This weekend should have been the midpoint of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which would have brought together top runners, jumpers, pitchers, lifters and, for the first time, skateboarders in the world’s most populous city. May the Simone Biles fan club forgive me, but the event that excited me the most was handball.
Not for sport, but for the stadium: handball matches would be held at the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, a landmark of modern Japanese architecture designed by Kenzo Tange. The stadium is defined by its huge sunken roof, made up of two catenaries (steel cables stretched between concrete pillars, like a suspension bridge) and perpendicular ribs that extend from those axes to the ground. Years ago, cycling through Yoyogi Park, I remember stopping in front of the gym’s welded ceiling panels, marveling at its steel awnings. It could have been the most glamorous venue of this year’s Olympics, even though it was built more than half a century ago.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced the first postponement of the Olympics: Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it ever takes place. Yet the entire Japanese capital is the legacy of other Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a burned-out ruin to an ultra-modern megalopolis. (Actually, the “Summer” Games were held in the fall; organizers thought October in Tokyo would be smarter than stifling July.) Those early Tokyo Olympics served as a debuting ball for post-war democratic Japan, which was reintroduced to the world not only through sport but also through design.
Preparations made Tokyo a city-wide construction site. Author Robert Whiting, who was stationed with the US Air Force in Tokyo in 1962, describes the pile pilots and jackhammers that gave an “overwhelming assault on the senses.” Pedestrians walked around with face masks and ear plugs, and employees drank from bars protected by plastic sheeting that blocked dust. Japan was only a few years away from becoming the second largest economy in the world, and the 1964 Olympics were to be an economic revival contest and honor regained.
Cars went out, highways came in. The city obtained a new sewerage system, a new port, two new subway lines, and severe contamination. The slums and their residents were ruthlessly cleared to make room for new buildings, some of them grandiose, such as the exquisite Hotel Okura, designed in 1962 by Yoshiro Taniguchi (father of MoMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi), and very forgettable. The new shinkansen, or bullet train, rushed between Tokyo and Osaka for the first time just a week before the opening ceremony. It was not until 2008, when the Games boomed in Beijing, that the Olympic Games would so profoundly alter a city and a nation.
Tokyo had been awarded the Games once before; it was intended to host the canceled 1940 Olympics, succeeding the Nazi spectacle in Berlin in 1936. The architects and designers of the 1964 Games therefore had to fulfill a clear ideological goal: to be a showcase for New Japan, a pacifist and avant-garde. Dawning, largely free of Japanese classical aesthetics or traditional national symbols. Without Fuji, without cherry blossoms and without calligraphy. And any expression of national pride had to be as far away from the old imperial militarism as possible.
Designing the look of Tokyo ’64 fell to Yusaku Kamekura, the dean of Japanese graphic designers, who had absorbed modern design from Bauhaus-trained professors at the Tokyo Institute of New Architecture and Industrial Arts. Where the posters of the previous Olympic Games had been based on figurative images, often explicitly Greco-Roman, Kamekura distilled Tokyo’s ambitions to the simplest emblem: the five interlocking rings, all gold, crowned by a huge red disk, the rising sun .
Kamekura’s poster not only rejected Western expectations of the “exotic” East for a tough, clean modernity. More impressive than that, it reinitiated the Japanese flag, which was virtually banned during the early years of the American occupation, as a symbol of a democratic state. The same bold aesthetic would also characterize the second poster for the Kamekura Olympics (and, by 1964, technically daunting), with a photograph of runners in a fraction of a second on a black background.
The main ceremonies and sporting events took place in an unremarkable stadium that has since been demolished. At the Komazawa Olympic Park in Setagaya, a control tower designed by Yoshinobu Ashihara took the form of a 165-foot-tall concrete tree; it still stands, though its brutalist directness has been softened with a peeling of white paint. However, it was the somewhat smaller stadium in Yoyogi, designed by Tange, who would build the imposing Tokyo City Hall and its Sofia Coppola-approved Park Hyatt Hotel, specifically expressing what Kamekura and the other designers did on paper.
In 1964, the Tange Stadium hosted the swimming, diving, and basketball events, and their union of strength and dynamism conveyed stronger than any other that Japan had restored, even reborn. From the outside, it looks like two mismatched halves of a pair of slices, in steel and concrete, though its real innovation was the roof. Its drive structure is based on Eero Saarinen’s recently completed hockey rink at Yale University and, furthermore, on the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, designed in 1958 by his hero Le Corbusier.
More quietly, the gym nods at Tange’s most significant work to this point: the cenotaph arch at Hiroshima, another reinforced concrete curve. In Hiroshima, Tange’s arched concrete became a mausoleum for Japan’s darkest hour; in Tokyo, she locked up a festival of new national life. (The Hiroshima legacy also permeated the opening ceremony, where sprinter Yoshinori Sakai, born on August 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb fell, lit the cauldron.)
The 1964 Olympics were the first to air worldwide, via the first geostationary satellite for commercial use, and Japanese families with growing family budgets were even able to watch the Games in color. However, the most enduring images of Tokyo ’64 appeared in the cinema, in director Kon Ichikawa’s three-hour documentary “Tokyo Olympiad”. Filmed in the wide CinemaScope format, in intense colors, with novel telephoto lenses, “Tokyo Olympiad” is, on various sections of the track, the best film ever made about the Olympics. (You can stream it, along with much sadder movies from the Games from 1912 to 2012, on the Criterion Channel.)
Unlike Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia”, which preceded the Berlin Games with Aryan athlete gods in Greek, the “Tokyo Olympiad” immerses us in modernity from its opening sequence: a glowing white sun against a red sky – Inverted Japanese flag – Smash -Cuts into a wrecking ball hitting pylons. The facades of the buildings turn to dust, the bulldozers drag the rubble. We see the Tange stadium in the mist, then the torch relay, and then the crowds pushing to watch the young foreigners arrive at Haneda airport. Inside the stadiums, the telephoto lens allowed Ishikawa to get stunning close-ups of the sprinters ‘sweat and swimmers’ goosebumps, but just as often, he shot almost abstract sequences of shooters and cyclists blurred into streams of color.
There are champions and record breakers at the “Tokyo Olympiad”, but they share screen time with the finalists. Gold medal matches are interspersed with overlooked details of assistants sweeping the triple jump court, or bullet-throwing officials taking metal balls. The Japanese Olympic Committee hated the film and commissioned another; Nationalist proponents called it unpatriotic or worse. But Ichikawa’s distillation of national ambition in abstract form was the hallmark of Tokyo ’64, and the “Tokyo Olympiad” became Japan’s biggest national box office hit, a record that would last four decades.
Whether they happen in 2021 or not, the upcoming Tokyo Games will surely have a calmer cultural impact than their predecessors. The first logo for Tokyo 2020 was thrown, for alleged plagiarism. The first stadium too: Zaha Hadid’s initial design was abandoned, and was replaced by a more serene and much less expensive wooden stadium, designed by architect Kengo Kuma.
If Tange’s steel and concrete expressed Japanese ambitions in 1964, now it is natural materials that point to a vision of the future whose challenges are both ecological and economic. But Mr. Kuma, who attended the 1964 Games as a child, attributes Tange’s swooping stadium as the trigger for his own architectural career. “Tange treated natural light like a magician,” Mr. Kuma told the Times two years ago, recalling his childhood discovery of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium. “From that day on, I wanted to be an architect.”
