Nations marched in alphabetical order according to Japan’s Katakana alphabet instead of the Western ABCs, so Greece, as is customary, went first followed by Iceland and Ireland? Austria marched after El Salvador, Canada after Qatar, Switzerland after Zimbabwe, Chile after Tunisia, Bahrain after Norway. The stadium was eerily empty except for media and a smattering of dignitaries, as all Tokyo venues will be over the ensuing fortnight, but nine days earlier a crowd of 10,767 was in the Tokyo Dome to watch baseball’s Yomiuri Giants play the Yakult Swallows. It was a night filled with incongruity and contradiction, though. The daughter of a Haitian father and Japanese mother, she grew up in New York and speaks only passable Japanese, preferring to answer questions in English. She’s never played in the Summer Games before and elected to compete under the Japanese flag only 21 months ago. (You can’t make this stuff up.)īut Osaka doesn’t much represent the Olympic movement.
She represents a refreshing, multicultural shift for one of the planet’s most homogenous societies, particularly after the ceremony’s creative director was fired earlier in the week for joking about the Holocaust in a comedy routine, and his predecessor resigned after suggesting a rotund Japanese actress could play an “Olympig,” and the musical director was ousted for boasting that he bullied disabled children in his youth, and the head of the organizing committee quit after suggesting women talk too much.
Osaka was both an obvious and curious choice.
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