The Olympics on TV: Mediation and the Spectacle of the Tokyo 1964 Olympics

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the medium of television to the legacy of the Tokyo 1964 Olympics. Known colloquially in Japan as the Terebi orinpikku (TV Olympics), the 1964 games were the first to be broadcast live and in color to an international audience, a feat rendered possible by significant advances in information communications and satellite technology. Domestically, too, the games engaged a public eager to absorb the images of the world's athletes flickering across the screen. With televisions situated in more than 87% of Japanese homes by 1964, over 97% of the population (a figure approaching 98 million) is thought to have watched some portion of the events on TV.¹

Given the significant role television broadcasts played in shaping the narrative of the games, it is little surprise that distinguished writers and cultural critics in Japan weighed in on the meaning of the medium. Two of those responses, one by acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and future Nobel laureate, Ōe Kenzaburo (1935-), and another by the so-called "God of Criticism" Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83), are examined below. Typically known for their work in the field of literary production and criticism, these writers evinced a remarkable interest in the as-yet nascent technology of television. Such was the power of the television's flickering images that their interest in the sporting events themselves was entirely eclipsed by ruminations on the affordances of this novel medium. In particular, Kobayashi and Ōe were preoccupied with the question of how to best orient themselves toward the images projected on the television screen, and as a result, the Tokyo 1964 Olympics emerged as an occasion to consider the concept of mediation vis-à-vis the technological apparatus of the television.

Following the work of Marshall McLuhan, I argue here that mediation is not a simple process whereby two objects or persons are brought into relation, but one in which the formal and technical properties of media fundamentally restructure the human experience. McLuhan's recognition that media are not separate from humans, but are extensions of them, has allowed scholars to investigate the capacities different media possess for redefining, reordering, and reconfiguring our "general environment for living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling."² Mediation, in other words, is not merely an additive process but is instead a transformative one.³

Writing contemporaneously with McLuhan, though in a vastly different media and cultural environment, it seems almost as if Kobayashi and Ōe intuited his central claims about technology's transformation of the human experience of the world. Their essays share the sense that something fundamentally new is happening when the Olympics are experienced not live and in-person but are captured by the camera and projected onto television screens in homes. They both register their surprise at how powerfully the events capture their attention, and they suggest that watching the Olympics on television feels more intimate than viewing them in person. Far more illuminating than these shared concerns, however, are the separate trajectories their essays chart vis-à-vis the images projected on their screens and the relationship these images engender with the object of the camera's gaze. In the hands of these capable writers, the television is as much an instrument for (re)figuring social relations among far-flung bodies as it is device for projecting satellite broadcasts of the Olympic games. At stake in their essays is therefore a fundamental reconsideration of how the self relates to the other with and through the medium of the television.

Thinking broadly, we might provisionally (and somewhat imperfectly) describe their understanding of the novel relationships engendered by the television with the framework of surface and depth. For his part, Kobayashi is concerned with surfaces. Demonstrating a near-sublime fascination with the images appearing on screen, he voices a radical desire to experience the image itself in all its arresting immediacy, embodying what Kobayashi scholar James Dorsey has called Kobayashi's "timeless subjectivity."⁴ As we will see, this stance is not solely aesthetic but is also relational, an organizing of bodies that demands rigid...