In terms of entertainment value, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which is gone but far from forgotten, continues to pay dividends. The latest source of delight is Ishikawa Prefectural Governor Hiroshi Hase, a former Olympian wrestler who, during a lecture he gave in Tokyo on Nov. 17, recounted a conversation he had with the late Shinzo Abe in 2013 when Hase was a Diet lawmaker and head of the Tokyo Olympic bid committee and Abe was prime minister. Abe, who was desperate to win the 2020 Games hosting job for Tokyo, advised Hase that he didn’t have to worry about money because the cabinet’s secret emergency fund would be made available to him. Caught up in the excitement of boasting about his close encounter with a person who many now consider a saint, Hase then explained how he used these funds to produce a personal “photo album” for each member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who had once been an Olympic athlete. One album cost ¥200,000 to produce, Hase said, and they were subsequently presented to their respective subjects as “souvenirs.” As everyone knows, Tokyo won the hosting honors in September of 2013. 

Hase almost immediately realized the can of worms he had opened with his reminiscence and publicly disavowed it the same day, saying that he had somehow misconstrued the facts of the matter, but it was already too late. The press had picked it up. Asahi Shimbun, which did not attend the lecture, published several reports about Hase’s faux pas based on interviews with people who did. What exactly about the incident did Hase misconstrue? After all, it was he who carried out the photo album production for the assumed purpose of currying favor with the voting members of the IOC, which is a violation of IOC ethics rules. 

After Hase returned to Ichikawa he held a regular press conference to explain the upcoming prefectural budget, and the only questions asked by the attending press were about the Olympic bid. “I don’t get it,” said one reporter, obviously speaking for everyone. “Are you saying you didn’t understand what you were talking about?” Hase declined to answer and formally retracted all the comments he made at the lecture. Other reporters asked if he would admit “accountability” and “apologize to the LDP.” The press conference lasted a full hour, and Asahi estimates Hase refused to answer about 40 questions, all of them having to do with the bid. 

Asahi studied Hase’s personal blog and found a posting on April 1, 2013, in which he described a conversation with Yoshihide Suga, the future prime minister who, at the time, was the chief cabinet secretary, which means he was nominally in charge of the secret cabinet funds. During this conversation, Hase explained his plan for winning the bid. He would lobby foreign embassies in Tokyo and, prior to traveling abroad to carry out further promotional activities, meet with various photo agencies, presumably to secure materials for the albums. In another post for May 31, he wrote that the secret to guaranteeing the hosting gig for Tokyo would be to tap the voters’ honne (real desires), since it would be difficult to win just through a normal bid campaign. Asahi focused on this comment to imply that tapping honne essentially meant bribery.

The controversy hasn’t been overlooked by the opposition. In a session in the Lower House on Nov. 21, a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party said that while the cabinet funds used are a national secret, it was obvious that Hase used them for “an illegal act,” so he should be summoned to the Diet and explain fully and frankly to the public what he did. Asahi explained the IOC’s ethics rules, which, in 2013, stipulated that anyone associated with a candidate city’s bid may not provide “IOC-related individuals” with gifts. By the same token, IOC-related people must not accept gifts from those associated with hosting bid campaigns. Since then, the ethics rules have been revised, but this particular one has remained the same. It wasn’t always that way. Until 1999, IOC members could accept gifts of up to $200 in value. The reason it was changed was due to the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. During its bid campaign, the Nagano committee presented the head of the IOC with a valuable Japanese sword and a painting valued at ¥2 million. IOC members and their families were also invited to Nagano for an extravagant holiday at the expense of the committee. At the time these activities received a great deal of criticism from various parties. Even after the new rules were implemented, it was revealed that Salt Lake City, the host of the Winter Games in 2002, had given gifts of cash to IOC members. In addition to prohibiting gifts of any value, the new rules said that IOC members could not visit host cities at the express invitation of those cities. 

The Tokyo bid committee could be liable for violating these rules and if it were it would seem to follow that IOC members who accepted the albums might also be in breach of the rules. On Nov. 21, Thomas Bach, the present head of the IOC—not in 2013, but he was a voting member—was in New York to take part in a meeting at the UN and Japanese media asked him about the albums. Though it’s highly likely he knew about the controversy he acted as if he didn’t; in fact, he seemed to be taking the piss, saying that he did have “some family albums and photo albums.” When the matter was explained to him he replied that he hadn’t heard what Hase said and therefore couldn’t comment. A former executive of the Tokyo bid committee told Asahi that he had “heard” of the albums but “not at any official meeting.” A former Japan Olympic Committee member waved off Asahi’s question and simply said that at the time “everyone was working hard to win the bid.”

Both Asahi and an article that appeared Nov. 21 in Nikkan Gendai Digital say the number of albums produced was about 100, meaning the scheme cost the bid committee ¥20 million, which is taxpayer money since Hase says he used the cabinet funds. Gendai delved further into Hase’s blog and found another post that said the IOC prohibits direct contact between members of bid committees and members of IOC, but that there can be “indirect contact.” At any rate, the post also said that Hase met with the president of a photo agency who told him the agency had signed a contract with the IOC to provide relevant photographs, presumably of the IOC members in their athletic prime. So, in effect, the bid committee indirectly paid the IOC for photographs it then compiled in book-like form to give back to the IOC as presents. 

It’s impossible to know if the gesture really had the effect intended, but the whole project says more about Hase’s and the LDP’s curious understanding of human nature than it does about their ethics. Spending ¥20 million to give a bunch of athletic officials pictures of themselves they already have in their possession sounds not only like a huge waste of money but also, to use a sports term, an own goal. But, of course, that’s not what Hase regrets, because, based on his Nov. 17 lecture, he obviously is still proud of the idea.