Yomiuri Giants great Shigeo Nagashima was one of six individuals presented with the Order of Culture at a ceremony held at the Imperial Palace on the Nov. 3 national holiday, Culture Day.
Was it an ominous premonition or just another blunder by a gaffe-prone politician?
During an Upper House finance committee meeting on March 18 last year, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso described how exceptional events seem to overshadow the Olympics in 40-year intervals.
Take the 1940 iterations, when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified and prompted the nation to forfeit the planned Summer Games in Tokyo and Winter Games in Sapporo.
Then, the Moscow Olympics in 1980 suffered from a mass boycott by Western nations, including Japan, in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan the previous year.
“It’s a problem that’s happened every 40 years. It’s the cursed Olympics, and that’s a fact,” said Aso, who doubles as finance minister and is known for his not-so-infrequent slips of the tongue.