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In the mid-1960s, how did a small French mountain village become a high performance international Olympic training center? This article intends to answer this question by examining the social conditions behind the center's creation. The sporting and political context of the Olympic Games in Tokyo (1964) and Mexico (1968) proved fertile ground for the rationalization of sports through stabilizing a medical and sporting administration and implementing a stronger scientific framework. From this perspective, the medicalization of athletic performance in the 1960s played a central role in the conversion of Font-Romeu, transformed from an acclimatization station in the early 1960s into a renowned international altitude training center just a few years later. The article will take a comprehensive look at the construction and management of such a center, and how it became a game changer in the international movement of sportspersons and sports-related personnel the world over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:Introduction and Methods: The author provides an overview of the history and future prospects of psychological support for elite athletes in Japan. Results: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics was the starting point for the psychological support of these athletes. Thereafter, the Japanese Society of Sport Psychology (JSSP) was founded in 1973, and sports psychologists began providing psychological support to elite athletes; this was followed by the establishment in 2001 of the Japan Institute of Sports Sciences (JISS), an organization that provides psychological support to athletes through cooperation among sports psychologists, clinical psychologists, and sports psychiatrists. The Japanese Association of Sports Psychiatry, which cooperates and collaborates with the JSSP, was founded in 2003. At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, Japanese sports psychiatrists provided psychological support to elite athletes from around the world at the Olympic Village. Sports psychologists of the JISS also provided psychological support to Japanese elite athletes during this time. Conclusion: In recent years, tremendous attention has been paid to the mental health and well- being of elite athletes, and both research into these topics and support of athletes has been taking place in Japan at an unprecedented rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces the stories of four former residents of a municipal housing complex built in the late 1950s in central Tokyo. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the interviewees and their families had found shelter in and around an abandoned Imperial Japanese Army base. After moving them into concrete housing blocks in order to hide their settlement prior to Tokyo's hosting of the Olympics in 1964, the city moved them again in preparation for the 2020 Olympics. Their stories reveal the ways that war and defeat left the city's population to fend for themselves, as well as the long tug‐of‐war that ensued between the interests of settlers and those of the municipal and national governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an analysis of the historical continuity of the military‐cultural spatial formation of the Tokyo Olympic Games throughout the prewar and postwar era. The sites that eventually became the basis for hosting the 1964 and 2020 Olympics had already materialized in the plan for the 1940 Olympics. Tokyo's modernization process entailed a shift of the city's core from the rich cultural heritage accumulated since the Edo in the city's northeast towards an area extending from the southwest of the city center into the suburbs. The northeast area of central Tokyo had been home to commoner districts since the Edo period, and with land that was highly subdivided, did not lend itself to large‐scale development. But the southwest of the city center was originally the site of feudal estates, and these large sites were generally amenable to large‐scale development. These areas were home to numerous Imperial Japanese Army bases before the surrender, which after seizure during the US occupation eventually became the footprint for large parks and urban developments. The 1964 Olympics played a determinative role in the developments of the southwest of the city center. This continuity from prewar to postwar planning is reflected in the similar placement of venues, and the their conversion from former military uses. So the Olympics came to postwar Japan as a postwar event, in the strict sense of the word. The term postwar here refers foremost to the strategy of converting the social consciousness from war that accompanied reconstruction and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the "document or art" controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of "prosthetic memories" that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian "screen memories." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to focus on a correlation between urban land development and a "proletarianization" of day‐laborers by examining Mitsui Fudosan Group [Mitsui Real Estate Group] as an agent of urban developments and construction industry in Japan, with examining daylaborers' riots and moral economy as a counter‐culture against gentrified urban spaces.It is necessary to acknowledge the fact that the national projects – maintained by the closed market and the subcontracting labor system in the construction industry – also induce a radical opposition against the urban development. Although national projects are inevitably accompanied by gentrification, eviction of the homeless, and social exclusion of the underclass, unavoidable transgression or deviation conflicts with urban development, such as periodic and spontaneous riots by day‐laborers, demonstrates a vulnerability of the national unity. In fact, the day‐laborers changed the street labor market into their own field in order to overturn the hierarchy determined by the subcontracting structure in the construction industry. Their bodily expression in the form of riots had radically transgressed the ideas promoted in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as "One World," or the 1970 Osaka Expo as "Progress and Harmony for Mankind." The Olympic legacy was disrupted boldly and transformed into a radical egalitarian thought in this sense. The underclass is immediately defined and commodified by national projects, however, it does not mean that its body is completely involved in its time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of