quarantine

The Elephant, The Albatross and The Phoenix: Whither the Tokyo2020 Olympics During the CoronaVirus Outbreak?

Diamond Princess

We followed the story of the Diamond Princess as if we were binge watching a Stephen King adaptation on Netflix – with fascination and fear.

 

The two-week quarantine of the 3,711 passengers and crew on the British grand-class cruise ship docked at Yokohama harbor was a constant reminder to the Japanese of how close the coronavirus outbreak has come to Japanese shores. The death of two elderly passengers on board the Diamond Princess on February 20 at the end of the quarantine intensified the concern over the Japanese government’s decision to release hundreds of passengers who tested negative for the virus.

 

In fact, as the number of reported infections on the ship climbed, so too did the number of reported infections across Japan: Kanagawa, Wakayama, Hokkaido, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Okinawa, Kyushu, Aichi, Chiba….

 

Masks are the coinage of the land. Tokyo and Kyoto are no longer swarming with tourists as inbound cancellations climb. Announcements of meeting and conference cancellations in companies across the country are coming hard and fast. Organizers for the March 1 Tokyo Marathon and the March 8 Nagoya Women’s Marathon are dropping tens of thousands or participants from the race, and allowing only the elite runners to compete.

 

And then there’s the elephant in the room.

 

Will the Tokyo2020 Olympics be cancelled?

 

Yashiro Mori, former Japan prime minister and current president of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games pointed at the elephant in the room and said:

 

I would like to make it clear again that we are not considering a cancellation or postponement of the games. Let me make that clear.

 

That was February 13, just before the cases of coronavirus began to crisscross the country.

 

Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani, a Japanese virologist, said on February 19 that the Olympics could not take place today.

 

“I’m not sure [of] the situation in Japan at the end of July,” he said at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan on Wednesday, as per The Associated Press. “We need to find the best way to have a safe Olympics. Right now we don’t have an effective strategy, and I think it may be difficult to have the Olympics [now]. But by the end of July we may be in a different situation.”

 

Or we may not be.

 

We have no cure for coronavirus right now. We understand so little about the latest virus outbreak. And in the absence of clear facts, what often fills the void is doubt, speculation and fear.

 

Am I safe? Will a cure be found in time? Will the virus burn out as the temperature climbs?

 

Will the Olympics be cancelled, its sunk cost like an albatross around the necks of the country, the IOC and the massive number of organizations and businesses that have invested in these Games?

Or will the Olympics rise like a Phoenix, overcoming crisis, sending our spirits aloft?

 

Note: This article was written on February 22, in the midst of daily changes and updates regarding the coronavirus in Japan.

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Olympic Posters Through the Years Part 2: Equestrian Events Held in Stockholm, Not Melbourne – and the Swedes Dominated

1956 Olympics in Stockholm equestrian events

The Stockholm Olympics were held in July, 1912, the fifth Olympiad of the modern era.

But there was also a Stockholm Olympics in June, 1956, and only equestrian events were held at this particular event. Why? Because the actual host of the 1956 Olympiad was Melbourne, and Australia is famous for its tight quarantine control, a custom that goes back decades.

According to Wikipedia, Australia “had a strict six-month pre-shipment quarantine on horses,” and authorities insisted from 1953 that they would not allow horses enter Australia, even for the Olympics, which were to be held four months later, from November 22 to December 8. So, in 1954, the IOC decided that instead of cancelling the equestrian events, they moved them to Stockholm, Sweden instead.

As a result, the 1956 Olympiad was the first and last to be held in two different hemispheres in the same year, and 1956 saw posters that featured two different cities. The one above is the equestrian part of the 1956 Olympics in Stockholm, while the one below is the standard poster for the Melbourne Games.

1956 Melbourne Olympics

Interestingly, Sweden won gold in half of the equestrian events: individual dressage, team dressage and individual eventing. One might think home field advantage made the difference. Maybe it did, although Sweden dominated the equestrian events at the 1952 Summer Olympics in neighboring Helsinki, Finland.

