One Year To Tokyo 2020

One year from now we will get a break what promises to be an ugly 2020 election campaign in the United States to watch the opening ceremonies of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad.

The Tokyo Games will open on this date and close on August 9 in the soon to be completed New National Stadium.   Other venues are will be completed in time for the Games

It is not only the second time since 1964 that Tokyo has hosted a summer Games, it is the first Asian city to do so twice.  Japan has also hosted the winter Games twice (1972 Sapporo, 1998 Nagano).

It will also be the middle leg of three consecutive Olympic summer and winter Games being hosted in east Asia that started with the winter Games in Pyeyongchang last year and will conclude with the winter Games in Beijing in 2022.



When the Tokyo Games open there will be a record 33 sports in the 2020 Olympic program.  There will be along with the permanent core sports new additions like 3x3 basketball, freestyle BMX, and the Madison cycling race.  Baseball and softball will also return to the Olympic sporting program for the first time since 2008.

Four sports, surfing, karate, sport climbing and skateboarding will make their Olympic debut, and as usual, men's and women's soccer will start their respective tournaments before the opening ceremonies at stadiums across Japan.

One of the questions trans people around the world have is will this finally be the Games in which a trans athlete qualifies for their national team.   So far the only time a trans person has a ppeared inside an Olympic stadium was when model Lea T rode in on a tricycle carying Brazil's placard during the 2016  Rio Games opening ceremonies .

Over the last several Olympiads the host nations have been one upping each other on who has the most spectacular opening ceremony and who will have the most unique Olympic cauldron lighting.

Will be interesting to see not only who gets the honor of being the final Tokyo 2020 torch bearer, but how they light the cauldron and what it looks like during the opening ceremony.. 

We'll know the answer to that question in 366 days.   Yep, a summer Olympics always takes place during a leap year   

Tokyo Passes Law Banning TBLGQ Discrimination

For those of you who reflexively hate on the Olympics and fixate on the infrastructure costs associated with hosting an Olympic Games, here's a compelling argument in favor of having them in your city.

In the wake of what happened in Sochi, with the Russian government ramping up discrimination aimed at TBLGQ people by passing an anti-gay propaganda law on the eve of the 2014 Winter Games too late for them to be moved elsewhere,  the IOC as part of Olympic Agenda 2020 requires all future host cities to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In order to meet that Olympics hosting requirement standard, on October 5 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government passed a TBLGQ rights law that states:

“The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, citizens, and enterprises may not unduly discriminate on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation” and includes a government pledge to “conduct measures needed to make sure human rights values are rooted in all corners of the city and diversity is respected in the city.”

The new law also commits the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to do public education campaigns in the city about TBLGQ rights issues.

Tokyo, along with Tokyo prefecture which it merged with in 1943, and the Tokyo metropolitan area is home to 25% of Japan's population.

Japan doesn't have a national law yet legalizing same sex marriage, and Japanese transgender people are required to have gender confirmation surgery before they can obtain federal ID that matches their gender identity.

But Japan has been making positive strides on the TBLGQ rights front in the last several years. Well known trans women like 2009 Miss International Queen winner Ai Haruna live and work there.

According to Human Rights Watch, in 2016 Japan's Minister of Education released a teacher's guidebook that covered the topic of how to treat TBLGQ students.  That same year Japan, along with the Netherlands and the United States, led a UNESCO conference on TBLGQ bullying, and followed that up in March 2017 by the Ministry of Education modifying the national bullying policy to include TBLGQ students.

Since 2003, Aya Kamikawa has been serving on the council for the largest of the 23 wards that make up the historic city of Tokyo, Setagaya.

She was the first and only elected trans official in Japan until March 2017, when 26 year old Tomoya Hosoda became the first trans masculine person elected to public office in the Land of the Rising Sun by winning a seat on the Iruma City city council, located in the Saitama prefecture in the Greater Tokyo metro area.

He called his win at the time 'a marker for transgender rights' in his nation, and in the wake of it has worked to increase acceptance for all forms of diversity in Japan.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics Opening Four Years From Now Today

Four years from now on this date, the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo will kick off and run until August 9.   When that happens, Tokyo will become the fifth city and the first Asian one to host the Summer Olympic Games more than once.  

The other three cities who have hosted the Summer Olympics twice are Los Angeles (1932,1984), Athens (1896, 2004) and Paris (1900, 1924).  London is the only one to have hosted the Games three times (1908, 1948, 2012) and Los Angeles may join that exclusive three time host list if they successfully win the bid for the 2024 Games.

Tokyo hosted the Games in 1964, and was scheduled to host them in 1940 but those games were canceled because the outbreak of World War II.  Those 1964 Olympic Games served as their international coming out party, and one of the long lasting legacies of those Games was the completion of the bullet trains that revolutionized Japan's national transportation system.

Hosting the Summer Olympics not only revolutionized the japanese transportation system infrastructure, but also transformed Japan.   Since 1964 Japan has become an economic powerhouse nation that is on the cutting edge of developing robot technology, their women's soccer team won a FIFA world title in 2011, they are competitive in other international winter and summer sports disciplines and Tokyo has become a world class international city and the fashion capital of the Asia Pacific region.

As for what visitors to Tokyo can expect when they come to the 2020 Games, the Olympic venue game plan is to have two compact zones called the Heritage Zone and the Tokyo Bay Zone with the Olympic Village intersecting both of them.  

The venues will all be within a 8 km. radius of the Olympic Village

The TOOC will use some of the facilities built for the 1964 Games but also have some newer ones like the revised national stadium design.  

The old stadium design by world renowned architect Zaha Hadid won an international design contest in 2012, but was criticized for looking like a bicycle helmet and for its ballooning construction costs that would have made it at $2.1 billion the most expensive stadium ever built on this planet, exceeding the cost of the $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.   That design was scrapped by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a new one recently revealed by the Japan Sports Council.

The Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee won the bid for the 2020 Games back in 2013 by promising to be 'the safe pair of hands' for it.  It will be interesting to see over the next four years if they pull it off while still hosting a memorable experience for the athletes and visitors attending the Games.

Based on their past history and the flawless way they have executed other large international sporting events they have hosted including two winter Olympic Games in Sapporo (1972) and Nagano (1998), I wouldn't bet against the Japanese doing exactly what they promised to do four years from now as they prep for welcoming the world back to Tokyo for another edition of the Games once Rio finishes its Olympic business.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Logo Revealed

While we are still counting down toward the start of the 2016 Rio Games next year, we already know what city will be hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics.

It's Tokyo, and the Games of the XXXII Olympiad will take place from July 24 to August 9

The countdown to the 2020 Games will begin when Rio's mayor during the closing ceremonies  for next yer's games hands off the Antwerp Olympic flag to Tokyo's mayor, and in preparation for hosting the games for the second time since 1964, the 2020 games logo has been released

It was created by award winning designer Kenjiro Sato with the goal of symbolizing the unifying power of the Games.   It is based on a stylized letter ;T', which is the first letter in the words, Tokyo, Tomorrow and Team.

The black color of the central column of the stylized 'T' represents diversity.  The red color in the circle represents the power of every beating heart, in addition to representing the rising sun at the center of the Japanese national flag.

While the emblem has gotten some mixed reviews since it was unveiled at a public event in Tokyo on July 24, five years before the date of the opening ceremonies of the Games.  While some have criticized it, others have praised it, and the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee likes it.

But the logo unveiling is just another reminder that we'll soon be enjoying Summer Olympics action on less than a year, and the chatter about Rio Olympic favorites will only get louder over the next few months.