“That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”
- Fukushima
How far from Tokyo is that mess?
The city of Fukushma is 273 km from Tokyo, or 98 minutes by Shinkansen. I don’t know how much further you have to go to reach the exclusion zone around the nuclear power station.
(When I visited earlier this year, the closest that I went to Fukushima was Niigata and Nikko. Neither showed any signs of being affected by the disaster.)
Pretty far; approximately 170 miles by car.
Pretty far, but he’s surprisingly quick for a creature of his size.
Wait…were you asking about Godzilla or Fukushima?
Why the anti-smoking hate?
Smoking is still pretty popular, world wide.
If you’re going to restrict it to a non-smoking city with English signage predominating, you’re limited to Seattle, L.A., and San Fran.
No, you can go to Sydney or Melbourne too, but Sydney had the games 13 years ago.
Huh. I thought they still liked to light up down under. 
I see they are shaded the same as the U.S.
By the way, books and movies are a great way to develop completely accurate perceptions of a city or country.
Yes, but there’s broad social disapproval of cigarette smoking in Australia: no advertising of any kind is allowed, including plain cigarette packets being required, and no smoking in public buildings or near the entrances of public buildings. In addition there are high taxes, of about 35 cents per cigarette.
Been to New York lately? It’s downright pleasant in many public places now. Nary a cigarette plume to been seen or smelled, thank goodness. Of course folks still smoke in NY, but it is not nearly as bad as it was, say, 10 years ago.
The decision was IOC trying to go for the old Holiday Inn slogan: NO SURPRISES. Give it so someone that you are pretty damn sure can deliver and not throw you a curveball with, say, an anti-gay law with just months to go.
And as for stereotypical things to be found in Tokyo, at least the OP doesn’t seem to have had a chance to check out the really strange porn. THAT would have had to top the list of objections for any would-be visitor (or is it attractions) 
Really. And when it comes to be able to temporarily absorb a visitor surge in the tens-of-thousands range I would imagine the Kanto region would be capable. Oh, which is another thing: it’s not like they have to cram the whole megillah into the middle of downtown, there’s some room to spread along all those fast train corridors, as has been done around every Olympic city for decades.
Let’s be honest, anyone could see it coming. With Sochi already an embarrassment and Rio de Janiero looking like it’s going to be a real pain in the ass to get done, there was no chance they were going with anything other than the safest pick possible.
I guess the OP will just have to deal with the stunning revelation that many of the world’s countries contain people who speak languages other than English.
As to its climate, Tokyo is not particularly hot as Olympic cities go, so I’m not sure where that comes from. It certainly is no hotter than Atlanta or Athens, and isn’t much different from Beijing or Barcelona. Even Rio can be very hot in August, despite the fact that it’s technically their winter.
OK, you’se guys, let me in on it!
DISCLOSURE FOR THE SAKE OF FAIRNESS: I lived for 4 years in Tokyo between 1995 and 1998.
Of all the possible options for the 2020 Olympics, the BEST was Tokyo, hands down.
Istanbul was not a suitable candidate because the political situation in the whole area is too volatile and murky right now, and nobody knows what would happen in 7 years’ time.
Madrid was an even less suitable candidate (thank Og it didn’t win!!) because my country is NOT in shape, economically speaking, to absorb the expenses that the Olympics involve. Better to spend the time until 2020 trying to get out of the hole than spending money we don’t have for a project that will assuredly produce lots of red ink.
All in all, Tokyo was the best candidate, and the best option.
If you’re not squeamish, try a google image search for “cigarette packs in australia”.
And, of course, many restaurants display plastic models of their dishes with their prices. You can take the waiter over to the plastic food display and point.
Look up the lyrics to “Istanbul, not Constantinople”
Don’t know what some of these have to do with the games. Crowds, smoking, English, cost sure. But cultural stuff, work hours?
Out of the final candidates, it was a no-brainer. Tokyo should have few problems with logistics, and Japanese construction companies love to pour concrete. I think there might be a few square meters of river somewhere that they haven’t fucked with yet. Maybe this will distract them from putting tetrapods on beaches, building bridges between nowhere and nowhere, or putting another tunnel through another minor mountain for a bit.
Crowded? Yep. Probably about like New York (which I haven’t been to) but definitely busier than Chicago (which I have). Normal crowding is bad enough that a mall in the San Francisco area during Christmas looked like the mall in the middle of a normal weekday when I went back for a visit and my aunt dragged me to the mall with her. She thought it was crowded. I thought it was next to deserted. It’s not that freaky, though. You get used to it pretty quickly.
Giles, Golden Week is when a lot of people leave town. It’s actually less busy in Tokyo during that time. Even if they are in Tokyo, not everyone is going places all at the same time like they would be during the work week.
Smoking? Lots. It’s the number one thing I dislike about going out here. It’s not worse than most of Europe, or many other countries though.
English? Next to none, despite 6 years of compulsory education. Like Giles said, you have more luck with writing than speech. Good ol’ grammar-translation method! (That doesn’t fucking work for producing any kind of communication skill.) There are lots of signs in English, mostly because it’s fashionable, but some businesses and restaurants do make a sincere attempt to make foreigner-friendly signs and menus — sometimes with hilarious results.
The train system is actually pretty easy. It’s more user-friendly than BART; at least that was my impression the last time I used it from SFO when I visited family.
Male dominated? Not really. Or yeah, but no, but yeah. But no. As Vicky would say. Depends on your perspective and the circumstance.
