–or “1 smoke, 1 drink, and you’re gone”

Today’s blog post is not about baseball, but about the tale of an Olympic athlete and how Japan deals with inconvenient truths inside a system of face-saving white lies.

Shoko Miyata is no longer captain of Japan’s Olympic women’s gymnastic team, the 19-year-old having confessed to smoking on one occasion and drinking on one occasion while staying at Japan’s National Training Center in Tokyo from the end of June to early July.

While the whole thing was portrayed as her quitting the team just days before the start of the Paris Olympics and that she was never kicked off the team. It was portrayed that way in the Japanese media after a Japan Gymnastics Association press conference in which Miyata did not appear but a lawyer did.

Still, two responses on Twitter indicated that not all Japanese were buying that story. A comedian and former politician wrote, “The association made the correct decision,” while a former Olympic sprinter for Japan, said, “There was no reason to kick her off the team, for one smoke and one drink.”

Lies as official policy

If the Japan Gymnastics Association is lying, one could argue that it is just acting according to tradition. Lies and Japan’s Olympic ambitions go together like sushi and soy sauce.

Even before the Tokyo Olympics opened, it was clear that lies were everywhere, starting with Japan’s bid document. Since TV money now requires the Olympics be held in summer months, instead of the early autumn as they often had been in the past, Japan’s bid committee stressed that Tokyo’s weather in July and August is mild and ideal for all outdoor sports.

If you’ve ever spent more than a few days in Tokyo in July and August, you know this is a lie of Trumpian proportions. It is not always exceedingly hot, but it is almost always very humid, so much so that when the Olympics were re-scheduled for 2021, the marathon and walk races had to be moved to Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido.

So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that many of the people behind the Tokyo Olympics were knee-deep in graft.

In 2019, French authorities brought charges against the then president of the Japanese Olympic Committee, Tsunekazu Takeda over the hiring of a consultant – highly recommended by advertising giant Dentsu – as a consultant, that turned out to be a shell company used to funnel money to the then head of world athletics, Lamine Diack, a power broker who was under investigation for blackmailing athletes caught doping. The Singapore national who ran the shell company, was an employee of a shell company created by Dentsu.

After the Olympics, a former Dentsu sports marketing power broker, Haruyuki Takahashi, who had been an executive on the local Olympic organizing committee, was found to have taken bribes from prospective sponsors. Meanwhile, Dentsu and a group of other ad agencies were found to have engaged in bid rigging for a string of Olympic tenders.

But somehow, the Olympics, even with the continued corruption and bullshit, continue to have an aura among Japanese that they lack in other countries. Gold medals in some sports are time for national celebration, with politicians bending over backward to bathe in the glow, just as for decades they bent over backward and dug deeper and deeper into the public trough to bring these expensive white elephants here.

Why the Olympics are sacred here

I reckon this has to do with Japan’s national insecurity. Japan is obsessed with how it looks to outsiders. Japan is like me looking in the mirror to see if I’ve shed any more fat around my waistline than I had six hours before.

I suppose it’s only natural. Modern Japan emerged from its feudal era beset by predatory foreign powers, and thus badly needed to learn how to build an industrial base and defend itself against rivals with modern weaponry. Even when Japan succeeded in empire building, in Korea and by fighting Russia to a bloody draw, it was held in check by coalitions of western powers keen to keep it in its place.

In the same way I was bullied by my next oldest brother and occasionally at school, and became obsessed about not doing anything that would hold me up to ridicule by my peers, Japan developed a kind of need for constant reassurance that it was being taken seriously in the world.

Hosting an Olympics fills that need for recognition, and thus anything done to secure one, is seen as reasonable. And lying, why not? Especially if it’s done within the parameters of Japan’s white-lie protocol known as “tate-mae.”

This involves saying something that no one believes is true in a way to send another message. Sometimes the hidden message is, “You don’t want to know the truth,” and sometimes it is “We are saying this because we are complying with the social norms that bind us together.”

In the case of Shoko Miyata, it was probably a little of both, while in the case of the lie about Tokyo being suitable for a summer Olympics, it was probably, “We all know it’s a lie but, dude, this is the Olympics we’re talking about.”

We are so accustomed to lies.

For example, there is evidence that Tokyo forced the conservators of the Jingu Gaien area to accept a plan to eliminate publicly used sports facilities and replace two historic sports venues so high-rise commercial and office spaces can add even more glass and steel to Tokyo’s landscape. Yet Governor Yuriko Koike said it was the conservators, the Meiji Jingu Shrine’s idea.

Tokyo announced the plan only moved forward after public meetings were held, but these were “public meetings” in name only, about which the public was neither informed of nor invited to.

 Indeed, at least in Japan, lies are — as the late great Tommy Smothers said, in the Smothers Brothers’ sketch “I am a pilot” – government policy.