Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic organizing committee, speaks at a news conference on April 2. (The Asahi Shimbun)
It will soon be a month and a half since the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic organizing committee underwent a major overhaul, with Seiko Hashimoto as its new president and many women joining the board of directors.
But the committee is still floundering and causing problems, further deepening the public s disappointment and mistrust.
The most appalling example is its threat of legal action against the weekly Shukan Bunshun magazine over its report on the committee s plans for the Opening Ceremony.
Considering the weak domestic position of the United States, its demands for human rights could be perceived as self-righteous and end up alienating other countries.
Feb 13, 2021
Dozens of documents, including over 10,000 pages of mostly handwritten manuscripts, by Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, have been sent to the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Letters, the school said Friday.
The works by the 86-year-old author consist of the manuscripts of his novels published since the 1950s as well as proof sheets, which had been stored at publishing houses such as Kodansha Ltd. and Bungei Shunju. The documents will be made available for research purposes, it said.
The works include manuscripts of the 1957 piece “Lavish are the Dead,” “Dojidai Game” (“The Game of Contemporaneity”) from 1979 and his 2013 novel “In Late Style.”
Feb 6, 2021
It doesn’t compute. Why, asks Bungei Shunju magazine (February), should Japan be suffering a medical breakdown? Its medical infrastructure is among the world’s best; its doctors are well-trained and highly skilled; coronavirus rages starkly less virulently here than in many other places. And yet a system that should have held firm Japan has more hospital beds per capita than any other country is reeling and buckling under a “third wave.” Patients needing care are being turned away. The virus is killing around 100 people a day.
Whatever can go wrong will, goes the popular epigram known as Murphy’s Law. We know, we know, chorus survivors of 2020. The postponed Olympic Games that Tokyo was to have hosted last year are on track (so far) to proceed this summer, the government swimming against a vast current of public anxiety, with only 14%, according to a recent Kyodo News poll, supporting this symbolic return to life as we once knew it.