The impulse behind Japan’s decision to go on with the Olympic games

F EWER THAN 50 days remain before the apparently unstoppable opening of the 2020 summer Olympic games in Tokyo. The pandemic led to their postponement last year. Today the clock is ticking down against a backdrop of resurgent infections of covid-19 in Japan, a state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other prefectures, hospitals filling up and widespread opposition to the games from the public, businessfolk and medical experts.

All this counts for little in the eyes of the government and the International Olympic Committee ( IOC). The games are a go “barring Armageddon”, as one IOC member unhelpfully put it. Yet Armageddon is the real fear. The pace of vaccination in Japan has been snail-slow. Many foreign athletes will arrive unjabbed. The games risk going down in history as a massive superspreader event.

One reason for Japan’s obduracy lies in its contractual obligations to the IOC. Another is the personal concern of the prime minister, Suga Yoshihide, not to lose face—and possibly support within the ruling party. But the establishment’s sense of the Olympic games as serving a patriotic purpose should not be underestimated. Tokyo’s Olympics were intended to banish a sense of being overtaken—“Japan passing”, in the anglicised phrase—by a rising China and others following years of stagnation and the Fukushima nuclear...