As is explained in the book, Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games, by Danyel Reiche, success in equestrian events is directly correlated to a nation’s GDP – “Out of the 419 Olympic medals, 329 (78.5%) in equestrian were won by wealthy countries with a GDP above US$30,000.” In addition, Reiche points out that in the case of Sweden, “equestrian sports is a ‘folk sport’,” which may explain why Stockholm was selected as the venue on such short notice.

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The Cholera “Outbreak” of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics: A Guy With Diarrhea Clears Out Shimoda

Cholera Quarantine_Yomiuri_14oct1964

It was only 13 months ago when the World Health Organization declared zika a global health emergency, particularly in Latin America. With babies born with deformed heads, men and women alike were worried about going to Brazil for the Rio Olympics last August.

And while the zika virus has not exploded into a pandemic as some had warned last year, it is still an outbreak of urgency, one that still concerns mothers-to-be in the affected regions.

In 1964, a disease that struck fear in populations throughout the world was cholera. From 1961 into the 1979s, the world was facing the seventh known outbreak of a cholera strain called El Tor. While El Tor was rarely fatal, its symptoms of severe watery diarrhea over days were enough to cause considerable fear. El Tor emerged from Indonesia, to such countries as Bangladesh, India, the USSR, Italy, North Africa and the South Pacific.

On Tuesday, October 13, 1964, the third day of the Tokyo Olympics, the newspapers explained that El Tor had made it to Japan. The October 14 Yomiuri reported that Mr. Shoji Endo, a company employee of Dai-ichi Kinzoku Company, a trading company that specialized in importing metal. Apparently, Endo had returned to Japan on Saturday, October 10, after working in Kenya for three months, and then returned to Japan through Calcutta, India and Bangkok, Thailand. Immediately after arriving in Tokyo, he boarded a train to the resort town of Shimoda to join his company colleagues on a company trip. On Tuesday, October 11, Endo fell ill with diarrhea.

early japanese cholera prevention
Early 20th century cholera-prevention notice in Tokyo

Thus commenced a mini-panic. Once they realized that Endo had recently passed through Calcutta and Bangkok, where El Tor cholera had apparently been spreading rapidly, and his diarrhea, officials acted relatively quickly:

  • People who had been in contact with Endo, colleagues and resort staff, were immediately placed in an isolation ward at a Shimoda hospital.
  • The Shizuoka Prefecture government set up a cholera precaution headquarters at the resort, and set up facilities to inoculate the 15,000 residents of Shimoda and enforce quarantine measures.
  • In Tokyo, the Welfare Ministry ordered an extensive anti-cholera campaign, and sent an official to Shimoda to ensure enforcement of the inoculations as well as the disinfection of buildings (where foreigners have stayed) and ditches and the extermination of rats, flies and cockroaches.
  • The Japanese National Railways, as well the Keisei Electric Railway Company took measures to disinfect stations on Endo’s travel route.
  • The Izumi-so Inn was effectively closed, cordoned off from the public.

Of course, this was a disaster not only for the Izumi-so Inn, but for the tourism business in Shimoda. As The Yomiuri explained, “the outbreak of cholera was having a serious effect on the town which depends on tourism for its finances. By Tuesday evening, an estimated 1,500 bookings had been canceled and the figure was rising.

The inns are normally packed with 4,000 tourists daily. The town tourist association estimated losses at JPY6,000,000 for Tuesday alone.”

As it turns out, there was no cholera outbreak in Shimoda. Perhaps it was because the officials isolated Endo in time – cholera, officials said, is contagious only after symptoms have appeared, and apparently Endo had shown no symptoms before he left Tokyo for Shimoda. Endo eventually recovered and that was that.

As for the Izumi-so Inn, it is still a thriving resort hotel, which, according to this Booking.com summary, is “a 3-mintue drive from Gero Train Station…offers Japanese-style rooms, an indoor and an open-air natural hot spring bath and Japanese cuisine.” If you’re in Japan and want to enjoy hot springs by the seaside, then look no further. The Izumi-so Inn averages an impressive 8.7 points out of 10 on the site’s review section.

Izumi-so Inn
Izumi-so Inn
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