Cherry Blossoms and the Tokyo 2020 Candidate City Logo

A photograph by Hengki Koentjoro (Tobin Ohashi Gallery)

One of the most iconic images of Japan is the cherry blossom. It is both symbol and example of beauty that charms young and old, cynic and saint, natives and non.

The beauty of the cherry blossom is inherent, but enhanced by time – the uncertainty of when they bloom, whether March or April, and the brevity of their bloom.

For about two weeks, we are enthralled by the sakura, whether it is a single blossom, a lone cherry tree on a road, or a park-filled celebration of delicate pink and rose-tinted white. We forget ourselves as we stare from an elevated train platform into a sea of cherry trees, filled both with hope and humility.

That period is just commencing in Tokyo.

When Tokyo won the bid for the 2020 Summer Games, the logo for that bid was a wreath of cherry blossoms. Designed by an arts graduate student from Tokyo University, Ai Shimamine, the ever-present logo showed a ring of cherry blossoms in the Olympic colors of red, blue, green and yellow, with black replaced by purple. Shimamine submitted her design organized by the Tokyo bid committee believing that the cherry blossom was an excellent way to represent her country, according to this interview.

Arts graduate student from Tokyo University, Ai Shimamine, whose design graced the Tokyo 2020 Candidate City bid logo

Cherry blossoms are our national flower that represents Japan and are loved by many. They also symbolize the Japanese spirit, as cherry blossom trees have been sent to countries around the world as a tribute to peace and friendship. The most important point about this logo is that it is a wreath. I once saw a scene in a foreign film where a wreath was laid on a grave and wondered about the meaning behind the gesture. When I looked it up, I discovered that wreaths carry a message of “coming back again.” I took this concept and infused the hope that Japan will recover its vigor and courage through sports.

The cherry blossom logo was popular, and certainly linked to the tremendous feelings of happiness and pride when Tokyo won the bid for 2020. But, for some reason still unclear to me, the International Olympic Committee does not allow the local organizing committee to use the candidate city logo as the official logo for the Games and Paralympics.

The Tokyo 2020 Candidate City Bid Pin

Thus, the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (TOCOG) had another competition last year to select a new logo, which turned into a PR fiasco. Many of the logo corporate sponsors, eager to show off the new logo, had to rush to change their marketing materials and commercials to replace the now notorious logo, and TOCOG launched yet another design competition. Open to the public, the initial draw yielded over 10,000 designs. Subsequent rounds dropped the number of entries under consideration to four.

The final design, according to this website, is supposed to be decided by the Emblems Selection Committee sometime in the Spring. Exactly when is not clear. But that, I suppose, is the beauty of Spring in Japan.

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Update on Tokyo 2020 Logo Competition

Over 300 designs for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo design contest have already been submitted. Is yours one of them?

You need to be a Japanese national or a permanent resident of Japan 18 years or older to submit. A child or groups of children can also submit a logo design, but only under the name and supervision of a person 18 years or older.

According to this NHK report a few days ago, you need to make sure that you have the words “Tokyo 2020”, as well as the Olympic and Paralympic symbols together with your original design.

But there are a few restrictions NHK pointed out in the video clip:

You cannot mash the three design elements together into one.
You cannot use the Olympic torch or Olympic medal in the design.
You cannot use widely known national symbols like the flag symbol in the design. (Admittedly, this last one will be open to interpretation.)

When the submission portal opened up, over 300 submissions were made in the first 30 minutes. The application form was downloaded over 70,000 times, so one can expect that number to climb dramatically. In terms of the timeline going forward, the hope is to narrow the design nominees to 100 to 200 by the end of the year.

In January, a committee will narrow the nominees to a short list, making sure that the requirements are satisfied and that the logo would be eligible for trademark registration. There would then be a national survey conducted to get further input, with the intent of finalizing the logo design by Spring of 2016, although the details of that step are not yet clear.

You have until December 7 to design your logo, fill in the application and submit. For background on why this contest is being held, see a prior post on this topic.

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The Case of the 2020 Olympic Logo: Copying versus Creating

Olivier Dibie showing the Tokyo 2020 and his Theater de Liege logo side by side.

Copying is a key component of learning. There is nothing new under the sun, and we stand on the shoulders of giants…to shamelessly borrow these words of wisdom.

Many well established writers may have started off by mimicking Ernest Hemmingway’s simple, direct tone. Microsoft’s Windows GUI was borrowed from Apple’s Macintosh GUI which was borrowed from Xerox’s PARC research.

As James Abegglen and George Stalk wrote in their classic book on the Japanese corporation – Kaisha – “In the high-growth U.S. economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans took great pride in what was termed ‘Yankee ingenuity.’ By this was generally meant the taking in of European discoveries and developments, adapting and commercializing them, and building on these imported technologies.”

The line between copying and creativity is fine. My favorite example is George Harrison’s 1970 “My Sweet Lord“, which was the center of a copyright infringement lawsuit where Harrison was ruled to have subconsciously plagiarized Ronnie Mack’s 1963 song “He’s So Fine“.

George Harrison has such a body of work that screams creativity that no one will begrudge him this.

And to be honest, I was going to give designer, Kenjiro Sano, the benefit of the doubt when his Tokyo 2020 logo was thought to be a copy of the Theatre de Liege logo, created by Olivier Debie. But the recent revelations that Sano’s firm essentially traced designs of another firm for use in a major marketing campaign by giant Japanese beverages corporation, Suntory, is sad. Suntory ended up pulling those blatantly copied designs from their marketing campaign.

You can see in this illustration below recent designs by Sano where he

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The Olympians

Tokyo 2020 logo

Cherry Blossoms and the Tokyo 2020 Candidate City Logo

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Update on Tokyo 2020 Logo Competition

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The Case of the 2020 Olympic Logo: Copying versus Creating

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