Tokyo’s successful bid to host the Olympics made much of plans to reuse venues built for Japan’s last Summer Games. But for Kohei Jinno, redevelopment for 2020 again means eviction, just as it did ahead of the 1964 Olympics.
Most of Japan celebrated Tokyo’s victory at last week’s meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires, but Jinno, who is 79, was cursing his luck.
In 1964, his home and business were torn down to make way for an Olympic park around the main stadium for the Tokyo Games. Now he has been told he must move again to make way for the stadium’s redevelopment and expansion in time for 2020.
“I don’t want to see the Olympics at all,” Jinno said. “Deep inside, I have a kind of grudge against the Olympics.”
The crown jewel of Olympic construction, an 80,000-seat main stadium, will be built with a retractable roof at a cost of US$1.3 billion (Dh4.8bn).
But its enlarged footprint will see it spreading over Jinno’s flat and the tobacco shop he runs inside a small market at the ageing Kasumigaoka apartment complex. About 200 households at Kasumigaoka, where a third of the population are 70 and older, will have to move.
The city has offered them spaces in three other municipal apartment complexes. But Jinno insists it will be difficult for people, especially the elderly, to cultivate new relationships in a new environment.
“Probably I may go where you cannot set up a tobacco shop. That means I will lose my reason for living,” he said.
– Agence France-Presse
