Since Tokyo 2020 can't really brag about tackling environmental issues, sustainability, cost cutting, or transparency, by default diversity and inclusiveness have become the branding agenda. This could be a positive legacy, but can the Olympics serve as a catalyst for Japan to reinvent itself? Probably not, due to the patriarchal elite's ethnonationalism and aversion to diversity and inclusion.

The Opening Ceremony under the guidance of popular film director Yamazaki Takashi will almost certainly earn it applause overseas, particularly by viewers and writers eager to take stock of a country's creative talents in this once-every-four-years fantasia. As the stuff of international politics goes, it will be mostly inconsequential and harmless, and it will likely be good fun. But it also offers the chance to explore how a ceremony can reproduce moral and historical claims that remain largely unexamined, and how closed to challenge and contestation an Opening might be.

Japan has so far seen foreign workers as a stop-gap solution to intensifying labor shortages, as manifested in the labor import scheme for the Olympics. However, due to a gathering demographic crisis, the labor shortage will not disappear when the Olympics ends. Japan needs to create a social environment where immigrants can more easily fit in. Perhaps the 2020 Olympics, with all its promises and challenges, will be an opportunity for Japan to envision a new form of society and redefine its national identity from an exclusively monoethnic monocultural one to an embracing, inclusive and diverse one.

The dynamics of Japan's indigenous rights struggles are not well understood, but the 2020 Tokyo games may spark serious debate on restoring and promoting the social, cultural, economic and political rights of the Ainu people. It appears that people from throughout Japan and the world curious about Ainu culture may be disappointed in the Olympic ceremonies and the new Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park that opens in 2020. The Olympic moment offers an opportunity to embrace diversity, but probably will highlight the limits of the Japanese state's willingness to recognise the rights of Ainu as indigenous people.

The forthcoming 2020 Games are a critical moment in the implementation of diversity and inclusion strategies targeting sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) related issues in Japan. However, the resultant “hypervisibility” of “LGBT issues” has led to an increasing “invisibility” of those who supposedly fail to fit LGBT narratives that pivot on specific forms of consumerism, internationalism and globalized diversity from which the “issues” purport to arise.

Japan has a pervasive and problematic history based on design by consensus and speculative labor for the design of past Olympic Games as much as for the upcoming Games. The 2020 Games have been defined by design competitions, events where individuals volunteer to create visual graphic works without financial reward for the time and labor spent. This devaluation of creative work helps explain why Tokyo is swathed in mediocre Games-related visuals.

The 2020 Olympics will be held in a Japan that confronts challenges that are a world apart from the Japan of the 1964 Olympics. None is more profound than Japan's demographic dilemma. The population pyramid has been inverted from what it was half a century ago when Japan was a vigorous nation bursting with vitality and hope. The upbeat messaging in 2020 can't obscure questions about how Japan will cope with serious economic and security challenges.

The Olympic Games are burdened with this inherent paradox of universal humanism and chauvinistic nationalism. Japan took palpable national pride in being the first ever Asian host of the modern Olympic Games in 1964 and in executing the mission with zeal, precision and order. Hosting the 2020 Olympics again represents Japan’s aspiration to play a significant role in the global world - and rebranding Tokyo as a leading global city – but this grand scheme has also invoked some antagonistic sentiments at home.

This essay reflects upon the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, explaining the socio-political context in which the Games were planned. How far has Japan come since 1940? There are issues and problems that were apparent around 1940 that have not been fully resolved. Contemporary Japanese society seems to embrace racial diversity on an unprecedented level, most visibly in sports. This embrace, however, seems to be limited to cases where the racial difference is visible and excludes those of mixed Asian ancestry due to unresolved historical issues.

This is a memoir about the hectic preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that proved to be a successful coming out party. For the Japanese, the success of the games was a source of pride. The world discovered a new Japan, one that was no longer a shunned militarist rogue regime but rather a peaceful democracy on its way to becoming a world economic powerhouse. For the citizens of Tokyo, the Olympic success was doubly important because their city was now rebranded as the capital of cutting-edge technologies.

Hosting the 2020 games was a mistake right from the beginning. The Olympics sucked construction workers from Tohoku and delayed reconstruction work in the 3.11 tsunami-devastated Tohoku region. It is essential to concentrate our mental, spiritual and financial resources to create a future vision of Japan, and to move holistically toward the implementation of that vision. Instead, the energy, money and vision which the Japanese people mobilized over the last seven years has been misdirected.

The 1964 XVIII Olympiad enabled the Japanese to take a breather from their breakneck economic growth, and reflect on and celebrate in collective joy. Pulling it off was a big test that Japan passed with flying colors thanks to a stunning alignment of purpose across government, corporations, educational institutions, and local neighborhoods. In the aftermath, Japan was a nation reborn - young, confident, world-beaters.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics the Japanese women's volleyball team, nicknamed the ‘Witches of the Orient’, defeated the Soviet Union to win the gold medal. This article charts the story of the Witches journey to the Olympic final and draws parallels with the post-war growth of men's rugby in Japan and the performance of the national team the ‘Brave Blossoms’ at the 2019 Rugby World Cup. As in 1964, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will showcase Japanese technology, creativity, culture and hospitality, but will also highlight the necessity for greater acceptance of diversity in Japanese society through the power of sport.

As preparations for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games continue, largely on islands in Tokyo Bay constructed from reclaimed waste material, the question of the impacts on the environment is of vital importance. While prospective host cities increasingly set forth extensive proposals to hold “Green Games” that will have minimal impact on the natural environment, few, if any, are able to deliver on these promises. Positioning itself as one of the world's leaders in environmental technology and efficiency, Japan is seeking to use the global spotlight of the 2020 Olympics to display and market new models of sustainable development.

The 2020 Summer Olympics will be the hottest ever; due to a combination of climate change and scheduling them when Tokyo is at its most sweltering. Cities have been transformed, with the Games used by governments to unite citizens behind patriotic visions of national success and project a modernist image of a city and nation on the leading edge of global progress. This is the Olympic paradox-being uniquely symbolic of modernity while also complicit in modernity's outcome, including the systematic depletion of the Earth's resources, our destruction of its habitats, and pollution of the biosphere with emissions and effluents which together threaten the sustainability of life on Earth.