Prime minister Yoshihide Suga risks playing host to a coronavirus spike if he doesn’t check his Games hubris
The Olympic torch is currently making its way across Japan in a live-streamed relay – at the time of writing, it had passed through 28 of all 47 prefectures in the country. The Games are scheduled to take place in two months. But whereas you might expect the national mood to be crackling with excitement, things are different, with more and more Japanese people reaching an uncomfortable conclusion: the Games need to be scrapped altogether.
A recent poll shows more than 80% of the public want the Tokyo Olympics to be either cancelled or postponed again, an option the International Olympic Committee has ruled out. As the public see it, the Games are distracting the government from dealing with the Covid crisis head-on. They are also expected to drain medical and financial resources when they are needed most. About 80% of all Covid deaths in Japan have occurred since December. Many fear that the worst is yet to come.
Related: 79,000 people flying in for Tokyo Olympics, Japanese media reports
Koichi Nakano is a professor of political science at Sophia University, Japan
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