Has Japan Fallen This Far? What Shocked Me Most About the Asian Games

The Asian Games are currently being held in Aichi and Nagoya.

Put simply, it is a massive sporting event comparable to an Asian version of the Olympics.

To be honest, I was not particularly interested in the event itself.

But as I watched the news day after day, I found myself unable to look away for reasons that had nothing to do with the competition.

There were complaints about the accommodations. Shuttle buses were delayed or arranged incorrectly. One team even had to abandon its pre-match practice because its bus never arrived.

Then came the worst incident of all: North Korea’s national anthem was played at a match involving the South Korean team.

Given the relationship between South and North Korea, this could not be brushed aside as simply playing the wrong audio file.

As I watched the news, I genuinely wondered,

“Was Japan really this bad at organizing international events?”

What the Organizers Said Shocked Me More Than the Mistakes

Of course, it is impossible to eliminate every problem at a major international event.

The real issue was what came afterward.

After facing a wave of criticism from the South Korean delegation and others, the organizing committee acknowledged that problems had occurred while maintaining, in effect, that the event as a whole was being managed successfully.

That response nearly made my head spin.

Is that really the point?

Is this really the time for the organizers to give themselves a passing grade by saying that things are going well overall?

Buses fail to arrive. Accommodations fall into confusion. Athletes’ preparations for competition are disrupted. Even a national anthem is played incorrectly.

If only one of these things happened, it could be dismissed as a mistake.

When problems keep occurring in so many different places, however, the normal response is to question the system itself.

Being told that “the operation as a whole is functioning” only makes an outside observer think, “That is not the point.”

Japan’s Strength Was Never Money; Ultimately, It Was the People on the Ground

We have been hearing for decades that Japan’s economic power is declining in relative terms.

Japan does not have a vast market like China’s. It has few IT companies on the scale of those in the United States. Salaries are no longer as high as they once were.

Even so, I believed that Japan still had some strengths left.

People on the ground take their work seriously.

They are punctual.

They check even the smallest details.

When a problem occurs, they investigate the cause and make improvements to prevent it from happening again.

When Japan hosts an international event, the presentation may not be spectacular, but at least it is run with precision.

Those were the qualities I had in mind.

I thought we could preserve them even if we ran out of money.

But watching the news about this event, I have begun to wonder whether even that last strength is fading.

What Is Truly Frightening Is Not That We Can No Longer Do Something

Without money, facilities cannot be luxurious.

When there are not enough workers, the quality of service declines.

I can understand that much.

What frightens me is hearing people say, after a failure,

“But overall, we are doing a good job.”

If we acknowledge what we can no longer do, there is still room to improve.

If we start telling ourselves that we are succeeding when we are not, the very reason to improve disappears.

This is not just about a sporting event.

Whether it is a company or a country, the moment of real danger is not when it fails.

It is when it stops calling failure by its name.

Even when people said that Japan had become poorer, I still thought, “But Japanese people are serious about their work.”

Even if we lost our economic power and technological strength, the integrity and work ethic of the people on the ground would remain in the end.

Somewhere in my mind, that was what I believed.

Watching this event, it feels as though we have begun spending even those last reserves.

The final stage of a country’s decline may not be running out of money. It may be becoming unable to admit what it has become.