Will we be around for the Emperor’s enthronement?

We’ve been wandering around Japan for five weeks and, while it’s been a wonderfully immersive experience, you would be fooling yourself if you thought you were doing anything more than dipping your toes in the waters.

Typhoon Hagibis aside, little of real national importance here has managed to penetrate the rugby bubble and catch the attention. That will change on Tuesday, if we’re still here, when Japan’s Emperor Naruhito proclaims his enthronement at a ceremony at the Imperial Palace which will be attended by roughly 2,500 leaders and representatives from over 190 countries.

Yep, it will be hard for this one to pass us by and not just because our hotel is smack bang in the middle of ‘Embassy Row’. The emperor only ascended to the throne at the start of May following the abdication of his father, Akihito. Tuesday’s ceremony will come with all the pomp and splendour you would expect but it is an occasion that will be marked in other ways besides.

The Japanese government has announced it will pardon over half a million ‘petty criminals’ to coincide with the event. The vast majority of these are people convicted of traffic offences, a sizable minority will be those who caused death or injury in traffic accidents and a small percentage will have had convictions for assault, injury or theft.

Another news story to catch the eye on the excellent Kyodo English-language website this week was the brouhaha over the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) plan to move the 2020 Games marathon and race-walking events away from the capital and to the city of Sapporo -— a thousand kilometres to the north.

Tokyo governor, Yuriko Koike, is not impressed by the idea that athletes competing outside climate-controlled stadia will need cooler conditions. The surprising news prompted her to use her best sarcastic voice and suggest that they should be switched to some Russian-held Northern Territories islands off the coast of Hokkaido and to which Japan has made a claim.

“It came out of the blue,” said governor Koike, according to Kyodo. Not least for the mayor of Sapporo, Katsuhiro Akimoto, who, while welcoming the opportunity to possibly play a part next summer ahead of a planned bid for a future Winter Games, admitted that the first he had heard of their windfall was through the media.

It really is late in the day to be pondering such a move as this. Various administrative areas around Tokyo have been working away on the logistics of the road races but the recent World Athletics Championships in Doha and the oppressively hot and humid Japanese summer this year have clearly spooked the blazers.

Rightly so, you’d have to say. Even governor Koike accepted that athlete welfare has to be the priority and the fact is that the temperatures in Sapporo at that time of year are five-to-six degrees cooler than the norm in Tokyo.

“Athletes’ health and well-being are always at the heart of our concerns,” said the IOC president Thomas Bach earlier this week. “The Olympic Games are the platform where athletes can give ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ performances and these measures ensure they have the conditions to give their best.”

That aside, most preparations for next year’s Olympic Games are being taken care of away from the public eye. This week, journalists from around the world congregated in Tokyo for a global press briefing and to be ferried across the city and beyond to get a glimpse of some of the venues which will be used for the Games next year.

Visitors to Tokyo in the height of summer, when the one-year countdown to the event generated so much hype, were struck by the buzz being generated for the 2020 event. TV channels were saturated with it. Huge, drop-down posters were draped in shopping centres and in concourses. Shinjuku Station, the busiest in the world, was awash with the five rings branding.

That’s all been forgotten for now as rugby struts its stuff on the big stage but there is an understanding amid all the hype over the Brave Blossoms as they prepare for their quarter-final against the Springboks that this event will be dwarfed by the biggest sporting extravaganza in the world when it pitches up on their doorstep next July.

Tokyo hosted the Games back in 1964 and quite a few of the facilities used then will play their part again after having something of a makeover. Some of them bear plaques commemorating their role 55 years ago while the fashion for pop-up venues that really started in London seven years ago will be continued here in Japan too. If that all sounds cost effective then the cost of hosting the Games is still eye-watering.

The organising committee has tried to curb costs but building a new Olympic stadium from scratch is just one of the projects making up a budget that has escalated to somewhere north of 11 billion euro. And counting.

RWC Podcast: Buying into the confidence in the air around Irish camp