in the background. For decades I lived in Sapporo, whose 1972 event put them on the map. Much of that time I resided in the Gorin Danchi apartments converted from athlete dormitories in Makomanai, rode Sapporo’s excellent subway system, and like every other citizen took advantage of the leftover parks, buildings, arenas, and infrastructure.

I even have family who trained for the Olympics (in swimming) and participated in an Opening Ceremony. We looked into volunteering at the Tokyo Olympics before everything went bad.

Fact is, like the rest of the world, I’m taken in by the Olympic spectacle of athleticism. Whatever country I happen to be in at the time, I enjoy watching whatever sport is being promoted by the local TV networks, be they South Korea’s prowess in shooting, Canada’s hockey or curling, Japan’s judo and figure skating, and even sideshows like the United Kingdom’s Eddie the Eagle.

I’m the type who seeks out events I know nothing about, and fortunately this time NBC Sports enabled access to all events, not just the ones the broadcasting country happens to be good at.

I not only want to learn the rules (even for skateboarding and kumite karate; unsuccessfully), I’m also fascinated to see how sports change bodies. I’m in awe at the man-mountains who become weightlifters and shot-putters, the beanpoles who become high jumpers, the flawless torsos of the rowers and gymnasts, the endurance of swimmers managing not to drown from exhaustion, and the specimens of perfect metabolism who become distance walkers and runners.

So I should be a superfan of the Olympics. What changed me? My education.

Thanks to my background in political science, I’m trained to view nationalism with a critical eye: How governments convince people to live, fight, and even sacrifice their lives for their country. The Olympics are rooted precisely in these attitudes, and forever filter athleticism through the lens of national representation and superiority.

Remember that the Olympics were first framed as a way for the ancient Greeks to assert their superiority over neighboring city-states.

When the Games were resuscitated by aristocrats in 1896, in spirit they were still grounded in contemporary attitudes equating national strength with physical strength. Thanks to the racialized social theories in currency at the time, including Social Darwinism and eugenics, the Games soon became a public demonstration of the social engineering of supermen, which depended on how racially “thoroughbred” an athlete and a society was. It’s not difficult to draw a straight line from the geneticist attitudes promoted by the prewar Olympics to The Final Solution.

Even in the postwar Games, despite all the emphasis on individual athleticism and sportsmanship, the legacy of national superiority still exists. You easily find it in the schlong-measuring national medal tallies, and the enormous pressure put on athletes to prove themselves worthy of all the national attention and hype they’re getting.

Japanese athletes in particular must get Gold (especially in sports Japan thinks it owns, such as judo or karate) or publicly apologize for taking Shameful Silver or Despicable Bronze. This culture of self-sacrifice for the sake of nationalism is one reason why, as I have written elsewhere, Japanese athletes live surprisingly shorter lives, and why I constantly wince at the nasty nationalistic coverage in NHK and Japan’s sports newspapers.

That’s why I had some pretty low expectations for Tokyo’s Opening Ceremonies on July 21. Scandal after scandal had erupted over Japan’s Olympic Committee abysmal leadership choices, including the creative head cracking fat jokes about a female entertainer, the composer of the ceremony bragging about his history of abusing disabled people, the director of the ceremony making wisecracks about the Holocaust, and, of course, Yoshiro Mori, the octogenarian chair, resigning after sexist remarks.

After this, how would Japan introduce itself to the world?

Surprisingly, as a land with some degree of diversity. In prominent positions were people in wheelchairs and Visible Minorities, including hoopster Rui Hachimura as Japan’s flag bearer, Zainichi Taiwanese baseball legend Sadaharu Oh on the torch relay, and of course tennis champ Naomi Osaka having the great honor of lighting the Olympic cauldron. This caused much media buzz about how Japan was finally changing, coming to terms with the reality of its own diversity.

Sadly, I disagree. I would say this represents less a contradiction of Japan’s “monoethnic society,” more an affirmation of the power of tokenism.

