If Tokyo's reaction to winning the 2020 Olympics, especially among the cash-strapped TV stations and other media types who rely on bread and circuses-type events to pay the bills, made you feel like Alice in Wonderland or a character in a Samuel Beckett play, you're not alone.
Well beyond the drawbridge of Old Edo, where the other roughly 90 percent of the country lives, the general feeling was a mixture of "Good for you" and "Don't forget the victims of Tohoku and that problem in Fukushima. You know, the one you told the world was under control?"
The triumph also came with contradictory feelings about the alleged benefits for the rest of the country. There is hope that the boastful predictions — all from Tokyo-based pundits, of course — about the Olympics being of great benefit to local economies will turn out to be something other than wishful thinking or cynical propaganda.
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