Given the current state of the world, the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games next year are truly going to be historic. Instead of celebrating the opening of the games last week, everything that we were looking forward to in 2020 has been cancelled or postponed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Group of Seven and Group of 20 meetings have been pushed out and even the annual United Nations General Assembly has gone virtual. Therefore, if the Tokyo Games are to be held, a year from now is the first time that the world will really have the opportunity to celebrate a global activity of any type.
The significance of this happening in Japan cannot be missed. This year, we are celebrating 75 years since the end of the war in 1945. In 1964, the last time the Olympics were held in Japan, it was an opportunity to bring Japan back into the world of nations after having lost World War II. The 1964 Olympics were about Japan’s pride in stepping back on the global stage, not as an antagonist but as a global player promoting the shinkansen bullet trains, Tokyo’s subway system, its radical new architecture and all the beauty that Japan has to offer.