Tokyo during the Olympics has been a city split between two versions of reality so jarringly at odds with one another that it is difficult to believe they are reflections of the same place.
On one side there are the Games themselves, an idealised televisual world of sporting rivalry, athletic excellence and cosmopolitan good fellowship.
Not much has gone wrong, and much has gone right from the point of view of the host country. The national team has won more medals, and more gold medals, than in any previous Olympics – early on, Japan led the medal table; it goes into the final weekend behind only China and the United States.
The burdensome bureaucracy of testing and quarantining has been handled as well as could reasonably be expected. The absence of spectators from the stadiums has not ruined the Games, even if it has muted the atmosphere. But outside the Olympic “bubble” of athletes, officials and journalists is a city in crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic is worse than it has ever been. On July 22, the day before the Olympic opening ceremony, there were 435 new cases in Tokyo. Today there were 4,515 new infections in the city, after a record number yesterday of more than 5,000 cases, and 15,000 nationwide.
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Ambulances report difficulty finding hospitals for patients because of the pressure placed upon them by sufferers from Covid-19. The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, has extended emergency measures to cover 70 per cent of the population.
“The number of new infections has surged across the whole country at levels we have never seen before,” said Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of the pandemic. “The rate of increase is an order of magnitude greater.”
Caught between the Tokyo-the-Olympic-utopia and Tokyo-the-cauldron-of-Covid are the city’s 37 million people. What do they make of the extreme situation in which they find themselves – and what is the relationship between the Olympics and Tokyo’s pandemic?
So far at last, there is no sign of the situation that many people in Japan feared before the Games began – a huge spread of infection from the tens of thousands of Olympic visitors to the Tokyo population at large.
Today the organisers reported 29 new cases among Olympic-related personnel, bringing the total number to 387. The entire Greek artistic swimming squad was eliminated this week after four swimmers and an official tested positive — but most of those infected have not been athletes. They have been local volunteers and “contractors”, most of them Japanese.
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Unlike the athletes, who are strictly confined to their “village”, many of these people return home at night to their homes and families – so it is not out of the question that Olympic-originated clusters will emerge after the international circus moves on next week. So far, however, the cases that have been identified are a drop in the ocean of far more numerous infections overwhelming Tokyo.
But this does not mean that the Olympics have not had an effect on Japan’s pandemic. There is a growing expert consensus that the Games are one of the biggest factors in the current crisis — not as a direct source of disease, but in the way they have corroded what was formerly the Japanese population’s most powerful defence against the coronavirus: its impressive discipline and cohesion.
Until this year, when it fell behind Europe and North America in administering vaccines, Japan had a relatively good pandemic. Even now, the figures are impressive by British standards — on the day Japan broke its record of 15,000 cases nationwide, the UK had 30,000 new cases. With double the population, Japan has suffered little more than a tenth the number of deaths as Britain — 15,000 compared with 130,000.
The reasons for this success are not obvious because the government’s performance has been inconsistent and patchy. It acted early to close borders but it has not carried out widespread testing. It has been criticised for urging people to travel last year in an effort to give the economy room to breathe. But broadly speaking, Japanese people instinctively do the kind of things that help in a time of pandemic.
They have always been more inclined to wear facemasks when they have a cough, and to bow from a few feet away rather than to shake hands or peck one another on the cheek. They wash their hands a lot. They generally worship in small groups, rather than large congregations. And they are less likely to flout authority and to treat as law what is no more than a non-binding requests.
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This last trait has been crucial because Japan’s states of emergency, solemn though they sound, have far less to them than the mandatory lockdowns imposed in Britain and many other rich countries, They amount to little more than a strong request by the authorities to do helpful things — stay at home, avoid crowded areas, and work from home. In theory, legal proceedings can be brought against businesses that ignore admonitions to stop serving alcohol and to close at 8pm; in practice, it almost never happens.
In Tokyo’s three previous states of emergency, people and businesses largely complied. This time, as an evening stroll in any commercial area of the city reveals, many have not. Bars and restaurants openly advertise the fact that they are serving booze and staying open late; many of them are full of grateful customers; and more and more of them seem to be unmasked.
Some of this is the pandemic fatigue that has occurred naturally in many societies, as sheer weariness and boredom overpower the sense of obligation and responsibility. But in Tokyo’s case it has much to do with the Games, which have bred what the Japanese media refer to as Olympic complacency. Before the Games began, a large majority of Japanese were opposed to them going ahead. Now, having been forced on them unwillingly by the government, the Olympics are serving as a licence and an encouragement to ignore pandemic strictures — and even as a drug that numbs people to the health crisis bearing down upon them.
The Games are closed to spectators, of course, and in most of Tokyo there is little sign that an Olympics is even taking place. But the presence in the city of the world’s biggest sporting event inevitably undermines the government’s appeals.
“We want the public to consider the possibility of infection as a personal matter,” a member of the government’s scientific panel told the Asahi newspaper. “But with the Olympics being held, comments such as ‘don’t gather in groups’ and ‘stay at home’ do not sound very convincing.”
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The situation is analysed by Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious disease at Kobe University Hospital, who compares the pandemic to other kinds of natural disaster. “In a typhoon, an earthquake a tsunami, the damage is visible,” he says. “You turn on the television and you see the broken houses and everyone shares a sense of crisis. But in a pandemic like this, there is nothing to see. And when people turn on the television now, what do they see? The happy faces of smiling young athletes.”
When the Games end this weekend, their organisers will no doubt congratulate themselves on the extent to which they have protected Tokyo from their presence. But they leave the country in a much worse state than they found it, even if the Olympics have brought pleasure and excitement to many Japanese. “If you drink beer, you feel happy for one night,” says Professor Iwata. “But you may have a big hangover the next day.”