Reconsidering sport diplomacy: The 2020/1 Tokyo Olympics and ‘soft-power’

The paper seeks to examine how sport mega-events can be utilized as a form of soft-power to further national unification, nation branding and international relations in the arena of sport diplomacy. Focusing on the 1964 and 2020/1 Tokyo Olympics, the paper critically analyses how the idea of soft power in the 2020/1 Games has become controversial. The paper explores how business oriented top-down Olympic diplomacy creates tensions, and value conflicts about the political, economic, and human life priorities between the organizers and Japanese citizens under the exigencies of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper also compares the gender discourses employed in the Olympics, since women’s performance in the Olympics can be seen as a vehicle of soft-power. The different gender politics are explored along with the impact of contemporary new media environments which created intensive public engagement about anti-gender inequality. These concerns indicate that the Olympics which are driven by the government and the IOC, no longer function as simple forms of soft-power designed to unify people, rather ‘soft-power’ is mobilized to unite multilateral profit-oriented business stakeholders and enhance the over-commercialized Olympics as well. Hence the question of what the general virtue of the Olympics should be, remains.