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Week 21 - Tuesday in Tokyo we look ahead to 2021 and the rescheduled Olympic Games

Edited BY


G P Kennedy

                        Ian and Minako


 This is our 4th summer living together in Japan and we have learned to get used to the fact the August is really a do-nothing month for us, even more so this year with the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. As we have mentioned several times, temperatures are rising each year; it's too muggy and dangerously hot to spend much time outdoors. Activities are limited to some small festivals (cancelled this year) and traveling is expensive and (normally) crowded at this time. This scenario is not unique to Tokyo of course; the whole planet is suffering from humanity’s destructive miss-management.


 So we stay in our air-conditioned apartment and only venture out in the cooler early mornings or evenings and the occasional train ride to temperature-controlled shopping or cultural areas. Once you know your way around Tokyo you can go long distances through it’s subterranean networks and indoor connecting walkways, you can spend all day in it’s huge railway station complexes which include shops, restaurants, hotels etc. You hardly need ever emerge onto the street. 


The rescheduled Olympic Games


 So what about next August? It would be lovely to spend some of the month in a cooler climate. Liverpool, UK is the obvious candidate, we last visited this time 2 years ago and had a brilliant couple of weeks catching up with family and friends and events. We are certainly overdue another visit but there needs to be a vast improvement in conditions before we would feel safe traveling that far and being in a country where, sadly, far too many people and organizations are not treating the situation seriously and taking proper precautions. It would be more stressful than enjoyable. We are always optimistic though - we have to be!

 

Hoping to return to San Fransisco in 2021

 

San Francisco is another place we really need to return to soon to visit Ian’s daughter and her husband but, again, August is not the best time because although San Fran itself is quite cool this month, as you will have seen in the news, it is surrounded by wildfires and this is now an annual event. They should be safe from fire in the cities but it’s raining smoke, they’re indoors anyway due to the lockdowns but now they have to keep the windows closed, run air-purifiers and wear their masks, not the best holiday destination for someone with lung issues.

 

Bon Odori at a local primary school

 

All being well, this time next year, the Tokyo Olympics will have just finished after being postponed for a year. If it happens at all it will probably be a much-reduced version but hope that the games and the Cultural Olympiad will be a post-COVID celebration.  Also we hope that the annual summer festivals will be back in every town for people to gather and we’ll be dancing in the streets for the Bon Odori and we’ll be following more of Tokyo’s hidden underground passages to interesting places.

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