Paris (AFP)
In 1964, Tokyo hosted the very first Olympic Games held in Asia from October 10 to 24, an opportunity for the country to show the world its technological prowess and acquire modern infrastructure.
Here is the story based on AFP dispatches from the time of the Games, which for the Japanese symbolized the post-war economic recovery and their return to the concert of nations, less than twenty years after the defeat at the after World War II.
"A historic week has started for Japan. He has never welcomed so many foreigners," AFP reports, six days before kick-off.
The country expects 20,000 tourists, 6,348 foreign athletes, 1,500 officials, 2,000 journalists ... and according to Interpol, 400 pickpockets.
- 36 Olympic venues -
To accommodate them, the hotel equipment of the capital, the largest city in the world with 10.6 million inhabitants, has been increased by half and increased to 30,000 rooms with ten new hotels, including four super-palaces.
Construction of 36 Olympic venues was completed a week before the opening ceremony.
Among the emblematic sites, the Nippon Budokan, built to house judo, the Japanese national sport which is entering among the Olympic sports.
The curved roof of this octagonal building, very close to the Imperial Palace, evokes Mount Fuji.
Also built for the occasion, the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, the work of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, future Pritzker Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel for architecture), as well as an Olympic stadium.
To symbolize post-war peaceful Japan, the choice of the last torchbearer for the Olympic torch fell on Yoshinori Sakai, a Japanese athlete born on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
- Face of Tokyo upset -
Before the Olympics, the whole city was transformed for several years into "a huge building site".
"Everywhere we started digging, digging, destroying to rebuild (...) some did not hesitate to predict a + huge fiasco + for the games of October 1964, but when they returned to Tokyo this year, they found that everything was ready, and remarkably ready, ”notes a dispatch at the end of the Games.
"To make + breathe + what was until now largely a huge assemblage of villages threatened by suffocation by traffic difficulties, a vast network of roads, totaling 113 kilometers, sometimes raised to the height a second story above the existing tracks, sometimes plunging into the basement, has been opened through the factories or buildings with metal frames which are gradually replacing the small wooden houses ", explains another dispatch, at the day before the event.
A 27 km highway was also built that connects the Olympic Village to the Haneda airfield via the Ginza district, as well as three new metro lines, giving rise to the largest underground station, two kilometers long.
- Technological know-how -
The Games allow the Japanese to show their technological know-how to the rest of the world, via television: ceremonies and several events broadcast in color, live satellite transmission in the United States, copying to tape for Europe, use of the system. slow motion picture, use of proximity microphones insensitive to the surrounding hubbub, full monitoring of the marathon live ...
In the shopping center of the Olympic Village, cameras and cameras are torn apart.
On October 1, nine days before the start of the Games, Japan inaugurated its "Super Express" in the presence of Emperor Hirohito.
The fastest train in the world, commonly known as the "Shinkansen", connects Tokyo to Osaka at an average speed of 160 km / h, after five and a half years of work.
- Judo humiliation -
On the sporting front, the Tokyo Games are marked by the second victory of the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila, the first athlete to win two Olympic marathons, the third consecutive success of the Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser in the 100m freestyle and the three medals of gold of Czechoslovakian Vera Caslavska in gymnastics.
The Japanese are third in number of medals, behind the untouchables Americans and Soviets.
For the Japanese public, however, it is the humiliation when the gold medal in judo "all categories" escapes a native child, Akio Kaminaga, immobilized in the last seconds of the final by the Dutchman Anton Geesink.
© 2021 AFP