IT IS difficult to match central Tokyo’s gleaming plantation of concrete spires today with grainy images of the rickety capital in 1959. Still rebuilding from America’s wartime firebombing, Japan’s capital stunned the world by winning the right to host the 1964 Olympics. The city had miles of bad roads and few decent hotels. Only a fifth of its residents had flush toilets. Pollution was so bad that oxygen cylinders were sold in vending machines. Yet it engineered one of the greatest urban transformations in history, going from a beat-up Asian megalopolis to a first-world city in five years. Another Great Leap Forward is planned ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The governor of Tokyo, Yoichi Masuzoe, has pledged to make it the planet’s number one city, using the games as a launch pad. In addition to 22 new Olympic venues, the plans include new roads and railway lines, a huge waterfront redevelopment and rebuilding chunks of the city centre. But this ambitious makeover has triggered withering criticism. “We are no longer in 1964,” says Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s most revered architects. He calls plans to replicate the concrete-and-steel era of Japan’s first Olympics a “nightmare.”

The fight between two competing visions of Tokyo’s future is symbolised by plans to refurbish the 1964 Olympic Stadium. At nearly 290,000 square meters, the new facility would have been by far the biggest in the history of the games. And it would have completely overwhelmed the Jingu-Gaien neighborhood, one of the few large expanses of green in the city centre, said Fumihiko Maki, another top architect. The criticism forced Zaha Hadid, the stadium’s London-based designer, to announce a scaled-down version this summer. But the old stadium still sits gutted and empty, awaiting a final decision before demolition.



A group of designers says even rethinking the centrepiece of the games does not go far enough. Team Timberize, a non-profit organisation, wants all the new Olympic facilities to be built with wood. A squad of 100 architects and designers has made scale models of the stadiums and Olympic village for an exhibition next week. Japan can no longer act like it’s still the 20th century, says Atsushi Yagi, a director of Team Timberize. It must think like the mature city it is, he says.

Disquiet over construction plans has been heightened by growing concerns about cost. Estimates for the stadium refurbishment have more than doubled as construction and labour costs have soared under Abenomics, Japan’s bid to end years of deflation. City officials revealed recently that this year’s consumption-tax hike of 3% was not even factored into the original budget. Cost concerns may now force some venues out of the expensive city to the far-flung suburbs.

The 1964 event cost many times more than its predecessor in Rome four years earlier, and added to the Olympics’ spendthrift reputation—not a single games since then has met its cost target. The Tokyo Olympics also triggered the start of Japan’s addiction to bond issuance, which continues unabated today. Tokyo’s original estimate of ¥409 billion ($3.7 billion) for the games now looks unrealistic to most critics. If, as some expect, Abenomics runs out of steam, the city faces a painful post-games hangover.

(Picture credit: AFP)