The 2020 Summer Olympics will be the hottest ever; due to a combination of climate change and scheduling them when Tokyo is at its most sweltering. Cities have been transformed, with the Games used by governments to unite citizens behind patriotic visions of national success and project a modernist image of a city and nation on the leading edge of global progress. This is the Olympic paradox-being uniquely symbolic of modernity while also complicit in modernity's outcome, including the systematic depletion of the Earth's resources, our destruction of its habitats, and pollution of the biosphere with emissions and effluents which together threaten the sustainability of life on Earth.

The Japanese government's manipulation of athleticism and consumerism to make Fukushima's radiation problems appear irrelevant takes the Olympics into dangerous new levels of state coercion. This essay urges making radionuclides visible—even metaphorically humanizing them—to grasp the ongoing threat to the people, land, and water that inhabit the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis.

In these excerpts from our manga ‘guidebook’ to the Olympics for foreign visitors we include some critical commentary concerning both the 1964 and present Olympics. From breathless hyperbole to environmental destruction readers encounter graphic images of the games beyond the PR hype. Alas, changes thought necessary have damaged the physical and cultural ecology of Japan and there is a need for greater social responsibility.