Ask the salaryman who goes off to work at an 80 hour a week job and gets a meagre allowance from his wife whether he feels like he’s in charge. Visit a department store and marvel at the 1.5 floors out of 12 devoted to male-oriented goods. Go flirt with one of the office ladies and realize that she might have more disposable income than most of the guys in engineering because she lives at home until she (hopefully) latches on to one of the up-and-comers who will work 80 hours a week to support her and eventually a kid, maybe two if he’s lucky, while she decides major household expenses up to and including a car, often without consulting her husband beforehand.
Men might control work, but women control the household and the purse strings. The marketing shows that. The stores show that. Everything caters to women more than men. I would bet hard yen that male luxury goods in particular are bought more often by women for men than by men for themselves. I honestly know only a handful of businesses that cater more to men than women, and of the ones that come to mind, about half of them are “nighttime entertainment”. Even in most suit shops, which you’d think would be totally businessman oriented, the female section threatens to dominate the floor space.
Weather? Sucks. I’m from the Central Valley in California. It gets up over 110ºF and stays there during the day for weeks at a time in the summer. I still thought I was going to fucking die when I first got to Japan. You get most of that heat along with the fun sensation of breathing through a wet towel while wading through air that feels like stale ball sweat. You’ll get 95–100ºF (35–38ºC) temps, and 80%+ humidity, and the temperature might only drop a few degrees at night.
Old people drop dead daily during heat waves. August is the peak of that shit. I went to Spain in late July to early August of 2005. It was upwards of 40ºC every day, and my Japanese girlfriend (now wife) and I kept remarking how it felt so much cooler than Japan even though the thermometer readings were at least 3–5 degrees higher. You literally could not pick a worse time to come to Japan than during the middle of summer.
Spring or fall are about the only times the weather is tolerable to actually nice.
Winter in the Tokyo area is just annoyingly miserable, not dangerously cold. The heating and insulation in homes here sucks, though. So much so that one of my friends from Alberta, Canada — where it does get I-shit-you-not -40º or worse during winter — said that she’d never been more consistently uncomfortably cold than in Japan. If you’re in Tokyo, you can get on a train and boil your ass for a while since the seat heaters seem to be turned up to “broil”. Everyone looks at me like I’m an alien since the trains are so hot that I need to strip off layers.
Hokkaido is the only place I’ve been where people seem to have learned to build for cold, probably because they’d literally freeze to death if they didn’t. Nowhere in the Kanto or Kansai areas, where most of the population lives, have anything resembling decent insulation or heating.
Radiation? Lower than the background radiation in a bunch of places around the world. Check http://safecast.org for independently verified radiation levels. They helped disseminate plans for an open-source geiger counter and encouraged grassroots movements to measure local radiation levels as a check for the official figures. Radiation danger in Tokyo is probably lower than being downwind from a coal plant in the US.
Long work hours? Oh yeah, horror stories abound. My job is happy-happy joy-joy land compared to most of my friends, and I have to work 6 days a week, about 46–50 hours most weeks, more on others, with occasional Sundays or holidays required as well. (I have an 8 day week this week, for example, though this time at least I get a replacement day off on Tuesday, and Monday is a holiday.) I still work fewer hours than most of the people I know, though some of them usually get two-day weekends.
Food and drink? Everything is expensive. It’s roughly 2x the cost for California, which is expensive relative to most of the rest of the US. But beer is not $20. Roughly ¥500 on the cheap end, ¥700–¥900 many places. Good Belgian beer on tap from one of my favorite places in Ginza is over ¥1,000–¥1,300 for some beers, but that’s tippy-top end. Figure about ¥2,000 per adult eating out at a regular restaurant with one moderately priced drink, more for more food or drinks, less for lower-priced bars or fast-food, and sorta-kinda cheap if you go for conbini or bento type stuff.
A nice Italian or French style restaurant can be ¥3,000 per person to holyshithowmanyzeroesisthat!? But you’re not likely to mistake the latter for a place you can afford, or one that you’d feel comfortable entering in less than a suit. Sushi similarly ranges from kaiten-zushi, priced at around ¥150–¥400 a plate, to places where you really want to use a credit card so you can pay it off in monthly installments, but they only accept cash.
It can be fairly affordable, if you try, but budget at least 1.5–2x more for food than you would for an American trip. Unless you’ve been to New York, in which case you have a pretty good feel already, from what I’ve been told about prices there.
I realize I sound kind of negative in a lot of this, probably because I’m a long-term resident. If you’ve never been to Japan before, it’s weird and fun and exciting. It’ll be expensive, but worth it. Just don’t stay too long because you’ll start to see past all the stuff you were too dazzled with when you first came.
And for all the gods’ sake, if you do come to Japan, get the fuck out of Tokyo while you’re here. There are two things that Tokyo is good for: restaurants, and trains, plus Akihabara if you’re a game/anime/manga nerd. Otherwise, it’s stinky, crowded, expensive, kind of ugly, and depressing to live in. Go to Kyoto, Nara, Nikko, or somewhere out in the countryside. See at least a little of old Japan. New Japan is neon and flash with hollowness underneath.
The anime inspired mascots for 2020 will be awesome! They can do individual mascots for different events too!
Eva Unit 2 on javelin!
Vash the Stampede at the shooting range!
Ranma and Tae Kwon Do!
SSJ4 Goku as a weightlifter!
Hatsune Miku singing the Olympic Theme!