TOKYO (AP) – Japan’s ambitions for a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics to showcase the country’s economic revival are facing an unexpected obstacle course as planners lurch from one fiasco to the next.
The 2020 games were dubbed the clinching “fourth arrow” of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ambitious strategy to restore Japan’s star stature after two decades of economic doldrums. But instead of burnishing the country’s image, the glitches so far have tarnished it.
Last week, organizers scrapped their Olympics logo, saying it was withdrawn by the designer due to allegations of plagiarism. That followed Abe’s decision in July to drop a gargantuan new national stadium design that critics likened to a bicycle helmet, reducing the project to cut its cost by over a third, to a still-whopping 155 billion yen ($1.3 billion).
Some say the embarrassments show Japan has yet to adapt its idiosyncratic, opaque ways of decision-making and planning to 21st century expectations for transparency and accountability.
“Tokyo 2020 is so symbolic of their lagging behind in globalization,” said Nancy Snow, a professor emeritus in communications at California State University at Fullerton. “This is a disaster in terms of communication and image management.”