I really don’t understand the olympics.

Like any other recurring sports event, the olympics comes and goes. I’m not into sports, but I have tremendous respect for the athletes, much in the same way I have respect for anyone who works hard to perfect their art. I just never understood all the commotion around the Olympics, and I never really cared to find out why other people care so much about the olympics.

Except, in 2020, the olympics started mattering to me simply because I don’t understand it.

We are still neck deep in a global pandemic. The host country, Japan, has less than 1/2 of 1% of its population vaccinated as Tokyo commences with the games. Foreign spectators have been banned. Olympic athletes from all over the world can enter Japan without quarantine. For Japan, with a culture that is so consistently data-driven and pragmatic, this whole thing seems both out of character, and, quite frankly, dangerous. We’re just now entering a fourth wave, and Universal Studios Japan appears to be accelerating infections with up to 10,000 visitors per day to its tiny corner of the park called Super Nintendo World. It’s probably not the wisest decision (or investment) launching a theme park in the middle of a virus outbreak. Side note: I wrote about the Super Nintendo World launch here, and how Nintendo probably missed out on its biggest opportunity in 100 years.

So what can go wrong bringing athletes, coaches and countless support staff from all over the globe to Tokyo for an olympics where even guests from overseas are banned, a fourth and more dangerous wave of pandemic is exploding, and next to no one is vaccinated in Japan?

The Olympics Were Never About Bringing Us Closer Together

The ancient olympics were athletic competitions between members of Greek city-states, held in honor of the god Zeus, dating back to 776 B.C. Separate from the obvious goal of testing athletic ability, the games were a political tool used by city-states to assert dominance over their rivals. Basically, a big pissing contest.

Several hundred years later, in 394 AD, the Romans banned the olympic games, as part of a campaign to make Christianity the state religion of Rome. They labeled the olympics a pagan event.

Fast forward another 1500 years to 1894, and Pierre de Coubertin and Demetrios Vikelas co-found the International Olympic Committee, what is now called the IOC, in an effort to bring back and promote the olympics worldwide.

What changed in 1500 years? Not much.

Instead of a competition between city-states of one empire, the olympics is now a competition of athletes between countries around the world. Cities in these countries put everything on the table to bid big and bigger in an effort to be the host of the olympics, even to extremes that they can’t afford.

Take Tokyo as the most recent example.

What the olympics cost, and what Japan Is getting for it

Last year, the original budget in Japan for hosting the olympics in Tokyo was ¥1.644 trillion ($12.6 billion USD). The pandemic happened, and of course the olympics were postponed. What was decided? Spend an extra ¥365 billion ($2.8 billion USD) to resume in 2021, for a new grand total of over ¥2 trillion ($15.4 billion USD).

That’s a lot of money. Over half of it is for facilities alone.

There is no Rabbit

There’s a timeless Chinese proverb 守株待兔 “To Wait by the Tree Stump for a Rabbit”.

As the story goes, a long time ago, a farmer was walking home from a long day towing the fields when suddenly, he noticed a rabbit springing through the grass. The rabbit was moving so fast it ran head-first into a tree stump. The farmer ran over to the stump and found the rabbit unconscious. This was his lucky day. He carried the rabbit home. It was rabbit stir-fry and rabbit soup for dinner!

The next morning, the farmer thought to himself, “Why work all day in the field? I’ll just wait by the tree stump again!” He found the same tree stump and waited. All day. From sunrise to sunset, he waited. In the end, he went home frustrated and hungry.

When Japan hosted the olympics in 1964 it was a very different world, with a very different set of conditions. The 1964 olympics was Japan’s debut on the global scene, a country that had reinvented itself after a grueling defeat World War II defeat. It’s hard to imagine, but before 1964 the image of Japanese manufacturing in the US and in many places around the world was “shoddy and cheap”. Made in Japan in the 1950s was what Made in China was in the 1980s. Japan changed all this and transformed itself into a cutting-edge, high-tech juggernaut focused on quality. Japan proved all of this and more in 1964 when it unveiled the Shinkansen (bullet train) which today, 57 years later, is still the gold standard for safe, fast and efficient mobility worldwide.

