Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had to delay announcing that the plan for the new National Stadium, the main venue of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, would be scrapped. This is because it took him much longer than he had hoped to persuade former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who heads the Tokyo Olympics Organizing Committee.
The night before he made the fateful announcement on July 17, Abe and his close associates invited Mori to dinner to win his consent for a scenario in which he would visit the prime minister's office the following day and agree to Abe's idea of adopting an entirely new design because of the high costs associated with the previously approved scheme.
Of greater political significance than who was responsible for the stadium fiasco is an in-depth study of the psychological dynamics between Abe and Mori.