Money issues re: The Tokyo Olympics 2020

As you know, Japan will host the 2020 Summer Olympics. Japan needs to build/renovate all sorts of stadiums/buildings for this big event. Some people doubt about some of the building plans.

One of the heavily-talked buildings is National Stadium Japan located in Tokyo. This is the main stadium for the event (and should be used for the 2019 Rugby World Cup!!) but since it is quite old and it needed renovation or something.

The Japanese government decided that it needed to be rebuild and organised the design competition of the new stadium; one particular design, which was proposed by an architect named Zaha Hadid, has been now chosen. That was some time ago.

Recently, the government has figured out that the cost of rebuilding of the stadium would be much more than what they thought originally. The latest caliculation has told us that it would cost around 3,100 million NZ dollars. This is almost doubled figure from the original estimate. The government has now decided, despite such budget-blow up, to go aheard the plan assuming that Tokyo City Counsil should carry around 20% of the cost. The government is also thinking of using some of the money, which was to use to support elite athletes who are expected to perform well at the olympics, for this rebuidling project. It sounds like that we will get a nice place to play but not have good people to play there…  We also want to know if Tokyo could cope with such big expenditure suddenly fallen onto their shoulders…

Many people now have started expressing their concerns (including Ken Watanabe, a famous international actor). Japan still needs to do a lot for the recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Fukushima NPP disaster and so on.

I read an article recently about the Greek financial crisis: it says that Greek problems became so massive after the Athens Olympics. The country injected so much money into infrastructure, buildings and so on for the event and could not retrieve much from their investment. I do not know how true this is, but it sounds plausible…

Is Japan okay???

 

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