My '64 Tokyo Olympics
Cool temperatures, great architecture and superb filmmaking mattered. Kindergarten didn't
When the 1964 Summer Olympics began I had just started kindergarten in Tokyo. This was not because the gaijin school year began in summer, but because the Games ran from October 10th to 24th. It was Tokyo’s infamously hot, humid summers that prompted the IOC to move them to autumn for the sake of the athletes’ health. NBC, making its Olympic broadcasting debut that year, might have objected, but it had no influence on the schedule.
Fifty-seven years later, Japan’s once stable climate is a maddening mix of extreme heat, floods and sudden frosts. Summer now stretches from May to October, yet the 2020 Games will be held from July 23-August 8 at the pleasure of NBC. The IOC’s main concession to Tokyo’s July and August temperatures--which now reach an average high of 95 degrees, as opposed to 79 degrees in 1964—is to run the track and field events at night and the marathon at dawn. Though Covid19 has replaced heatstroke as the main topic of this year's postponed Olympics, the latter seems a likelier danger to athletes who compete outdoors.
But in 1964 the Games opened in delightfully cool, sunny weather. In subsequent days it sometimes rained, as it often does in Japan. The fact that school had begun made no difference to my mother, who held that any day of the Olympics was more important than the most eventful day of kindergarten. And so for at least three of those ten weekdays, she pulled me out of school and took me to watch the Games.
Among the daytime events we saw were fencing, ballroom dancing (yes, it was an Olympic event) and men’s gymnastics. The first two were new to me, but gymnastics was a big deal in Japan and, along with judo, its strongest Olympic sport. My mother and I watched the qualifying rounds that would earn the Japanese team the all-around gold medal. Yukio Endo would become the first Japanese gymnast to win the individual all-around gold, a triumph bookended by his team golds in 1960 and 1968.
In the evenings and weekends we went to the Olympics with my sisters and father. We watched the equestrian events at the same facility where my sisters took riding lessons from ancient ex-calvary officers. One memorable night we excitedly entered Kenzo Tange’s Yoyogi Stadium, whose construction I had watched from the beginning, for the men’s swimming competition. Because my father could only get four tickets, one of my sisters and I took turns sitting on a molded plastic seat as we cheered the American team, led by Don Schollander, who would win four gold medals, to victory.
I returned to school with a love for the Games that never entirely faded. For the rest of kindergarten I took naps on my Olympic beach towel, which I treasured until it became a rag twenty years later. What I hadn’t seen live, I watched on TV. During the opening ceremony, which my parents attended, my sisters and I saw the Olympic smoke rings on the screen in black-and-white. Running outside, we saw them in color against the blue October sky.
NBC made history with the ’64 Games: they were the first to be transmitted via satellite. The opening ceremony was the world’s first live, color event to be transmitted by satellite. But it was Kon Ichikawa and his team of cameramen and editors who made the Olympics indelible. “Tokyo Olympiad” remains the greatest film about the Games, an artistic triumph that has influenced sports documentaries ever since its release in 1965. Ichikawa, a famous feature director (“The Burmese Harp”), used split screens, juxtaposing stadium crowd shots with those of athletes below. He filmed the marathon from a helicopter, following the runners down narrow streets lined with traditional Japanese houses and shops. For those who know Japan, the marathon sequence is a shock: today only remote villages and history museums boast streets without a single western-style structure, and Japanese people will travel to see them.
“Tokyo Olympiad” shows its age in other ways. In those pre-Lycra days, the athletes’ clothing was bulky and inelegant. Men wore crew cuts; women had perms. The equipment was shockingly crude, from the rusty-looking weights to the piles of torn foam rubber on which pole vaulters landed. Nevertheless, 1964’s athletes competed in humane temperatures at a time when the IOC ruled NBC, instead of the reverse. This year’s Olympians, for all their state-of-the-art equipment and sleek uniforms, can only dream of such luxuries.