Hello from Tokyo where the city is hosting the 2020 Olympic Games this year in 2021.

Postponed for 12 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The city also hosted the games back in 1964,

which were very different times. How different we shall discover through some of the people who were there and some who hope to see 2021 act as the same

Catalysts for change a catapult to the same seismic shifts in economic fortunes and social norms that 1964 seemed to herald. I'm Ken Nishikawa and I'm Nick Lusken. Let's go back to the opening.

I'm Ken Nishikawa and I'm Nick Lusken.

Well let's go back to the opening of the very first Tokyo Olympic Games.

Cast your mind back nearly 60 years.

Imagine yourself in 1964.

We're in Tokyo and the city is alive with the sound of building an industry.

The Beatles might be on the radio and soon they're going to play their infamous

Budoacan concert.

The country has survived war. Hiroshima and recession, yet there's a

strange youthful exuberance in the air. Everything and everyone is getting ready to

embrace the modern age and the stage is set for the Olympics

to show the world that Japan is ready for a new world order. It's difficult to imagine Tokyo before 1964 because so much of what we see today was shaped at that time.

But all of that change had come from tragedy. The country had been devastated by

war and the recession that followed. Pretty much everything we see today were built

after that and it was a country divided with American forces occupying Okinawa

a painful reminder of the end of an empire.

The games really were a chance to show the world a new Japan rebuilt for

modernity and for peace.

And even today as a new Olympic Games is underway in the city, the impact of 1964 is still very visible from the iconic

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