Japan should cut losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage elsewhere | Hacker News Reader

Japan should cut losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage elsewhere

washingtonpost.com

53 pointsClewza31346 comments

Japan has been preparing for the Olympics for years. As much as I oppose the Olympic Games in general, the government is spending lots of money on restoring temples and preparing for a tourism boom as a result of the games. It's not an easy thing to just "cancel".

Sure it is. It's just that the IOC, the Japanese government, and the various athletic orgs value the money in this over, you know, not having a global super-spreader event.

Aren't Shinto temples somewhat continuously rebuilt anyways as part of the religion?

No, that's just the Ise Grand Shrine.

Some Shinto and Buddhist shrines/temples are, but I know at least the Kiyomuzi-dera (a Buddhist temple) was undergoing restoration construction while I was there in 2017 in preparation for 2020.

They aren’t really preparing for a tourist boom considering that non-resident fans and spectators will not be allowed entry.

They've already banned foreign spectators, there will be no tourism boom.

In the next 10 years there will be, and 10 year time frames are short when it comes to LDP's planning. The tourism boom from 2014 to 2020 was an LDP plan. The Olympics were supposed to be just middle step in expanding that tourism. COVID is but a blip on the roadmap, hence all the subsidies meant to keep the hotels alive.

Don't get me wrong, my post isn't a love letter to the LDP. But you do need to keep the Japan context in mind: the LDP have been in power for over 60 years. The METI, who drive economic polocy, have been a continuous singular bureaucracy since before WW1. Setting long term development goals and continuing in those plans come hell or high water is the one thing Japan does really well. Just look at the Fuel Cell investments.

Umm maybe, but that's orthogonal to whether the Tokyo Olympic Games happen or not. Tourists would visit Japan for an actual Olympic games (if they could), but have you ever heard of anyone visiting a place because it hosted the Olympics in the past?

That is a Thing. The Olympics put Barcelona on the map for many Tourists. Although the Consensus seems to be, that it worked better in the past and best for formerly obscure cities not for a whole country.

It’s equally a thing that countries get zero long-term tourism boost because of the Olympics and end up with a huge economic hangover and giant venues that have no practical use.

Tokyo is already pretty well on the map.

Conversely, Nagano hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, but it really isn't.

Sapporo is somewhere between the two: pre-COVID, it was really taking off as arguably Asia's premier ski destination, but it's hard to credit the 1972 Winter Olympics almost 50 years ago for too much of this.

Montreal took a financial beating from the 1976 Summer Olympics.

Sarajevo took a military beating after its Olympic Winter Games.

What if we put all this effort into improving our infrastructure, transport and heritage and don't host the olympics...

This is my view when it comes to the Olympic Games in general.

Ah yes but we "can't have that" without a good reason, and without a fixed deadline right?

Why do you oppose the Olympics in general?

Serious problem in Japan is that all top 5 nationwide newspaper (they're also parent company of top 5 nationwide TV) is Olympic sponsor. They can't publish neutral articles/programs. Journalism is dead.

What a bizarre screed. "Baron Von Ripper-off"? Who exactly is Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post writing to? I'd be quite surprised if any of the decision makers in Japan give a flying fuck what she thinks. Most likely they are acting in their own self-interest, just like the IOC. Billions have already been spent; all the revenue from foreign spectators has already been cancelled. If the games are cancelled entirely, any chance of revenue will be destroyed, not to mention a huge loss of face.

The paternalistic tone here is also way off-base. Many Japanese are quite tired of being told what to do by Americans for the past 75+ years.

It's just an opinion piece in an American newspaper. This is an odd post to be sure.

Tone aside, she is not wrong though. At this point, there are only two groups of people who are clearly incentivized for the Olympics to happen: the IOC, which would lose all the revenue; and the athletes who would "age out" for the 2024 games. Why should an entire city, even an entire country, bear the cost for just a few?

> Why should an entire city, even an entire country, bear the cost for just a few?

Are you imaging some form of refund on the billions in infrastructure spending? Japan has nothing to gain by canceling and freeing the athletes and IOC from their responsibilities. Why shouldn't Japan get their own private Olympics? They paid for it.

Sunk cost.

Yes that's the point.

You're actievly committing the sink cost fallacy. You need to ignore how much has been spent already and just look at how much it more it will cost from right now to host the Olympics, compared to potential value it would produce.

These comments are old but I figured I should point out the meta: if the japanese government cuts contracts they would just have to spend yet more on subsidies. Japan already has extensive subsidy programs for companies with reduced revenue from Corona. Not only would Japan lose out on any upside, there would not be any savings. Further more: it is Japan: the government is not for want of cash.

Maybe Elon could give Japan a insider tip before he pumps Doge again and everyone call it a day.

In all seriousness though I think Japan has plenty to gain by acting as a global leader, it’s not all about money, and even if it were all about money then unfortunately sometimes cutting loses is the best you can do...and no one really knows how it might work out legally/financially, there may be refunds, or more accurately legal remedies for many of the contracts and investments, and there could be untold amounts of insurance coverage.

> Japan has nothing to gain by canceling

Japan has not paid 100% of the costs already. Cancelling will avoid throwing good money after bad.

