Resisting the ‘power of the dream’:

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  • 「夢の力」に抗する
  • 「夢の力」に抗する : 2020年東京オリンピック・パラリンピックと都市のヘゲモニー
  • 「 ユメ ノ チカラ 」 ニ コウスル : 2020ネン トウキョウ オリンピック ・ パラリンピック ト トシ ノ ヘゲモニー
  • ―2020年東京オリンピック・パラリンピックと都市のヘゲモニー
  • 2020 Tokyo Olympic & Paralympic Games and hegemony of the city

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Abstract

This paper examines how the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games combine a neoliberal policy with the regeneration of the city of Tokyo by looking at discourses which emerged from the time that Tokyo first became a candidate to host the Games. This paper first attempts semiotic analysis of the official slogan for the bid, “Nippon needs the power of this dream now”, and criticizes the way it represents the Games as a “national” event in which all the nation should be involved. The slogan may well invoke emotional national feeling by employing the word “Nippon” phonetically in Katakana rather than using “Japan” in Chinese characters, which is associated visually with territorial nationality because “Nippon” represents a particular city, “Tokyo”, as if Tokyo was a synonym for Japan. This naturalizes the hegemony of Tokyo over other areas in Japan. Secondly, this paper is concerned with how neoliberal politicians, economists and specialists on urban development have tried to utilize the 2020 Games to regenerate Tokyo. They have been trying to engineer a form of euphoria for the forthcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in order to justify not only regeneration of the city but also the neoliberal policy of the Abe administration, while concealing the fact that very few people will actually benefit from the Games. Finally, this paper anticipates the consequences of “the power of the dream” for Japan, referring to the case of the 2012 London Games. My conclusion is that sport sociologists have to keep a critical eye on the way in which neoliberal policy appropriates the Olympic and Paralympic Games for the privileged few, so that sport culture does not betray its specific values.

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