Abandoned Kansai

A few days from now the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris will begin. A spectacle that costs about €9 billion – and probably will leave some abandoned places behind… like in Japan!

Japan’s history as a host of the Olympic Games dates back to 1964, when Tokyo was home of the Summer Games. Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998 followed with Winter Games, before the disastrous Tokyo Summer Games 2020 were held in 2021. Sapporo (who had won the bid for 1940, but couldn’t follow through for obvious reasons) remembers the 1972 games so fondly that there was a large campaign to get the games in 2030 – an effort that became rather unpopular quickly in the aftermath of Tokyo 2020. 2034 is still in talks, but extremely unlikely… Some politicians seem to cling to it, but that’s pretty much it.

Since I avoid Tokyo like the plague (or Corona… still no infection!) I don’t know what the status of their Olympic ruins is, but both Nagano and Sapporo still have some installations left. The Olympic bobsleigh track in Nagano called Spiral is a tourist attraction now (coordinates: 36.71088, 138.1578), the other remaining venues that have been abandoned are mostly forgotten now – some have been demolished after my visit, for example the bobsleigh goal house in Sapporo and that gymnasium used by athletes to change and prepare right before their competitions. I compiled a little gallery with some interesting photos at the end of this blog entry, but here is a list of links to the full articles I’ve written in the past, in case you want to see (and read?) more:
*Sapporo 1972 (1)*
*Sapporo 1972 (2)*
*Nagano 1998 (1)*

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