From researching intensively on the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, my general conception of the event is that it will likely do more damage to Tokyo (and Japan as a whole) than overall good. I believe this for several reasons.

As we know, Japan has been in a long recession since the burst of its bubble economy in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Obviously, the government feels the pressure to get its nation out of the recession, and the 2020 Olympics are part of the plan to achieve this. However, I’m doubtful that the Olympic Games will actually help to bring long-term stability to Japan’s economy; I think there is a good chance of another inflation and bubble-burst scenario.

As I discussed in my first blog post, Japan is facing a shrinking population, a challenge unfamiliar to most developed nations. So, it seems that if the hosting of the Olympics are done strategically, the event could definitely provide a solution to this problem: there will be a huge influx of people into Japan for the Games, and if Japan were to seriously expand its immigration policies, this event could provide the reason for a huge increase in immigrants and therefore a larger workforce.

However, it does not seem to me that the government or population in general are keen to open its borders, before or after the Games. This is concerning to me because in my opinion, the only way the Olympics will provide lasting positive economic effects, is if the Games are simply used as a tool to represent Japan’s changing global attitude, with real, long-lasting changes being made to the immigration policies. The Olympics after all have always been used as a political tool to try to grow the host city/nation’s economies, and those Olympics most commonly viewed as “successful” were those that represented a positive political statement and underlying real growth, such as Vancouver 2010, in which the changes to the city for the Olympics helped to grow the city for years after the Games.

Hosting the Olympics can facilitate lasting changes to a region. If Japan doesn’t take full advantage of hosting, I think the Games could end up being more of a distraction than a solution to the very serious problem.

I think Japan is facing one of the most unique challenges of any well-developed nation: its shrinking population. A simple idea of economics is that with a larger working-age population, comes the possibility of economic growth, which it seems every developed nation is and has been striving for, for centuries. And yet, Japan, the nation with the third-largest economy in the world, is facing a rapidly declining work force, and the government has no plans in place to mitigate this economic danger.

The interactive population pyramid, moving into the future (to 2065), showed the severity of the problem for the nation’s economy. The workforce is going to drastically decrease, while the elderly (and therefore dependent) population will increase, as the currently middle-aged population bulge moves through the years. This poses the problem of who will take care of these elderly people, and how, with a severe labour shortage?

For most developed nations, I’d think the answer would be pretty simple: to find help from elsewhere. Opening the borders to more immigration would certainly be a quick and relatively easy solution to the problem. The increase in immigrants would not pose a problem of infrastructure or urban development, as Japan is already very well developed, with many large cities, already connected through one of the best transit systems in the world. So, what would be the problem?

Japan has a long history of xenophobia, with a strong stance on national pride. As I learned in the textbook, Japan has a relatively peaceful national culture, which the Japanese people believe is because of the homogeneity of the people themselves, being Japanese and nothing else. There is a general fear that opening its borders will allow the chaos of the world to disrupt the long-standing peaceful culture, and I don’t really blame them. However, this attitude does not help with the aging population problem.

In my opinion, I think if the Japanese consider easing up on their immigration policies (and more than the recent expansions in preparation for the 2020 Olympics – which I thought were weak expansions), they can find a balance between maintaining the national culture, and balancing their demographics in order to not completely lose their footing in the world economy.