altitude, wind, and track curvature is studied on the basis of a simple biomechanical model. The results are compared with some data from the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Munich, and Mexico City. The influence of these factors is found to be considerably larger than the current precision in the measurement of records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reconstruction of the National Stadium for the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo has induced displacement of two groups of vulnerable people, raising concerns of the violation of human rights, particularly the right to adequate housing. The expansion of the stadium led to the expulsion of dozens of homeless people who lived in and around the park surrounding the stadium, and a sudden decision to demolish a nearby public housing estate built for the 1964 Summer Games forced over 200 tenants, most of whom were elderly, to be relocated. While the homeless people engaged in several rounds of negotiation with the government authorities, the majority of the housing tenants reluctantly agreed to move except for a few who kept demanding respectful treatment from the metropolitan government. Presenting the preliminary results of a mixed-method three-year qualitative study, this research note demonstrates that while the authority might have offered alternative housing considered ‘adequate’ in terms of physical living conditions, the process of evictions did not afford autonomy for the affected to choose where to live. The respective status of the affected – homeless and elderly – may demand the reconsideration of the concept of ‘adequate housing’ in relation to human dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1962 to 1968, the United States Government along with private entities funded the training of athletes from developing nations through a non-profit organization named Sports International. Led by former Peace Corps member David Dichter, Sports International sought to enhance America’s image in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The initial aim of the programme was to train athletes to compete at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The theory behind Sports International centred on the notion that helping developing nations achieves athletic success would influence them to view the United States more favourably. The idea to form Sports International came in the midst of the Cold War as the United States and the Soviet Union battled on a multitude of fronts. This article argues that American leaders worried about the presence of the Soviet Union in developing countries and sought ways to maximize American influence in those areas. The theory of soft power, a concept most prominently explicated by American international relations theorist Joseph Nye, forms the framework for this study. By analysing Sports International through this lens, this article demonstrates several problems which might ensure should one overemphasize the effect of sport on a nation’s soft power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre los Juegos Olímpicos de 1964 en Tokio, Japón. El autor comenta sobre la historia de los Juegos y examina el rol de Hayato Ikeda, el Primer Ministro de Japón en el momento, en ganar la oferta de organizar los Juegos Olímpicos en 1964. También se considera la historia de su carrera política en Japón.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Japanese women's volleyball won the gold medal, which in many ways can be viewed as an epoch-making event in Japanese post-war sporting history. This article explores the background to that victory, revealing a corporate history of the sport with a prominent role played by Japanese cotton textile companies. It argues that gold medal success at the 1964 Olympics was the result of a history of corporate investment in women's volleyball, in particular by one company, Nichibō Corporation, and tells the Olympic story with a focus on the personal recollections of the women's volleyball team captain, Kasai Masae. Finally, it evaluates the impact that Olympic victory had on the popularity and strength of women's volleyball in Japan in the decades after 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nakamura (nee: Kasai) Masae (July 14, 1933 - October 3, 2013) was Captain of the Japanese women's volleyball team, popularly nicknamed the "Oriental Witches" (Tōyō no Majo) that won the Gold Medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This victory propelled Kasai into the Japanese media spotlight and she spent the remainder of her life actively promoting the sport. Kasai was an instrumental figure in the emergence of volleyball as a popular sport for women of all age groups across Japan. Following an interview by the author in May 2012, Kasai sadly and unexpectedly passed away in October 2013. This article reflects on her remarkable life, her commitment to the sport of volleyball, and her legacy as one of Japan's most famous sporting personalities to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses topics of articles within this issue including the post-World War II treason trials in the Philippines, the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, and China's participation in the 1963 international sports event known as the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) held in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The phrase Oriental Witches (Tōyō no Majo) was used in the mass media to describe the Japanese women’s volleyball team that won 22 games in a row during their tour of Europe in 1961; they became even more famous when their impressive career was crowned with a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. In this paper, I investigate media representations of the Oriental Witches in the retrospective programming of the NHK Japanese public broadcaster. I analyze the Oriental Witches success story as a part of ‘Shōwa nostalgia’—a cultural trend idealizing Japan of the 1950s and 1960, especially the years of high economic growth that led up to the Tokyo Olympics. I argue that NHK actively promoted ‘Shōwa nostalgia’ in the first two decades of the new Heisei era, and the Oriental Witches were a prominent feature of this programming. The NHK representations of the Olympic team, although seemingly non-gendered, provide normative notions of gender roles that ‘proper’ Japanese women should conform to in the idealized Shōwa era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This feature reflects on the gold medal victory for the Japanese women's volleyball team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, through