ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sometimes thwarted, sometimes celebrated, sometimes embarrassing efforts to draw Japan’s popular culture into the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. In particular, it focuses on the expectations that the global appeal of anime, videogames, and other aspects of Japanese popular culture are supposed to be politically meaningful for Japan as a whole and that the Olympics would provide the optimal opportunity to demonstrate this. Japan is hardly alone in harboring and promoting these expectations, but the distinctive circumstances and calamities surrounding the postponed 2020 Olympic Games provide vivid examples of the challenges of turning a vibrant and endlessly complex entertainment environment into a singular story of national attractiveness and resilience.
