Kohei Jinno is not a fan of the Olympics.
While Japan celebrated Tokyo’s victory over Istanbul and Madrid at the September meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires, 79-year-old Kohei Jinno was reliving a nightmare from 1964.
In a interview with The Japan Times, Jinno described how he was evicted from his home and business during the ’64 Tokyo games and in 2020 he will be forced to relocate again.
“I don’t want to see the Olympics at all,” Jinno told The Japan Times. “Deep inside, I have a kind of grudge against the Olympics.”
READ MORE: Photo Gallery: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics
Japan is planning to spend $4 billion on building and renovating facilities for the Games, including an athletes’ village and media centre.
At the centre of the infrastructure projects being built for the 2020 games is an 80,000-seat stadium.
The scale of the project will force close to 200 households, including Jinno’s, from the Kasumigaoka apartment complex.
Residents will be relocated to three other municipal housing complexes.
Japan fended off concerns about the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima ahead of winning the 2020 Games.
A French cartoon took aim at the decision to award the Games to Tokyo leading Japanese officials to file a complaint with the IOC.
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that led to meltdowns at three of its reactors. Fukushima’s operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., has recently acknowledged that for more than two years, radioactive water has been flowing into the Pacific.
-With files from the Associated Press
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