Although billed as an important material legacy of the Tokyo Olympics, National Stadium has become a taxpayer burden and its future remains in limbo.
The stadium was originally planned to be privatized after the Olympics to reduce the cost to taxpayers, but that project has fallen far behind schedule and is showing no sign of getting back on track.
In 2019, a year before the Olympics were originally supposed to take place, the government settled on a concrete privatization plan to publicly recruit potential businesses to take over the venue. That timeline, however, hit a snag the same year.