The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games are perhaps the most significant in modern history, due to the unprecedented challenges surfaced by the COVID-19 pandemic. To meet this unique moment, Japanese organizers are implementing increased safety measures and new technology to ensure the safety of athletes and others connected to the games.

“The difficulty in organizing these games is figuring out how to respond to a situation that the world is experiencing for the first time,” says Hidemasa Nakamura, games delivery officer and executive director of sports at the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Nakamura says roughly 80% of his daily tasks are related to COVID-19 prevention. He explains that a successful prevention strategy requires dividing visitors into categories—athletes, games staff, media, attendants—and implementing measures tailored to each.

In the case of athletes, they will be requested to share their itineraries with the committee in advance of their arrival. Once in Japan, each athlete will be required to basically stay only in stadiums, training grounds and their accommodations, and their movement will be restricted to chartered vehicles to curb the risk of infection. Athletes will also be periodically tested at random for COVID-19.

“Our motto is, ‘Be prepared for anything you can imagine,’” Nakamura says. “By resolving one potential scenario at a time, we’re developing a matrix that will allow us to rapidly respond to any situation.”

Nakamura says that the unique nature of the problem impacting the games has, if anything, strengthened the committee’s determination to make the Summer Games a success. “If we can overcome this global health threat to successfully host the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, we will make history,” he says. “Images of athletes from around the world competing with all their might could turn the Tokyo Games into a symbol of healthy living and of life itself.”

In the areas surrounding Tokyo, tourism boards, hotel owners and restaurateurs have begun mapping out ways to bring future travelers in safely. Take Kyoto, for example. Akiko Saga, the director general of the Kyoto City Tourism Association, says the city has worked diligently throughout the past months to ensure they are ready to welcome guests once travel becomes possible.

Places like Minokichi, a 300-year-old, Kyoto-style kaiseki restaurant, have implemented safety measures that are common throughout Japan—like temperature checks, required hand sanitation, and plexiglass partitions between socially distanced tables. Rikifusa Satake, the 10th-generation owner of the restaurant and president of Minokichi of Kyoto Co., has embraced a hybrid approach to meet customers where they are. “We’ve shifted our business model towards selling luxury bento boxes for takeout,” he explains.

In Kyoto’s central Shijo-Karasuma district, Ryokan Kohro, a traditional Japanese inn, has evolved to accommodate guests differently. “Dinner and breakfast are served only in the guest rooms,” says Tatsuma Kitahara, president of Kohro. “We’ve enacted a set of very strict rules to keep people safe.”

Across the city, many of Kyoto’s over 1,600 temples are also instituting high-tech and low-touch measures to keep visitors safe. At the Kurodani Temple, visitors’ temperatures are scanned as they pass a heat-gauging screen. Communal spaces at the Fushimi-Inari-Taisha Shrine are repeatedly treated with an antiviral coating. And at the Yasaka Shrine, the traditional act of ringing bells with suzunoo ropes has been replaced with motion-activated speakers that play ringing sounds as visitors pass their hands over a sensor.

“By establishing guidelines that take COVID-19 seriously and cover every relevant industry, we wanted to show the world that we were ready to bring people back to the city,” Saga says. “We’ve also launched Kyoto Machi-quette—a website offering content designed to encourage tourists to follow certain manners when visiting Kyoto. None of it is pushy or judgmental; we want to convey information in a fun but educational way.”

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