If we are _only_ thinking about finances then the question is if Japan will make more money from hosting the reduced olympics than it would cost to finish all work required to host it.

And there's the even "real-er" cost of bringing in thousands of people in an ongoing pandemic (it might be hard to realize for the many Americans on this site, but many places, including Japan, are still only getting a trickle of vaccines for example).

It would be possible to just vaccinate every athlete (talking less than 10k people). It might be possible vaccinate all of the staff as well. But in a country where not even all the doctors have gotten vaccinated yet, it's not a great look, politically.

And if you choose not to do mass vaccinations, you're talking about doing a mass event with huge risks of spread at every level.

More importantly, canceling saves lives. There are not much medical resources.

> At this point, there are only two groups of people who are clearly incentivized for the Olympics to happen: the IOC, which would lose all the revenue; and the athletes who would "age out" for the 2024 games.

You are forgetting the most important constituency driving this: "Senior Japanese politicians also in on the take."

What's sad here is that loss of face and sheer inertia seem to be the primary (only?) reasons the Olympics are still going ahead. Japan's vaccination rates remain pathetic, since only 2% have had even a first shot, so even without the Olympics there's a real risk of one of the new variants laying waste to Japan's elderly population. Something like 8 Olympic torch bearers have already come down with COVID, and they had scheduled the world's oldest person to take part until she wisely pulled out.

Wow. You're not kidding. And apparently they're not alone: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/world/asia/japan-south-ko... (April 17)

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/05/01/national/japan-... says 1.3% as of May 1. It appears things have been partly delayed due to ... well, it's not clear:

> The EU said on Monday that it had authorized some 52.3 million doses made in European factories by companies including Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. for export to Japan, the highest volume among all 43 countries to which vaccines have been shipped.

> As the revelation caught fire on social media, vaccines minister Taro Kono tweeted that the numbers were wrong. His office said in an emailed statement Friday that only 28 million shots from Pfizer had arrived in Japan. Chief Cabinet Secretariat Katsunobu Kato confirmed on the same day news reports that shots of the Moderna vaccine — which the local drug regulator has not yet approved for domestic use — had also been received though did not disclose the number of doses.

And the latest numbers Google gave me was indeed 2%. So it's climbing, but not quickly. They're at least two months behind schedule, I'd suggest.

I believe the main reason is cost. If IOC call it off, IOC bear the cancellation cost. If Japan does, Japan bear the cost. So Japan is waiting for IOC to call it off.

This might be paternalistic, but the Japanese public is pretty much against holding the Olympic Games this year. I felt that pretty well from anecdotal evidence, but public opinion polls seem to back this trend. Taking this poll[1] for instance, 39.7% were in favor of calling off the games and 25.7% were in favor of postponing them to 2022 or later. Only 28.9% were in favor of hosting the games as planned in 2021.

[1] https://www.jiji.com/jc/article?k=2021041600807&g=pol

This would be the third time the Japan Olympics have been cancelled or postponed?

"Pillage" is a little hyperbolic, and while I agree that it's probably not worth it, that giving up like that feels very un-Japanese.

The only fair thing is to ask the participating athletes. If 80% want to go, proceed with the games. If necessary, without spectators.

We live in an abominable society where people who do the work are always asked last, and politicians, businessmen, and IOC functionaries decide.

The athletes aren't the only people who are betting big ($15B+) to make the Olympics work. You think the 80% vote of foreign athletes should govern how the nation of Japan proceeds with its loss?

Make their profits work? Olympics could he held anywhere in existing locations for a negligible cost.

What loss? Presumably the athletes want to go, so increase TV broadcast rights by x% and there is no loss. When everyone is at home, there will be record numbers of viewers.

I can’t remember the last Olympics I watched. Nor do I know anyone that watches it. Wonder if viewership is in decline around the world?

>The most recent summer games, held in Rio de Janiero in 2016, drew in an audience of 3.6 billion viewers.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/287966/olympic-games-tv-...

Those aren't individual viewers though, that's multiple-counting everyone who watched more than one event.

A bit like splitting the Superbowl into discrete ad-delimited sections and repeat-counting everyone who stayed tuned in.

Viewership in the US at least seems to be all over the place by year with no rhyme or reason really, other than maybe high GPD country hosted olympics seeming to have higher ratings. Table from wikipedia on TV viewership in this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_on_United_States_tele...

Less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated.

Uh oh. Major international event, in a big city, with 2% vaccinated, not good.

We now have a idea of how many people have to be vaccinated to wipe out the disease. Israel is 81% vaccinated and near zero deaths, and around 0.8 new cases per 100K people per day. The UK is at 66% with at least one dose, around 30% with two doses, and holding steady around 3 new cases per 100K people per day. The US is at 30% with two doses, around 47% with one dose, and about 15 new cases per 100K people per day.

So it looks like reduction at the US rate, containment at the UK rate, and elimination at the Israel rate.

The number of people you need vaccinated is N where N * (vaccine efficiency) = (herd immunity threshold = ~ 70%), so in the case of the higher efficiency vaccines N should be between 75% and 85%

Though anything above (efficiency * vaccinated) above 50% should make a significant dent on the pandemic

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