From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is a daily.

Despite the fact that fewer than 10% of its population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19,

Japan says that the Olympic Games will be played this summer in Tokyo.

The news spoke to our colleague, Motoko Rage, about why the Japanese people were mean so

and bivalent about the idea.

It's Monday, June 28th.

Hello.

Nice to see you.

Good to see you.

We've all been watching and waiting to see whether the Olympics are actually going to happen.

And now it's a month out and it seems like they're on.

It does. It's sort of hard to believe.

They were postponed last year and now we're at this point.

We're kind of amazed that it's going to happen in about a month.

And I guess on one hand that makes sense because we are in a moment of recovery, more and more people are getting vaccinated.

But on the other hand, my impression is that Japan and many parts of the world in fact are not nearly as vaccinated as we are here in the United States.

And it also occurs to me that like the Olympics is kind of the perfect super spreader event.

Like you've got all these people coming from all different parts of the world, bringing with them all kinds of regional and local diseases, possibly.

And so I wonder if actually having the Olympics now is a good idea.

You and the Japanese public both are wondering that exact same thing. I mean, I think there's a lot of anxiety.

Japan's borders have been closed for well over a year.

And so all of a sudden you're going to have thousands of people, tens of thousands of people from over 200 countries descending on Japan all at once.

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