It’s Been All Downhill Recent Stock Market Crashes, Runaway Costs And Lagging Revenues Cast Large Shadow Over Winter Games

A month ago, Keita Asari was praying for snow. Lots of it. This week, as the executive producer in charge of the Nagano Olympics’ opening ceremony on Feb. 7, he has been going to the famous Zenkoji shrine to pray for no more snow.

As it is, some 20 centimeters (8 inches) of the stuff had to be brushed off the seats in the giant Minami Nagano Sports Park before the opening of the 19th Olympic Winter Games.

With some cooperation from the weather gods, there is no question that the Nagano Olympics will be the slickest spectacle staged yet in the history of the winter games. It will certainly be the biggest. Unfortunately, the event will also win the gold medal for runaway costs.

The games were planned while Japan was still intoxicated with the excesses of the bubble economy - before the stock and property markets crashed, ushering in today’s austerity.

Local governments in Nagano prefecture dug deeply into their pockets to pay for the widening of roads and the construction of new sports facilities. Entrepreneurs, expecting a flood of foreign visitors, splurged heavily on providing western-style accommodation.

An expressway was bulldozed through the mountainous prefecture, and a sleek new bullet-train has halved the three-hour journey from Tokyo.

All told, insiders reckon that staging the event has cost a staggering 1.3 trillion yen ($10.5 billion).

Eishiro Saito, president of the Nagano Organizing Committee (NAOC), rejects complaints from citizens who are worried about how their taxes have been spent.

The games, he claimed recently, would boost the local economy - largely tourism - by up to 3 trillion yen.

Unfortunately, tourism in Nagano is not up, but down.

Hotel-owners and innkeepers throughout the prefecture got wind that something was wrong two months ago when NAOC cancelled a quarter of the 16,000 rooms it had block-booked.

Occupancy rates in the prefecture’s ski villages - normally over 80 percent at this time of the year - are currently running below 60 percent.

Chambers of Commerce say regular winter tourists have stayed away, fearing they would not be able to get near the ski slopes because of the Olympics.

Meanwhile, the only other Asians with any interest in winter games - the South Koreans - have remained patriotically at home while their country struggles with its financial troubles.

The NAOC leadership has already embarrassed itself over attempts to present the greenest ever winter games.

Until it recently backed down, it had cited environmental concerns for refusing adamantly for five years to meet the International Ski Federation’s request to raise the starting point of the men’s downhill race to a higher altitude, in order to create a longer and more testing course than the hopelessly short one originally planned.

The organizers had claimed a higher starting point would cause untold damage to a national park, despite 170,000 recreational skiers crisscrossing the area every winter.

Now Nagano has another headache. The new roads are bringing something nasty to its once pristine forests and snow-draped mountainsides.

Organized crime has started a nifty new business trucking toxic waste from factories in the industrial heartland of Japan and dumping it quietly in Nagano’s countryside.