(23 Jul 2021) Protesters continued to voice their opposition nearby Tokyo's Olympic stadium, where - belated and beleaguered - the virus-delayed Summer Olympics finally opened Friday night with cascading fireworks.
Close to the near-empty stadium, protesters chanted "Cancel the Olympics" and held up banners reading "Olympics kill the poor."
Protesters' shouts from outside the arena gave voice to a fundamental question about these Games as Japan, and large parts of the world, reel from the continuing gut-punch of a pandemic that is stretching well into its second year, with cases in Tokyo approaching record highs this week.
The Tokyo 2020 opening ceremony began Friday evening local time, 364 days behind the original schedule and with a very different feel than initially intended before the pandemic changed everything.
The Games, largely without spectators and opposed by much of the host nation, are going ahead a year later than planned.
A day earlier, Tokyo hit another six-month high in new COVID-19 cases as worries grew of worsening infections during the Games. Still, the number of cases and deaths as a share of the population in Japan are much lower than in many other countries.
The opening ceremony will be held mostly without spectators to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections, although some officials, guests and media will attend, including U.S. first lady Jill Biden.
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