Reigniting the Flame: Nation-Building Through Medal Winning at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

Modern scholars agree that the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games marked a dramatic turning point for the Japanese nation after the Second World War. In Japan, the 18th Olympiad remains so much more than an international sporting event – it represents the nation’s transition away from the pain of postwar destruction towards the economic prosperity of the later Shōwa Era years (1960-1989). Scholars have discussed the Olympic spectacle and its symbolic significance at length, but the scholarship presently lacks in a discussion of the role of athletes in helping to resolve the uncertainty of the immediate postwar years. Athletes maintained a vital political role of confirming the nation’s progress after World War II to the Japanese people through their Olympic medals. They became beacons for nationalism, restoring confidence to a fragmented and insecure nation, but also, importantly, transformed themselves into valuable political tools. This thesis follows three separate case studies of Japanese athletes across three separate sporting events in hopes of conveying that the 1964 Tokyo Olympics held value to various institutions as a means of reigniting national confidence in the country. Each case tackles nationalism, gold medal desires, and the developing postwar Japanese cultural identity from a unique angle, highlighting the importance of the Tokyo Olympiad as a nation-building event in postwar Japanese history.Bachelor of Art