As you know, Governor Ishihara is leading the charge to bring the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo, appealing to the international community under slogans such as "Energize Japan" and "Revitalize Tokyo."
Forty-eight years ago, on October 10, 1964, the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony was held. Against a piercing blue sky, the Air Self-Defense Force Blue Impulse team traced the five-ring Olympic emblem in contrails — a sight burned into the memory of many Tokyo residents.
A key figure in bringing those Olympics to Tokyo was IOC member Shingoro Takahashi. Drawing on the international network he built during many years as an overseas correspondent for The Mainichi Newspapers, headquartered in Palaceside Building, he became an IOC member in 1939 without first serving on the Japanese Olympic Committee. After the 1940 Tokyo Games were canceled by war and he himself was purged from public office, he began campaigning around the time of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics to realize the Tokyo Games "not as a phantom but as proof of postwar recovery." After various twists, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were awarded at the 1959 IOC session.
At the Tokyo Games he presided over the medal ceremony for judo, which debuted as an Olympic sport. When Kokichi Tsuburaya won bronze in the marathon, Takahashi, secretary to President Brundage, placed the medal around the athlete's neck in a moment of quick thinking.
Takahashi later worked on bringing the Winter Olympics to Sapporo. When illness kept him from the 1966 Rome IOC session that decided the 1972 host city, a recorded message was played — it made such an impression that President Brundage declared "Sapporo is a get-well gift for Takahashi," and the momentum shifted. Takahashi passed away in 1967 at 88 without seeing the Sapporo Games.
An avid golfer, he also served as the first chairman of Sagamihara Golf Club and Musashi Country Club, contributing to the sport's development.