Panel Title: “Reflections on COVID–19, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and their Legacies for Old, Poor, Disabled, Immigrant, and Sexual Minority Communities in Japan”
Friday March 25, 2022, 11:30 AM-1:00 PM
Panel Abstract: “The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games and ongoing COVID–19 crisis have provided spaces for advocacy for old, poor, disabled, immigrant, and sexual minority communities in Japan. By passing laws, producing media, and redesigning cityscapes, advocates and members of the general public have contributed to projects to build a more inclusive society. Despite their contributions (or perhaps because of them), such projects have frequently failed to combat discrimination, improve accessibility, and correct for longstanding economic inequalities. In this panel, we consider some of the factors that constrained efforts to use the 2020 Games and COVID–19 crisis to promote diversity in Japan while utilizing our case studies to suggest paths for a more inclusive future. By combining disciplinary approaches from History, Anthropology, Political Science, and Urban Studies, we demonstrate how advocates and regular citizens alike empowered some marginalized persons at the expense of others and show how their exclusions may influence broader communities inside and outside Japan. Ultimately, our empirical analyses act as a gateway to explore prescriptive policy interventions and avenues for community action.
Our panel consists of three core presentations and commentary from discussant Robin Kietlinski.
In the first presentation, Mark Bookman and Celeste Arrington discuss how disability advocates used the 2020 Games to expand on decades of activism for accessibility and enact new policies, which removed barriers for some individuals but erected them for others with conflicting needs. By tracing the development and implementation of those policies, Bookman and Arrington show how they helped reify hierarchies of inequality across impairment type, age, and gender in Japan.
In the second presentation, Heide Imai and Milica Muminovic show that a (re)definition of public space has gained significance in recent academic discourses recognising moments of crisis and the need to rethink how different groups perceive, use, and design public spaces. The central argument of their presentation is that public spaces serve a variety of purposes and are crucial for socially vulnerable groups including low-income residents, immigrant and elderly populations. In making their argument, Imai and Muminovic illustrate the importance of understanding how the needs of vulnerable groups will be accounted for in future public space designs and practices.
In the final presentation, Thomas Baudinette considers how discourses of hope that emerged in mainstream Japanese media prior to the Games concerning the emancipation of sexual minority communities should be considered in light of the COVID-19 pandemic’s frustration of meaningful social change within Tokyo’s gay nightlife district of Shinjuku Ni-chome. While demonstrating how systems of xenophobic and gendered discrimination were not dismantled during this seminal moment in recent Japanese history, Baudinette nevertheless reveals that his interlocutors’ hopes continue to build emancipatory queer futures for a post-Games, post-COVID world.
Disciplines: History, Anthropology, Urban Studies, Law
Keywords: Japan, COVID–19, Olympics, Accessibility, Inclusion
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Paper 1.
Title: “Policy Change in the Shadow of the Olympics: Disability Activism and Accessibility Reforms in Japan”
Presenters: Celeste L. Arrington and Mark R. Bookman
Abstract: “The preparation, execution, and aftermath of the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo have provided domestic stakeholders opportunities to leverage international scrutiny and deadlines to pressure policymakers to pass reforms, including measures to improve accessibility. However, the games alone are not sufficient to explain the scope and consequences of recent accessibility measures. We argue that researchers must also consider the impact of historical contingencies such as decades of activism for accessibility by affected parties (tōjisha), the 3/11 triple disaster, and Japan’s 2014 ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in order to understand how the games catalyzed reforms and empowered some (but not all) populations of disabled people. Drawing on government records, news reports, and documents from disability organizations, we unpack the causal mechanisms that linked activism for accessibility to policy outcomes and in so doing contribute to studies of minority social movements and policy processes in Japan. Our analysis also demonstrates how disability activists contributed to a recent “legalistic turn” in Japanese governance, characterized by detailed rules and enforcement mechanisms, through accessibility projects. Those projects improved accessibility for some disabled individuals but engineered difficulties for others with conflicting needs, reinforcing inequalities across impairment type, age, and gender inside Japan.”
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Paper 2.
Title: “Access for all? Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Covid-19 and the Future of Public Spaces”
Presenters: Heide Imai and Milica Muminovic
Abstract: “What does it mean for vulnerable communities to have to access and actively use public spaces, especially in times of crisis? We discuss in this paper how the use and behavior observed in different neighborhoods and public spaces in Tokyo has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The results are based on ethnographic observations, survey and interview data collected during different lock-down phases in 2020 and 2021. The data shows that regular behavior and access pattern of vulnerable groups (including different immigrant groups, low-income residents and elderly) have significantly been influenced by different social-distancing measurements, from 1) being totally invisible, 2) re-appearing in different form and pattern, and 3) being heavily regulated again to stage the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Our findings show how the access to public spaces was/is heavily disrupted by the measurements implemented and we conclude this paper with recommendations about what should be done to allow all communities to (re-)gain their right and access to a diversity of public spaces. To do so, we argue that different stakeholders have to find new ways, tangible and intangible, to reconnect basic communication lines between users and designers, as observed disruptions mirror the ongoing trends of Japan’s restructuring, especially in terms of basic economic needs and social changes affecting the right to the city during and after mega events as the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Thus, in what way can we use these disruptions as a chance to re-design public spaces that facilitate nourishing and care-full relations?”
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Paper 3.
Title: “Queer Hopes Frustrated by the Pandemic?: Theorizing Queer Futurity from Tokyo’s Gay Nightlife District”
Presenter: Thomas Baudinette
Abstract: “From 2015 until 2017, Japanese media underwent a so-called LGBT Boom as debates concerning queer rights emerged as a prominent topic. Simultaneously, informants I interviewed in Tokyo’s gay nightlife district of Shinjuku Ni-chōme consistently positioned the upcoming Tokyo Olympics as a moment when Japan’s somewhat parochial queer culture would undergo significant transformations. My interlocutors voiced hopes that a renewed focus on queer rights in the district would shift systems of xenophobic and gendered discrimination central to Japan’s gay male culture. Hope represented a resource that young gay men traveling to this important queer space would deploy to combat discrimination they had faced in both mainstream society and within Shinjuku Ni-chōme itself. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and anti-Olympics sentiment developed in Japan during 2020 and 2021, there is a need to complicate arguments about the hopes expressed by young gay men during the LGBT Boom to re-theorize queer futurity in the post-COVID Japanese context. In this presentation, I marry a critical discursive analysis of social and traditional media debates concerning Shinjuku Ni-chōme during the pandemic and Tokyo Olympics to a queer affective reading of my interlocutors’ narratives of hope from the earlier LGBT Boom to explore slippages in articulations of the future. Rather than adopting an overly pessimistic reading, however, my analysis of hope before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 Olympics reveals how concerns in the present among young gay men are mobilized to produce queer knowledge that is fundamentally emancipatory in its future orientation. ”