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The story
Criticism has emerged over the wooden container-type lodging where thousands of athletes will stay during the Asian Games, set to open on the 19th in Aichi and Nagoya. Jung Jae-yoon, vice president of the Korean Basketball Association, told AFP the accommodations are “the worst ever,” pointing to the problem of athletes taller than two meters being unable to stretch their legs out on the beds. On 5ch, while some noted that the Games had originally planned to build an athletes’ village but abandoned it for container housing due to soaring costs, others pointed out that Western outlets like the BBC and CNN were actually harsher on Japan than Korea was — turning the thread into more than just a simple pile-on.
Ahead of the 20th Asian Games — one of Asia’s largest sporting events — opening on the 19th in Aichi Prefecture, criticism has erupted over the wooden container-type lodging where thousands of athletes will be staying.
Jung Jae-yoon, vice president of the Korean Basketball Association, told AFP that the accommodations for this Games are “the worst ever.”
“Athletes over two meters tall can’t even stretch their legs out on the bed. It’s unreasonable.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Well, sure, if you're comparing it to a refugee camp…
They properly compared it to the World Cup in America
and it's Japan getting the praise, though
Quit nitpicking, idiot
We already learned our lesson with the Olympics and the Expo
why did we even bid for such a worthless event?
Nobody outside Asia even holds this thing — it's just a grab-bag of minor sports
Even Europe, which never used to do this, started holding one about ten years ago — now each of the five continental Olympic committees runs its own version
A gold medal gets you out of military service, so it actually ranks pretty high
Higher than the WBC even
not one country sends its actual top players
Korea takes it dead serious since military exemption is on the line
Japan, meanwhile, sends like the U-21 second string for soccer
I thought the athletes who got the cruise ship lucked out, but what happens to them if it sails out to sea?
Praising it?
Go look at Beijing — the athletes were joking around like "well, at least the beds aren't cardboard"
Lol, you're actually buying the fake story that the cardboard beds got mocked
Every reaction was more like "whoa, it doesn't collapse even with a ton of people jumping on it, that's awesome"
I really wish we'd just stop bidding for these things
It burns tax money and it's embarrassing
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Sounds like they scrapped the planned athletes' village because construction costs shot up, and switched to prefab container housing instead
Funding's apparently coming from the local government and related bodies, so maybe it's not really the athletes' fault
Back then the weak yen, labor shortage, and rising material costs all hit at once — feels like a case of everything piling up together
Probably that
Well, Japan did get poor all of a sudden
It hasn't even officially opened yet
Ball sports are just running their league rounds early because of fatigue concerns
Trim it down more
There are way too many events
Maybe just drop the ones that aren't even in the Olympics
NBC
CNN
FOX
Re: #62 Western media is ripping into this way harder than Korea is — that's something worth taking seriously
Come on, don't go sticking your nose into the Asian Games too lol
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The backdrop to this lodging controversy is that the athletes’ village originally planned for the Games was abandoned due to soaring construction costs, leading to a switch to prefab container-type housing (as >>97 points out, Nikkei also reported the weak yen, labor shortages, and rising material costs as factors). The thread shows both a view dismissing this as just “Korea nitpicking” and the counterpoint that “Western outlets like the BBC and CNN are criticizing it even more harshly” (>>129) — making clear this isn’t simply an anti-Korea sentiment issue, but an operational problem being flagged internationally as well. Some posts also conflated this with the “cardboard bed” story from the Beijing Olympics, but it’s worth noting that’s an anecdote from a completely different Games and isn’t directly related to this container housing. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the Asian Games carry Olympic-level weight for Korean athletes, since a gold medal comes with exemption from military service — which helps explain the intensity of the criticism.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisokuho+) thread “[Asian Games] Criticism of Japan’s Container-Type Housing — Korean Basketball Association: “Worst Ever”; Organizing Committee: “We Are Aware of the Complaints and Concerns”“.
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