Tokyo’s dear leader Shintaro Ishihara has accused his subjects of “having become a different race to the rest of the Japanese” after they angered him by refusing to display sufficient enthusiasm for his 2020 Olympic bid.
His comments come after the IOC surveyed citizens of the three candidate cities for the 2020 Olympics, and found support amongst the inhabitants of Tokyo (47%) significantly lower than those of Madrid (78%) and Istanbul (73%), which prompted Ishihara to start haranguing the people of Tokyo for “having become a barren race after satisfying their petty greed.”
He revisited the same theme at a later press conference:
“The people of the capital are extravagant. They no longer think of anyone but themselves. You know, they’ve become a different race to the rest of the Japanese people.”
At the same press conference, it was suggested to him that the low approval rating for the bid was due to dislike for him – to which he wryly responded: “If by quitting the approval rate would go up and the games’d come here, I’d quit tomorrow!”
The survey did not ask why the inhabitants of Tokyo were so ambivalent about hosting the world’s biggest televised sponsorship event, but it seems likely that in the absence of lust for national prestige, practical objections to spending billions of dollars of public cash on building extravagant sports facilities for the purpose of a single event whilst simultaneously swamping the city’s infrastructure with visitors and building work may weigh heavily on their minds.
Their apathy to the bid might be well founded – should Tokyo host the Olympics, Ishihara would rather the people of Tokyo stay away anyway: “If Tokyo gets the Olympics, the people of Tokyo needn’t come!” – words which may be familiar.
In matters not providing much opportunity to bash Korea or China, even 2ch is scathing of his latest senile outbursts:
“The real extravagance is squandering billions on this bid, isn’t it?”
“The Olympic bid is Ishihara’s petty greed…”
“Ah, so the people of Tokyo weren’t Japanese after all!”
“It’s quite funny listening to this guy bang on like this.”
“Nobody cares about the Olympics.”
“Since when did being opposed to hosting the Olympics become ‘extravagance’?”
“The old fool just wants to pour more cash into road building to help his friends in the construction industry.”
“A pawn of the banks, looking to further bury the nation in debt?”
“Classic example of the harm caused by these elderly fools. Anyone who doesn’t agree with him is no good or not even Japanese. Oh, wait, that’s just how people thought when he was young…”
“I don’t know about the benefits to the nation and business, but to the people of the capital it’s nothing but a hassle. Just a bunch of construction projects all over the place.”
“Ishihara thinks only of himself. He’s actually a good symbol for the people of Tonkin” [“Tonkin” is recent derogatory slang for Tokyo, based on either the Chinese or Vietnamese pronunciation of the “eastern capital” characters which make up the city’s name]
“Don’t call in a bunch of foreigners just when we’re expecting a huge earthquake under the capital…”
“He doesn’t care about the sports. He just wants an excuse to upgrade the city’s older infrastructure. If there’s a major quake the older stuff will be ruined.”
“He’s gotten full of himself after the Senkaku purchase declaration. I can sympathise over a territorial issue, but this is a different story. And if the people of Tokyo don’t attend, nobody from the regions is going to either!”
“If he doesn’t want them to come, he should hold it on the island he’s going buy down there.”
“How did the people of Tokyo elect this guy? He doesn’t even recognise them as being Japanese…”
“They elected him 4 times… pretty amazing really.”
His bets will not work.
It is the curse of the paper-door!
Oh look who the Japanese keep electing to represent their country.
A racist Jap.
You know who else was too enthusiastically racist when his country hosted the Olympics?
f♥♥k him and whatever douchebags voted for him.
The funny thing is Tokyo is still the front runner for 2020. Nobody still believes that Madrid can foot the bill anymore (although it would be good to put all those unemployed Spanish constructors to work). And Istanbul’s bid was apparently not better than the cities who got cut, but they were retained because they put “The First Games On Two Continents” on every document.
But to be honest, this isn’t 1964 anymore. Back then Japan had some very good reasons to hold the Games. They used it to get an infrastructure update (the shinkansen) and to show to the world that they had left WWII behind. Neither of those reasons apply today.