The Tokyo Olympic Museum is closed for the duration of the Olympic Games.
The museum is right next to the new Olympic Stadium.
Additional public traffic would only be a nuisance.
And increase the corona risks.
The closure of the museum has the side effect that the few foreign visitors to the games, journalists or officials, cannot visit the exhibition.
You miss a glimpse of the way Japan's Olympians remember former sports heroes.
Patrick Welter
Correspondent for business and politics in Japan, based in Tokyo.
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The exhibition mainly praises the Olympic movement and recalls the social and technical achievements of earlier Olympic Games, preferably using the example of the 1964 Games in Tokyo: peace and cohesion, equality and mass sports, the Shinkansen express train and sports infrastructure. That is to be expected and, like the exhibits from 1964, offers fond memories.
The brief statements on the Olympic Games of 1940 arouse a first frown. Japan renounced the Games in 1938 because the war against China, which was rekindled in 1937, strained resources and also threatened the disgrace of cancellations. The exhibition says succinctly: “The games were canceled due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War.” There is no mention of the fact that the aggression originated in Japan and that the country had occupied Manchuria years earlier and turned it into a puppet state. The NOK practices the art of omission in a very Japanese way.
The exhibition presents the poster for the 1940 Olympic Games, on which a larger than life guard of a Buddhist temple puts his hand on the shoulder of an athlete. From a Japanese point of view, these games should serve the honor of the imperial family and the memory of the mythical emperor Jimmu, who is said to have founded the imperial dynasty 2,600 years earlier. But the visitor does not find out.
Take a closer look and read the small print in the last part of the exhibition, in which the NOK celebrates Olympic heroes. It all began in Stockholm in 1912 with the father of the Japanese marathon, Shiso Kanakuri, the country's first Olympian to give up due to heat stroke. The exhibition commemorates the Japanese women Kinue Hitomi and Hideko Maehata, who won silver and gold in 1928 and 1936. The Dutchman Anton Geesink is honored, who wrested the judo gold from his Japanese competitor in Tokyo in 1964, but demonstrated the Japanese judo spirit. A display commemorates the “young samurai”, the soccer team that won the bronze medal in Mexico in 1968 and was awarded a fair play prize. The Japanese praise the former German coach Dettmar Cramer,who taught the players the value of humanity on the field.
What is more irritating for western eyes is the memory of other sports heroes, which the story presents selectively. Shunzo Kido is remembered, who stopped the cross-country obstacle race in Los Angeles in 1932 before the last jump in order to spare his beloved horse Kyu Gun. The board reads very small that Kido later helped erect a statue in the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo to commemorate the horses killed in the war. Yasukuni Shrine is the place in Tokyo where convicted Japanese war criminals are also commemorated.
The Japanese Shuhei Nishida and Sueo Ooe are honored in the museum because they refrained from fighting for second and third place in the pole vault at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 and later literally shared their medals. As an example of exemplary sporting spirit, the Japanese NOK is also celebrating Carl Ludwig “Luz” Long for 1936. The German gave the American Jesse Owens a decisive tip before the long jump, with which Owens got into the final and the gold. The games in Berlin are also known as Hitler's games because of the influence of racist Nazi politics, the exhibition says. Long, however, have overcome the racial separation. The exhibition describes the Hitler salute of the German athlete as second on the podium as a “sign of the times” in the small print.The games in Berlin present such examples and descriptions as if using a fabric softener that makes history more beautiful. You may have been a role model for the IOC, which reported analogously about the games in Berlin in recent advertising films.
In the Museum of the Japanese NOK, the blurring is all the more noticeable because the Japanese had learned from the Germans in the 1930s how the Olympic Games could be used to train young people for later wars - and because the Japanese Olympic athletes had a dark episode in their own history conceal. In 1936 in Berlin, Kitei Son won the marathon for Japan. But Son was not Japanese, but a Korean athlete named Son Kee-chung. Korea was then occupied and colonized by Japan, so that son could only start under a Japanese name and under the Japanese flag. During the award ceremony, he covered the red Japanese sun on his sports shirt with a laurel tree and looked down, not up. Later son said it was the biggest mistake of his lifeto have agreed to participate in the Olympic Games under the Japanese flag. There is nothing to be read about it in Japan's Olympic Museum. If you look very closely, you will discover Sohn's name on a long list of winners of Japanese athletes and as the last torchbearer at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.