On May 14, 10 weeks before the start of the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics, the ones which organizers once sold as the “Recovery Games,” Kenji Utsunomiya submitted his petition. Backed by 350,000 signatures, amid a state of emergency, it arrived at Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s desk with a simple message.
And all across a country awash in controversy, a country anything but recovered from the pandemic, millions of people seem to agree. Public opinion polls have shown that somewhere between 60 and 80% of Japanese citizens oppose the holding of the Tokyo Games this summer.