Asia Pride, China Fear, Tokyo Anxiety: Japan Looks Back at Beijing 2008 and Forward to London 2012 and Tokyo 2016

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among rival cities. However rather than tracing the narrative of competition for the 2016 Summer Games among the four candidate cities - Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasize 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 was a contentious debate within Japan about the wisdom of Tokyo's bid, which sharply divided the political leadership and the opinion of its citizens. 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. To the controversial Tokyo governor and his supporters, the 2016 bid had 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 were to 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.