East Asian Olympics, Beijing 2008, and the globalisation of sport

摘要

The IOC bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among competing cities. However rather than tracing this ongoing narrative among what is, in 2009, four anointed candidate cities - Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasise here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for global city pre-eminence. There is a contentious debate within Japan about the wisdom of Tokyo's bid, which sharply divides the political leadership and citizen opinion. In 1964, Tokyo's hosting of the Games consolidated its place as the single national political, economic, and media capital of the country, reducing Osaka to second-city status. Now, to the controversial Tokyo governor and his supporters, the 2016 bid has much less to do with domestic prominence and much more about international prestige, as an effort to preserve Tokyo's status as a global city, a view that was only reinforced by the Beijing Games and by the upcoming 2012 Games in London, Tokyo's rival. If the 1964 Games were Japan's national games, properly held in its capital, I argue that the 2016 Games would be Tokyo's mega-event, still the national capital but looking beyond to re-assert its status as one of the world's truly global cities.View full textDownload full textKeywords2008 Beijing Olympic Games, 2016 Tokyo Olympic Games bid, global cities, Ishihara Shintaro, 1964 Tokyo Olympic GamesRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2011.626679