TOKYO: Tokyo's top administrator has denied that North Korea's latest nuclear test will trigger regional instability and threaten the city's bid to host the 2016 Olympics.
"It's an issue of East Asian security," Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about Pyongyang's test blast a day earlier. "But I don't think it's suddenly going to become a flashpoint." Ishihara was keen to highlight his city's financial might and public safety record but admitted the bidding race for the Games was a tough one to call.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will announce the winner from Tokyo and rival candidate cities Chicago, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 2 in Copenhagen.
"It is difficult to read world opinion or which way the political wind blows," said Ishihara, who plans to be in Lausanne next month for Tokyo's technical briefing to IOC members.
"Or how the worldwide recession will influence things.
Reading how 100 or so IOC officials will vote is really hard." Ishihara insisted support for Tokyo's waterfront bid among the city's 12 million residents was far higher than the reported figure of 56 percent produced by an IOC poll earlier this year.
"The IOC survey was in February," said the 76-year-old.
"Since then we've campaigned hard, made TV commercials and the mood has changed." City officials said their latest poll showed 70 percent of Tokyoites were in favor of the bid, while an independent survey by Japan's Yomiuri newspaper indicated 76 percent support.
The Japanese capital, the first Asian city to host the Olympics in 1964, topped the IOC's technical evaluation last June.
However, Barack Obama's landslide victory in the United States presidential election last November was seen to give his home city of Chicago a major boost.
"Financially of course, Tokyo is solid," said Ishihara, a keen yachtsman who worked as an official assistant at the sailing venue at the 1964 Olympics.
"Credit assessment companies such as Moody's rated Tokyo as stronger than the Japanese government." Tokyo's bid leaders claim the city is best-placed to survive the global financial crisis and stage a debt-free Olympics with a contingency fund of over $4 billion already in the bank.
"I am not saying Tokyo is totally free of crime but our safety and security is also the best," said the often outspoken Ishihara. "To that I would add cleanliness, low pollution and environmental friendliness.
"Tokyo has just joined ICAP (an open forum to promote a compulsory cap and trade scheme to cut greenhouse emissions).
It is the only one of the four candidate cities to sign up." Ishihara added: "I want to show that Tokyo is the most comfortable metropolis in the world to live in. Japanese don't boast much... but we also have the best food in the world!"