Still, setting aside all the current virtues of Japan that still include quality, service and peace, the 1964 olympics wasn’t held in the middle of a raging global pandemic. China wasn’t yet a superpower-turned-bully in the Pacific about to overtake the US economy. Shenzen was still a little town of 30,000 people, not the mega-factory of 12 million that it is today. And global warming wasn’t even a phrase (still, even in 1964 they had the common sense to schedule the olympics for mid-October to avoid the Summer typhoon season).

I can only imagine the parties they had in Tokyo. I bet they’re still talked about today by those who are waiting for that rabbit.

Will the Olympics help bring back tourism?

Probably not. And a lot of experts believe that the string of serious gaffes leading up to the olympics could hurt post-covid tourism. In a world that suddenly got a lot harder to travel in, competition for tourists will be more intense, Japan’s olympics “aura” will be gone, and the stream of misogynistic, fat-shaming and racist comments from government officials may not resonate well with more woke travelers, not to mention all those people who bought tickets to the olympics who may or may not receive a refund.

In 2019 Japan had over 30 million tourists. The pandemic almost eradicated tourism in 2020, which makes one wonder if the olympics initiative is a desperate measure to bring the tourists and their money back to Japan. But it’s not. Foreign spectators have been banned from entry, and only athletes and their support staff are coming in. Whether even that is a good idea is questionable, with less than one-half of 1% of Japan’s population being vaccinated, and with no required quarantine for foreign athletes and their support teams, it seems like an perfect spell for a super spreader event instead of a super athletic event.

What about Foreign Rivalry?

If the olympics are postponed to 2022, the next host city is Beijing. There couldn’t be a worse runner up for Tokyo. Most people alive today don’t realize that the contention between Japan and China wasn’t just the result of war atrocities in the past century. It goes back several centuries.

More than long-term historical rivalry, Japan has almost nothing to show off to the world for the past three decades. There’s even a term for the period between 1991 and present in Japan: The lost decades. In the 1980s the world thought Sony, Panasonic, Sharp and Toyota would rule the world. Today, Apple, Google and Tesla define the global marketplace. And while the transition from quality TVs and VCRs to software, AI and iPhones (made in China) was underway in the 1970s and 1980s, the communist experiment in Shenzen transformed a little city of 30,000 residents into a monster city of 12 million that fueled economic development in China.

For Japan to let go at this stage and let China exalt in the show-off, ego-driven feel-good of the olympics is probably unthinkable.

People are Starting to Ask Questions

Why? is a powerful question.

It started a couple decades ago, probably beginning with Gen X. One person at a time, one tribe at a time, we are beginning to wake up and ask questions. Simple questions, like “why are we doing this?”

For most of history, we didn’t ask questions. We either trusted our leaders (religious or political) or just abdicated to them. So traditions were formed and perpetuated even if they didn’t make sense, usually because one party or another quietly benefited from them behind the scenes. In the case of the original olympics in Greece, it was the politicians, not the athletes, that benefited. The athlete because the convenient marketing message to the masses of people not asking questions.

But it’s a different world now. Because of the Internet, we have a chance to form a new sort of global community, even if our old-world system of states and countries and artificial borders still artificially categorizes us based on the geography we were born in. To join this new global community starts with one really simple, yet powerful question: why?

Why? leads to discussion and dialogue. It leads to investigation.
Why? is the written embodiment of curiosity and the scientific method and love and passion and interest and everything that is good about us as humans, all in one word.
Why? is also the enemy of people who would otherwise suppress, control and destroy all of those same things. Bad actors and evil people have, throughout history, controlled and amassed power by suppressing, even destroying those who would ask the question Why? and those who would try to answer the same question.
Why? scares people who are threatened by answers.

If you don’t believe me that why? is the most powerful question, here are some examples that haven’t yet been satisfactorily answered:

Why am I judged by the color of my skin?
Why is it so hard to vote?
Why do I get paid less than a man?
Why can’t I marry who I want?
Why do people ask me where I get my protein?
Why did #formerguy get elected President with less votes?
Why do the ultra wealthy pay less taxes than the middle class?
Why did my child get killed in a school shooting?
Why is our military waging war in that country?