Remember how Tokyo got these Games in the first place: By wheeling out French-Japanese TV announcer Christel Takigawa to give a fluent gaijin-handling presentation about Japan’s mystical prowess in omotenashi hospitality. Once her purpose as a token of diversity was served, she essentially disappeared from the Games, and the old guard took over and reverted to its scandalous form.

The thing is, tokenism isn’t acceptance. At best it’s a way station to your acceptance as an exceptional individual, successful DESPITE your background, and even that depends on whether you’ve fulfilled your assigned purpose. For the Olympics, if we’re putting you center stage, you’d better do your job and win Gold for the nation.

Unfortunately, the tokens didn’t win. Osaka was defeated in her third tennis match. Hachimura’s basketball team placed eleventh. Despite Japan’s record haul of medals, as far as I can tell only two Visible Minorities (Aaron Wolf in judo and Kanoa Igarashi in surfing) made it to the podium.

And Igarashi, US-born resident of Huntington Beach, CA, indicatively promotes himself on his Olympics website entry in classic Olympic “thoroughbred-ism”: “I have so much support here in the USA and America will always be part of who I am. But I’ve grown up with a lifestyle and in a generation where things can seem a bit borderless. And so representing Japan felt like a solid, comfortable decision. My blood is 100% Japanese. That’s something that you don’t change.”

Good for his bloodline, I guess. But for mongrel non-medalists like Osaka, as the New York Times noted, Japan’s social media pounced, contesting her Japanese language ability, her standing to represent Japan, and even her Japaneseness, all of which mattered much less when she was winning.

The final straw was when The Daily Beast reported August 4 that Yoshiro Mori had lobbied against Osaka lighting the Olympic cauldron in the first place, in favor of a “pure Japanese man.” With her lackluster performance, no doubt many bigots feel Mori has been vindicated.

Sorry to say “I told you so,” but as I’ve written elsewhere this was all predictable backlash. Tokenism works like this: “They’ll claim us when we’re famous.” Not until, and even then; because one slipup and fame turns into blame.

No wonder athletes are (sensibly) bowing out due to mental health issues.

My point is that this is all an inevitable part of the Olympics, given how they’re designed. People are seen as national representatives first, individuals second. Even though many Olympians have told my family that the Games are a time to do their personal best foremost and represent their country second, the media bays for Gold and the Olympics caters. Anything less is a national let-down.

In the end, Tokyo’s Closing Ceremony returned to Japan’s monoethnic narratives. Nary a Visible Minority was seen, not even an Ainu ceremony that was purged from the original Opening. They could have featured some true diversity and cross-cultural communication, such as Imagine One World’s ambitious The Kimono Project, which spent six years researching and custom-creating exquisite kimono that represented the cultural themes of every competing country in the Games. But no.

Instead, we had some cobbled-together acts with no through line, including a (delightful) ska band, a light show computer-generated for the TV audience only, a bewildering and off-putting interpretive dance, and finally the cauldron being inexplicably extinguished by a mother figure (no father) accompanied by some children staring up at the stars for no apparent reason.

For me the most exciting thing was the presentation from Paris 2024, when, alas, the negative externalities of international competitive sports will be recycled all over again.

So that’s that. Yes, the 2020 Paralympics are coming up, but few people anywhere, sadly, pay attention to them. So we’re not quite through this orgy of hypocrisy quite yet.

But let me close with one more sentiment about tokenism: Frankly, I’d rather Japan’s Visible Minorities be visible, even if they’re only wheeled out as proof of prowess before they get pressured to outperform everyone. It’s better than the alternative of the default—ignoring them.

But how do Japan’s Visible Minorities make the transition to being normalized to the point of people not caring about their diverse roots, or at least not making a big deal of how different they allegedly are? I’m not sure. Let’s let them tell us.

The bottom line is that despite all their promises to showcase “Diversity and Inclusion,” the Tokyo 2020 Olympics shirked that opportunity—predictably and by design.

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