Was it an ominous premonition or just another blunder by a gaffe-prone politician?
During an Upper House finance committee meeting on March 18 last year, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso described how exceptional events seem to overshadow the Olympics in 40-year intervals.
Take the 1940 iterations, when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified and prompted the nation to forfeit the planned Summer Games in Tokyo and Winter Games in Sapporo.