The government needs to pull the plug on the planned new Olympic stadium designed by the celebrity British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.
Time is running out as wrecking balls are set to raze the iconic National Olympic Stadium this summer unless the relevant authorities come to their senses and hit the reset button. Her plan is attracting harsh criticism from the Japanese media, Japan's leading architects, environmentalists and the public because it is an eyesore in the making that is excessive in every way and will further increase the financial burden this generation is imposing on future generations. TBS recently aired a special television program critical of the project while editorials in the Asahi and Nikkei newspapers condemn it, the latter reminding readers that in 1964 a highway was hastily constructed over the historic Nihonbashi Bridge, a folly that should not be repeated. The media campaign is having an impact as a recent Nikkei poll found that 60 percent of respondents oppose the proposed stadium.
"Hadid's curse," as one of my students calls it, is a typical white elephant project, one that is unnecessary and wasteful. It will sit there after the Olympics mostly unused, a symbol of thoughtless excess and mindless consumption. OK, you are thinking, maybe this might accurately reflect the zeitgeist of contemporary Japan, the stadium equivalent of a monstrous Prada bag plopped down in a lovely park. But the glitzy ostentation is really more a retro thing, bringing to mind all those tasteless bubble-era projects that never made any sense, littering the archipelago with concrete symbols of bad ideas and profligate spending. That's why Japan has so many museums all over the country that don't have anything worth looking at aside from the buildings. There was money for the construction, but none left over for the art, the emptiness of affluence as installation.