Tokyo hotels are struggling to welcome overseas officials and media workers visiting the capital for the Olympics in the spirit of omotenashi (hospitality) as they have separate routes for them from those for other customers as part of COVID-19 measures need to provide.
After some overseas broke rules restricting their activities and took to the streets of Tokyo, the Olympic Organizing Committee has shown its willingness to impose penalties.
According to the Tokyo Games Playbook, athletes and other visitors to the Games will not be allowed to use public transport, walk around town, or eat out for 14 days after their arrival. You are encouraged to use special buses and to have meals in appropriate facilities at competition venues and in hotel restaurants or to use food delivery services. Offenders will be penalized.
About 400 people related to the Olympics and about 10 other guests are staying at a hotel in the Shinagawa district of Tokyo. The manager of the hotel said that all guests have the same entrance to the breakfast room and that there are partitions around each table. But he said, “It is difficult for the hotel to separate elevators.”
Security guards sent by the organizing committee control the movements of the guests, but do not accompany them on their excursions.
People gather at a facility in the Koto district of Tokyo on July 22nd to take part in a tour for foreign reporters. | KYODO
The manager of a hotel in Shibuya Ward said, “We previously provided foreign guests with information about nearby business (the coronavirus pandemic), but we are now doing nothing for overseas Olympians after they have checked in.”
A technician from Spain waiting for an Olympic person bus in Chuo Ward said he knew the activity rules and was staying in his hotel room.
A man who works for a French media organization and shops in a supermarket said it was impossible to confine himself to his hotel room, even though he had arrived in Japan less than 14 days ago.
On Saturday, Masanori Takaya, spokesman for the organizing committee, announced that the organizers had stolen the Tokyo Games identity card from a person in the athletes’ village on Friday after the viewing.
Teimuraz Lezhava, Georgia’s chief executive in Japan, admitted in a Twitter post that an Olympic athlete from his country who was staying in the Olympic Village had been sightseeing. The diplomat apologized for the incident. The athlete has already left Japan.
Takaya said it was “absolutely inadmissible” to leave the athletes’ village to go sightseeing.
This was the first time someone has had their Olympic ID withdrawn since the Tokyo Games began.
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