Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara angers Brazilians
Representatives of Rio de Janeiro’s successful 2016 Olympic bid are seeking an apology from Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, after the defeated leader of the Tokyo Olympic bid made some unfriendly comments about why he thought Rio won:
Mike Lee criticized Ishihara’s comments and went as far as to call the Tokyo governor “a bad loser.”
Ishihara said at a press conference in Tokyo on Sunday he heard that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made “daring promises” to African people and that French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to support Rio’s bid if Brazil purchased French-made fighter jets.
He also said, “invisible dynamics were at play.” It is unclear, however, which of those comments were a direct cause for Rio’s backlash.
“It was suggesting or hinting that there was some sort of trickery involved. It was very inappropriate. Everybody fights to win and some do better than others,” said Lee.
Should Ishihara apologize?
Update: A Japanese member of the IOC has apologized for Ishihara’s outburst.
[via JapanSoc]
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Categories: Politics
Brazilian president makes fun of Japanese politics
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva mentions his rivals at a press conference celebrating the victory of Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Olympic bid:
“I have a message to my close friend, the Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, to Barack Obama for whom I have high hopes, he’s a great fellow, and to the Prime Minister of Japan who I don’t know because it’s like that in Japan – you say ‘good morning to one Prime Minister and ‘good afternoon’ to a different one!”
[hat tip to Isaac]
Why did Tokyo fail so spectacularly in the IOC vote? The Japan Times quotes claims that Tokyo just didn’t have enough flair.
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Categories: General Japan
2016 Olympics: Say No to Tokyo
International Olympic Committee will meet in Copenhagen today to decide which of the four candidate cities will get to host the 2016 Olympic games. Hopes are high that Tokyo will win the honor, but is it really something residents of Japan should want? Trans Pacific Radio has an editorial arguing that the games will be ridiculously expensive and offer very little in return:
We can take the bid as saying it will cost roughly $14,194,537,000 for the Games themselves, plus the $48 million for the bid itself, which makes. . .
US$14,242,537,000
. . . which is a little over $1,114 per resident of Tokyo.
Related link: According to online gambling sites, Tokyo has very slim odds of winning the vote:
Their odds on Madrid getting the nod have been cut from 16/1 to 9/1, while the Windy City heads the market on 4/6, Rio has been eased out slightly to 7/4 and Tokyo is now a longshot at 25/1.
A Tokyo victory may be so improbable that we don’t even need to worry about the projected costs of hosting the games.
Do you support Tokyo's 2016 Olympic bid?
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Categories: General Japan
Hatoyama vs. Obama : Who will get the 2016 Olympic games?
As an introduction to their report on how both Yukio Hatoyama and Barack Obama will be attending Friday’s IOC meeting to decide the host city for the 2016 Olympics, the NTV graphics team added some exciting flames to week-old footage of the two leaders:
Tokyo bid chief Ichiro Kono has welcomed the competition.
More Olympic bid news
The AFP has run an article focusing on how Japan’s Olympic bid team lacks emotional punch:
“It is generally said that Japanese people lack emotion,” said Takeda, who represented Japan in show-jumping at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics.
“Well we do (have emotions). We have them in our own style and we will make them felt.”
Meanwhile, the official 2016 Tokyo Olympics site is busy pumping out propaganda news articles and dull PR blog posts in favor of its bid. A recent article boasts that 100 million of Japan’s 127 million citizens support Tokyo’s Olympic bid, a dubious claim when compared to the results of public opinion polls taken only a few months ago:
In public opinion surveys conducted in early July by two major national papers, the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun, 55% of respondents support Tokyo hosting the Games in 2016. In a poll conducted last week by the Sankei Shimbun newspaper and FNN television network, support improved to 63.6% from 58.3% in February.
[via JapanSoc]
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Categories: General Japan
Video: White guy mistaken for Michael Phelps
If you’re a non-Asian foreigner living in Japan, chances are you’ve been compared to a foreign celebrity at least once, and that celebrity probably looks nothing like you.
But have any of you experienced something like this:
[Via Brian in Jeollanam-do]
Categories: Odd / Strange
Angry ‘Olympic Ojisan’ leaves Beijing
Sankei/MSN reports that Naotoshi Yamada, an 82 year-old super fan famously fan known as “Olympic Ojisan” because of his energetic cheering at past Olympic games, has left the Beijing Olympics in anger.
When asked by the press about his reasons for leaving, he said that he was shocked by the bad way Chinese authorities treated visitors. Yamada claims that many Japanese fans were not allowed to attend Judo matches, despite a large number of empty seats in the arena. He attended many Olympic games over the last 50 or so years, and it was the first time he’d encountered anything like this.
Yamada was also angry about the behavior of Chinese fans at sporting events, as well as the air quality:
The booing was outrageous. There’s never been an Olympic Games like this one. They aren’t qualified to hold the Olympics. Moreover, the air was dirty, causing pain in my throat. This will be the first time I’ve gone to the Olympics and not stayed until the Closing Ceremony.
One could easily blow off Yamada’s complaints as the rantings of a loony old man, but he’s not the only one complaining about empty venues turning away fans, nor is he the only source to mention booing from Chinese fans (China’s state-controlled press has claimed otherwise). On the other hand, footage of the city and media reports show that Beijing’s smog levels are quite low compared to what had been expected before the games.
Categories: General Japan