the recollections of the team captain Kasai Masae. An interview with Kasai records the impact that victory had on her own life, as well as on the popularity of women's volleyball in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every Olympic Games involves a dual process of attempting to project favourable images of the host city/country/region and seeking to manage the international gaze that is invited as a key rationale for staging the Games in the first place. How each site seeks to be seen varies, though, with historical, political, social, cultural, spatial and technological context. The three Summer Olympic Games that have taken place in East Asia all attempted to demonstrate in different ways that its host had ‘arrived’ as a global force. A key variable in each case was the communicative apparatus available to hosts, guests and the world watching from afar before, during and after the event itself. This article addresses Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988 and Beijing 2008, seeking to demonstrate how the balance of power to represent and be represented has changed significantly over the almost half a century spanning the first and the last Games. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Olympic education in Japan began for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and was the first Olympic education programme in the world. The Olympic Games were an appropriate event for postwar Japan to revive and to declare the rebirth of Japan as a peace-loving country to the world. Before the Games, Olympic education was developed as part of school curriculum for Japanese students from elementary to the high school. Schools organised their education for their own school. In the later Olympic Games of the 1972 Sapporo and 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, Olympic education and peace education were tied together through their Olympic education programmes. However, after the conclusion of each edition of the Olympic Games, Olympics education expectedly tapered off in Japan. Although the Japanese national curriculum for the theories of physical education course was revised to include international sporting events such as the Olympic Games and World Cup Soccer and to address anti-doping education, much work remains to be done on Olympic Education in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using official materials and media commentary, this article examines two large-scale spectacles and their implications for post-war Japanese nationalism. Discursively, the Olympics and the World Exposition presented a clear vision of Japan: as a nation at the forefront of the international scene, fit to act as a champion of the non-Western world and firmly unified internally. In concrete ways, the two events strengthened the process of national integration that was gathering pace in the nineteen-sixties, especially through the provision of new networks of transport and communications. They also helped to rehabilitate the post-war Japanese state, so that it could more readily be seen as a benign entity devoted to the national interest and the people's welfare. The article illuminates a key moment in the emergence of new national self-images and in the construction of national life in post-war Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changing ‘style’ of urban order in Japan through the example of mega events, drawing on the architectural critique of Taro Igarashi and the historical sociological analysis of Masachi Ohsawa. It argues that construction for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was typical of a ‘concrete aesthetic’ that reflected a Japanese version of ‘control society’, at once modern and post-modern. Ironically, this period has since been re-imagined through ‘Showa nostalgia’ as shown in the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics and the 2005 Aichi Expo. This nostalgia has been a resource for a globalising form of urban order, seen in more recent mega events like the FIFA World Cup 2002, the 2005 World Expo in Aichi and the 2007 World Athletics Championship in Osaka. This order combines a new aesthetics of visibility through technocratic surveillance with authoritarian governance that seeks to render invisible the marginal, particularly homeless people and foreign migrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a category, Developmental States (DS) in the world political economy express a distinctive set of ideological practices that give them specific incentives to host sporting mega-events. Asian DSs, or ‘late(r) developers’, in particular offer interesting case studies by which to explore the symbolic value such states attach to hosting Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, and other major sporting events. This paper examines five Asian examples (Tokyo Olympic Games 1964, Seoul Olympic Games 1988, Beijing Olympic Games 2008, Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games 1998, and Delhi Commonwealth Games 2010) from the past half century which, despite their variations, illustrate the role of mega-event hosting among DSs and, specifically, the effect these events are intended to have in signalling conceptions of modernity and legitimacy to the international community and world society on behalf of their host cities/countries. Despite thenearly ubiquitous claims to economic growth and development, which accompany the bidding and preparation for major games, it is the symbolic representations of modernity and national ‘success’ that are most commonly pursued among this class of hosts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant discursive narrative at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics was that of Japan as a peaceful internationalist. No longer was it the aggressor and enemy of World War II. The post-war Constitution was the basis for this claim of a new Japan. The deployment of Japanese experiences as the only victims of atomic weapons buttressed Japan's moral claim to a new, ‘peaceful’ identity on the international stage, while providing rich material for domestic narratives of victimhood and suffering. It was a careful and nuanced balancing act – premised on inventing a forward looking Japan that was new and different from its martial past, while at the same time selectively remembering the past, both overtly and subconsciously, to erase problematic portions of it. This new peaceful identity for Japan, and the Olympics as the perfect stage for performing it, filled the discourse from the earliest stages of application to the Games themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A modern equation: money equals modern mega events. The West gets poorer; the East gets richer. Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988, Beijing 2008 are metonyms for Asian economic metamorphosis. In consequence, the world has witnessed a shift in its geo-political axis-from West to East. Asian ‘Otherness’ has been redefined; the mantra is no longer faded esoteric Asian promise but blooming modernistic Asian achievement. Asia is no longer the object of the complacent but rather the apprehensive Western gaze. Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988, and above all, Beijing 2008 are metaphors for a deeper and wider modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The East Asia Olympic Games of 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing are symbolised to legitimate the Olympic Games as abstracted, universal parade of nations that is severed from their specific, geopolitical conditions. Celebrated as ‘coming out parties,’ these East Asian Olympics are visual spectacles of the globalisation of the Olympic Movement and its espoused universalism. Central to countering these Games as allegories of the ‘universalisation of universalism,’ however, is to historicise the Olympic desires of each host nation. The East Asian Olympic desires for each East Asian Olympic Games will be briefly discussed in terms of how they function within the Olympic Movement and global modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The place of memory of the Tokyo Olympics 1964 is not condensed only at the memorial stadiums, gymnasiums, athletic fields and games pitches, as well as news media. The memory is richly accumulated in manga, an influential media for the younger generation that has been steadily developing by means of monthly or weekly juvenile magazines some time before the Games. Manga will tell us what ideologies are emphasized especially for young people. The analysis of Ikki Kajiwara's Kojin no Hoshi (Star of the Giants) and Judo Itchoku-sen (Devotion to Judo) showed the complex ideologies that were swinging between the modernization, innovation symbolized by 'technical skill', revival of Japanese fundamentalism, national (Japanese/Korean) identity, gender division, and patriotism. The analysis also reveals the feeling of humiliation, which derived from defeat in the Olympic Judo final match between Geesink and Kaminaga. The humiliation subconsciously denotes both the Japanese spirit to challenge Western superiority and Japanese expectation to eventually overtake it. The analysis also discloses that there is a hybridized mentality between Japanese and Korean hardships in yamato damashii (traditional Japanese spirit). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese women's volleyball team's gold-medal was doubtless a highlight of the Olympic Games hosted in Tokyo 1964. No other event drew such an audience to television sets. It is therefore not surprising that the Witches of the East (as the team was nicknamed) are still very well remembered in Japan. But why did women's volleyball enthuse the Japanese to such a degree? Formed as a company team, the Witches and their trainer symbolized Japan's recovery after World War Two. Training intensively after work for the nation's glory resounded well with the people. In addition, trainer Daimatsu had introduced a new technique - the rolling dive. The players went down to the floor to play the ball and rolled over in judo-style. This symbolized Japan's fate in general: falling to the ground after World War Two but coming quickly to their feet again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the graphic design of the Tokyo 1964 Games as a symbolic site through which Japan's postwar identity was re-articulated in relation with both the realm of internationalization and tradition. The visual language utilized by the Tokyo Games adhered to the anti-historical approach of modernism, while it also encoded the visual composition of crest design, established in medieval Japan. In encoding their tradition in not directly decipherable means, postwar Japanese designers found an important resource for distinguishing their identity in the international arena, and for establishing a continuity with their past. In the years following the Olympics, their designs were recognized as instigators of an international design scene, becoming also reminiscent of the 1964 Olympic glory days. On the other hand, they also encapsulated memories of the nation that acted on a visceral level, echoing Japanese society's fluctuation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism, past and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is presented on the workshop titled "Identity and the Nation in 20th Century Asia" sponsored by the German Research Foundation (GRF) at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany from July 20-21, 2012. The workshop's topics, including the relations between Asians and non-Asians, national identity in early 20th century Mongolia and the relationship between Japanese national identity and the 1964 Tokyo (Japan) Olympic Games, are discussed.

Keywords: Asia Pacific Journal; Japan; Asia Pacific; Pacific Rim; Asia; East Asia; Northeast Asia; Southeast Asia; Southwest Asia; South Asia; Contemporary Japan; Contemporary Asia Pacific; Contemporary East Asia; US-Japan relations; US-China-Japan-Korea relations; Japan-East Asian Relations; Japan-Northeast Asian Relations; Japan-Pacific Relations; Japan-Southeast Asian Relations; Japan-Middle East Relations; Japan-Central Asia Relations; Japan-South Asia Relations; Japan-European Relations; Okinawa EN Asia Pacific Journal Japan Asia Pacific Pacific Rim Asia East Asia Northeast Asia Southeast Asia Southwest Asia South Asia Contemporary Japan Contemporary Asia Pacific Contemporary East Asia US-Japan relations US-China-Japan-Korea relations Japan-East Asian Relations Japan-Northeast Asian Relations Japan-Pacific Relations Japan-Southeast Asian Relations Japan-Middle East Relations Japan-Central Asia Relations Japan-South Asia Relations Japan-European Relations Okinawa N.PAG N.PAG 1 03/24/20 20200301 NES 200301 In this collection of essays our authors explore a range of issues not covered in Part 1, examining the broader impact of the Olympic Movement, efforts to spin the message and whether hosting the games is worth the extravagant costs. Now Japan's inept spin-doctors face a new test, but don't seem to be doing any better as the international media has widely condemned the sluggish public health response by PM Abe Shinzo's government at a time when the stakes couldn't be higher. [Extracted from the article]