Tokyo 2020's Celebration Capitalism: The Struggle over Public Space and Parks

Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2021, this article discusses the Tokyo 2020 Olympics' impact on public space in the city. It attempts to test a framing of the Olympic developments through political scientist Jules Boykoff's concept of celebration capitalism alongside an investigation of differing values and interpretations of public space in the National Stadium and Shibuya areas, with a focus on Meiji Park and Miyashita Park in particular.

Meiji Park: A Phantom Presence in the Heritage Zone

Prior to the preparations for Tokyo 2020, the quiet and unassuming Meiji Park lay spread across land occupied by sports venues, a long woody strip, a small lawn area, and a plaza. Sitting in the shadow of the original National Stadium and located a short distance from Meiji Jingū Gaien (Meiji Shrine Outer Garden, often shortened to Jingū Gaien), it was a direct legacy of 1964, when Tokyo's first edition of the Summer Olympics was held. Though one of the city's lesser-known parks, it had a well-established function in civil society: its plaza, for instance, hosted regular flea markets and occasional political demonstrations. Administered by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG), Meiji Park fell within what the Tokyo 2020 organizers called the Heritage Zone, nominally to show the reuse of venues associated with the 1964 Games.¹ While there is a certain amount of truth to this in so much as sites like the Yoyogi National Gymnasium were indeed used again in 2021, the zone also experienced extensive demolition and redevelopment.

Though much media attention has focused on the highly troubled design and construction of the New National Stadium, this was actually just one part of the wider redevelopment of Jingū Gaien and its surrounding area,² such as the closure of Kishi Memorial Hall (1964) in neighboring Yoyogi, some of whose tenants (including the Japanese Olympic Committee, Japan Sport Association, and other sports bodies) relocated to the new Japan Sport Olympic Square (2019), behind which sat the rebuilt Nippon Seinenkan hotel and hall (relocated from a site adjoining the National Stadium). These plans impacted Meiji Park, effectively meaning the most conspicuous sections of it would disappear (such as the plaza where the flea markets took place) to make way for the expanded stadium and Japan Sport Olympic Square (fig. 4.1). The Kasumigaoka Apartments, a TMG public housing complex that formerly stood opposite the plaza (and with the lawn section of Meiji Park to its east), was also demolished to house temporary media facilities for the Olympics.³

Tokyo's canceled 1940 Olympics are frequently described as the "phantom" (maboroshi) Games.⁴ For Tokyo 2020, 1964 also had a kind of phantom presence: the ghost of Tokyo's glorious postwar past that organizers nostalgically hoped to recapture. But there were other phantoms: the invisible yet irrefutably present coronavirus pandemic; the absent live spectators in the venues; and sites like the original National Stadium

4.1.

Japan Sport Olympic Square, built on part of what was once Meiji Park. Next to it is the former site of the Kasumigaoka Apartments. It faces the New National Stadium. Photo: William Andrews. September 2021.

and Meiji Park, which were swept away in the haste to prepare the city for the 2020/21 Olympics. In the aftermath of the Games, Meiji Park, while still named on certain signs and maps in the area, existed effectively only as the block of land on which sit Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium and other sports facilities, a phantom presence amid all the new glass and concrete structures in the area. The casual visitor would probably never realize there was once a park. As a substitute for the land lost to the redevelopment, a new version of Meiji Park is meant to reappear in October 2023 on the former site of the Kasumigaoka Apartments as TMG's first park private finance initiative (a type of public-private partnership where development and management of a public project is assigned to private-sector entities), transforming into a large park with a...