Asia Pride, China Fear, Tokyo Anxiety: Japan Looks Back at 2008 Beijing and Forward to 2012 London and 2016 Tokyo

Extract

The logo of Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics is the musubi, a traditional Japanese decorative knot. The design uses the five Olympic colors as the strands that fold over to form a simple and colorful knot. Japanese have long used the musubi to tie up gifts on auspicious and formal occasions and to signify the ties that bind people together. Thus, a Bid Committee press release explains that the musubi logo “represents Tokyo 2016's mission to unite people young and old with sport and healthy living, unite green with 2016, unite the city and the Games, and unite old and new Japan.” This is common rhetorical fare for a Games applicant, although in addition to such public relations sloganeering of domestic benefit, many have noticed the aesthetic resemblance of the musubi to the designs of the candidate city logos for Beijing 2008 and London 2012. Unlike the eventual Games logos (the much-admired “Dancing Beijing” calligraphic figure and London's already-reviled, jagged “2007” logo), Beijing and London used entirely distinct logos when they were candidate cities, both based on flowing ribbon motifs. However unintentional the design similarities, they do remind us just how necessarily attuned an applicant and then candidate city must be to ongoing Games cycles. For Tokyo's 2016 effort, this has required a triangulation between the long and fraught Sino-Japanese relationship and the competition between London and Tokyo as global financial centers.