How is it that we haven’t solved these basic, fundamental human problems in over 2000 years?

This is why I don’t understand the Olympics.

How does the olympics help Japan? I can’t get my head around it. And answering this question is really important right now.

Japan is more critical to the future of our world than it knows. Visit or live in Japan for any period of time and you’re sure to be surprised and delighted by the remarkable level of heiwa (peace) in society. In Japan, most things just tend to work. Japanese society is structured and orderly, and the principles and values that drive this heiwa are the same that that resulted in business, life and economic behaviors and systems like muda (aversion to clutter and waste), just-in-time delivery and kaizen (continuous improvement). These are literally exports that we don’t necessarily see, but they’re everywhere around us. When you get in a Tesla, when you pick up a sleek new iPhone, or when you order Starbucks via the app, all of these things originated with Japanese thinking and priorities that were copied by the United States, Germany and many other countries starting as early as the 1970s.

Japan is the third largest part of the global economy after the US and China. Japan is also a successful non-Western democracy, and is the most important world partner the United States has in keeping alive democracy and the rule of law.

Japan has so much to offer to the world beyond tourism, ramen and karaage (fried chicken).

But Japan is struggling. With its economy, its population, social problems, with education and much more. In Japan, today, in 2021:

• One in six Japanese children go to bed hungry at night with not enough food to eat.

• The rate of suicide among Japanese women has increased 15% last year, with 6,976 taking their own lives.

• Less than 1% of the population is vaccinated for Covid-19 as Japan enters its fourth and most violent wave of infections.

• One-third of single women in Japan live in abject poverty, many the victims of physical and emotional abuse.

If Japan’s goal is to sustain and restore its economy, build a thriving society and be successful…. How is the olympics a priority?

How will spending ¥2 trillion ($15.4 billion USD) on sports facilities, mascots, and logo wear help the Japanese that are the future of Japan? It’s like buying a Peloton during a typhoon when you’re roof is leaking, while the car in your driveway has flat tires and you’re fridge is empty.

I am concerned that the emphasis placed on the olympics is evidence of the slow death of Japan that Clyde Prestowitz refers to in his book Japan Restored. Mr. Prestowitz wrote in 2015: “At this time of shifting balances of power, with increasing uncertainty about the extension of the rule of law around the globe, the slow death that would be a terrible blow to the hopes of those who believe in democracy and the rule of law.”

At least the good news is that people are beginning to ask why? Why are we doing this? I think when people reflect on the massive expenditure of their own money on the olympics and realize what they’re not getting for it, they’ll start to ask a lot more questions.

Concluding thoughts

UPDATE 2021 APRIL 20: I published this post two weeks ago. Since then, the Covid-19 case load has exploded all over Japan. If you read my previous blog post about Super Nintendo World in Osaka, you won’t at all be surprised to know that Osaka now is the title holder for new daily Covid-19 cases, at almost double that of Tokyo. Universal Studios Japan and the city of Osaka were not just welcoming, but encouraging 10,000 people per day, from all over Japan, to relieve their Covid fatigue by visiting a high-touch theme park.

Today the International Olympic Committee basically said (I am paraphrasing) “If people get sick with Covid during the Olympics, it’s Japan’s fault, not our fault.”

I respect and admire athletes. I enjoy watching them practice their art. And global competition is not only exciting, it’s the pinnacle of athletic achievement.

What could Japan have done with $15.6 billion dollars instead of the olympics? They could have eliminated child hunger in Japan for an entire year.

3.5 MILLION children in Japan do not have enough food to eat and go to bed hungry every night. The money $15.6 BILLION taxpayer dollars spent on the Olympics could have bought $4457 USD worth of food per child for all 3.5 million Japanese children who do not have enough food to eat. That’s more than $12 per day, per child, for an entire year.

The olympics aren’t just a waste of time and money, they are the embodiment of political ego and grossly misguided priorities.

It may be too late for Japan, but the 2020/2021 olympics is the greatest case study ever for other countries to learn from. The olympics no longer matter. Athletes can find another venue to compete. It’s time for the olympics to join the original olympics in the dumpster of history.