DThe Tokyo Olympic Museum is closed during the Olympic Games. The museum is right next to the new Olympic Stadium. The additional public transportation will only cause trouble. And increase the risk of corona. The side effect of the museum’s closure is that a small number of foreign tourists, journalists or officials participating in the Olympics cannot visit the exhibition. You missed the way the Japanese Olympians commemorate the former sports hero.
The exhibition mainly praises the Olympic movement and reviews the social and technological achievements of the early Olympic Games. It is best to take the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as an example: peace and cohesion, equality and mass sports, Shinkansen express trains and sports infrastructure. This is expected, just like the exhibits in 1964, providing good memories.
The brief statement of the 1940 Olympic Games first drew people’s frowns. Japan announced its abandonment of the Olympic Games in 1938, because the reignited war with China in 1937 strained resources and threatened the shame of cancellation. The exhibition succinctly stated: “Due to the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the sports will be cancelled.” It did not mention the fact that the aggression originated in Japan, which occupied Manchuria many years ago and turned it into a puppet.Very Japanese approach enough In the art of omission.
The exhibition displays a poster of the 1940 Olympic Games, on which a lifeguard larger than a Buddhist temple puts his hand on the shoulder of an athlete. From a Japanese perspective, these games should serve the honor of the royal family and the memory of Emperor Jinmu, who is said to have established the dynasty 2600 years ago. But visitors did not notice.
Observe carefully and read the small print in the last part of the exhibition, where Norwegian kroner celebrates Olympic heroes. It all started in Stockholm in 1912, when the father of the Japanese marathon, Kanakura, was the country’s first Olympian to give up due to heat stroke. The exhibition commemorates Japanese women Kinue Hitomi and Hideko Maehata, who won silver and gold medals in 1928 and 1936. The Dutchman Anton Gisink was fortunate to win the gold medal in judo from a Japanese player in Tokyo in 1964, demonstrating the spirit of Japanese judo. An exhibition commemorating the “young warrior”, this football team won a bronze medal and a fair play award in Mexico in 1968. The Japanese praised the former German coach Dettmar Cramer, who taught the players the value of humanity on the court.
For Westerners, the memories of other sports heroes selectively depicted in the story are even more irritating. In 1932, in order to protect the beloved horse Kei, he stopped the steeplechase in Los Angeles before the final jump. The board says very small, and Kido later helped erect a statue at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to commemorate the horses that died in the war. The Yasukuni Shrine is a place where Japanese war criminals worshipped in Tokyo.
The Japanese Shuhei Nishida and Sueo Ooe were commended at the museum because they did not fight for the second and third pole vaults at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and later actually shared their medals. As an example of exemplary sportsmanship, the Japanese Norwegian Krone also celebrated Carl Ludwig “Luz” Long in 1936.Germans got Americans Jesse Owens A decisive reminder was given before the long jump, and Owens made it to the final and won the gold medal. The exhibition stated that due to the influence of Nazi racist politics, the Berlin Games were also called Hitler’s Games. However, Long has overcome apartheid. The exhibition describes the Hitler-style salute of the German athlete as the second place on the podium, and uses small print as the “sign of the times.” The Berlin Games showed such examples and descriptions, as if using a fabric softener that made history more beautiful. You may be a role model for the International Olympic Committee, which similarly reported on the Berlin game in a recent commercial movie.
At the Norwegian Krone Museum in Japan, this ambiguity is even more obvious because the Japanese learned from the Germans in the 1930s how to use the Olympics to train young people to fight for future wars—and because Japanese Olympic athletes had a dark episode in themselves Concealed in the history. In Berlin in 1936, Kitei Son won a marathon for Japan. But Sun Zhengyi is not a Japanese, but a South Korean athlete named Sun Jizhong. South Korea was subsequently occupied and colonized by Japan, so the son could only start with the Japanese name and Japanese flag. At the awards ceremony, he covered the Japanese red sun on his sweatshirt with laurel trees, lowering his head instead of looking up. Sun Zhengyi later said that accepting to participate in the Olympics under the Japanese flag was the biggest mistake in his life. There is nothing to read in the Olympic Museum in Japan. If you look closely, you will find that Sun’s name appears on a long list of Japanese athletes’ winners, and he was the last torchbearer of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
