Isao Utsunomiya works up a sweat early in the morning in Yoyogi Park in the middle of Tokyo.

It is 6.30 a.m., the temperature is already 27 degrees, the humidity is 92 percent.

The well-trained Utsunomiya does stretching exercises, like every morning at this point.

There is a small wooden barrack behind him.

The walls are painted white, the turquoise paint is peeling off the window frames.

“The bright colors are fantastic,” says Utsunomiya.

“I don't even know why the house is unused here.

I would like to live in it. ”Only on closer inspection does he discover that it is a monument.

Patrick Welter

Correspondent for business and politics in Japan, based in Tokyo.

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The little barrack is one of the most inconspicuous memories in Tokyo of the Olympic Games of 1964. The house was part of the Olympic village and at the time housed athletes from the Netherlands.

6,600 athletes and supervisors lived on the site next to the Meiji Shrine, in the middle of the city.

There was a lively life in the wooden barracks, as pictures from back then show.

Athletes sat together and made music, and they got married in the village too.

Spectators are excluded

This Friday, the Olympic Games will open for the second time in Tokyo, 57 years after the Japanese premiere.

In the new Olympic village, a few kilometers to the east on heaped land in Tokyo Bay, sports life will be more sober.

The corona protection rules prevent a lot of exchange.

The fact that Japan still remembers Tokyo in 1964 with the barracks in Yoyogi Park is a political demonstration. Until shortly before the games at that time, the American military settlement "Washington Heights" stood on the site. In the heart of the capital, many Japanese found this humiliation. The Americans left the site for the Games and relocated the settlement at the expense of the Japanese government. The wooden barracks in Yoyogi Park are a reminder that Japan was given another piece of sovereignty back with Tokyo in 1964. This episode is not very anchored in the popular consciousness of Japan.

Anyone who thinks of the 1964 Games remembers dozens of skyscrapers, the luxury hotels Okura and New Otani, the city highways, the Shinkansen express train.

"It was the greatest urban transformation in history," says journalist Robert Whiting, who was an American soldier in Japan at the time.

"There was construction going on day and night, and people put plugs in their ears so they could sleep at night."

The Japanese Masaru Sato laughs when he remembers the city highways.

“When the freeway to Haneda Airport was ready, I packed my parents in my Nissan Bluebird and we drove the route out of curiosity,” says Sato.

"When we left the autobahn, I was still infected by the speed and immediately got a ticket for driving too fast."

Sato was there on October 10, 1964 for the opening ceremony in the National Stadium in the middle of Tokyo. Back then he was lucky in the ticket lottery and paid 5,000 yen for the ticket. Today a comparable ticket would have cost about 100,000 yen (770 euros), he says. But that's over, the spectators are excluded from the Olympic Games in Tokyo this year. Sato was 22 years old 57 years ago and had already taken over the good laundry from his father, which also washed for Americans from the nearby military airport.