The 2026 Asian Games, held in Aichi and Nagoya, have drawn criticism over operational failures — including athletes barred from competing due to registration mishaps and broadcasts that barely aired thanks to a dispute with the outsourced media partner — sparking a heated thread on 5channel. Posters repeatedly compared the situation to the Tokyo Olympics, which finished its full schedule despite arrests over a corruption scandal, and the Osaka-Kansai Expo, which wrapped up without major turmoil. Opinion split over whether success should be judged by “did the event actually function” or by “was it free of scandal.”
Lol, 2 bytes is actually pretty generous
Don't you mean 2 bits?
Guess the memory's already gone
At least it functioned as a tournament—
every match got played
every match got broadcast properly
At the Nagoya Asian Games, a sepak takraw (a Southeast Asian kick-volleyball sport) athlete couldn't even compete because of a screwup by the Nagoya organizing office.
TV coverage was outsourced to China, and a contract dispute meant almost nothing got aired.
Compared to how shoddy Nagoya was, Tokyo counts as a success.
I've been a little curious about the Yokohama Flower Expo — what's so funny about it?
Can a casual like me, who barely knows more than having a flower subscription, still enjoy it?
arrests over corruption tied to running the event? That's basically unheard of.
The Games themselves ran the full schedule with no issues —
that's a passing grade.
Nagoya didn't even reach that bar.
The level of criticism isn't comparable.
An operation riddled with corruption? lol
Even with the corruption, it still functioned as a tournament.
At Nagoya, athletes couldn't even compete — events like sepak takraw didn't happen at all.
Osaka Expo (EV buses that can't even be reused)
The question is: success from whose point of view?
Even so, it still held together as a tournament.
At Nagoya, matches happened but nobody could watch because of trouble with the broadcaster,
and in some events athletes couldn't even get into the venue to compete.
It just didn't function as a tournament.
An operation that can't even manage proper coverage.
The matches ARE happening — they just can't get them on air.
lol
Also, that thing about the food portions being small was reportedly just fake news based on a photo of some venue snacks.
So the BBC spread the fake news?
The real problem with the Nagoya Games isn't that peripheral stuff —
it's that the matches themselves couldn't be run properly.
The opening ceremony and the food are side issues, 'nice to have' at best.
Nagoya kept botching the core stuff, like kicking out registered athletes and causing matches to not even happen.
Osaka was a total failure.
Hurry up and settle those unpaid bills already.
No, Tokyo was worse.
It was so unpopular that barely any spectators showed up.
Wasn't it a huge blunder when a referee collided with the athlete who was way out in the lead during the BMX event, causing them to crash?
I got the details wrong, sorry.
It was during practice — the referee collided with a gold-medal favorite and injured them.
Not during the actual competition. My bad.
If it had been, the whole world would be praising it lol
A success leaning toward failure.
The Expo was just a failure.
The Asian Games is a full-blown disgrace.
insisting the Tokyo Olympics was a success is really a stretch.
Enough with the classic 'Tokyo move' of running others down to prop Tokyo up.
Everything people call a failure about the Tokyo Olympics is stuff outside the actual competition — the athletes' village, the opening ceremony, the corruption.
At Nagoya, the competitions themselves couldn't even happen.
Can't you tell the difference in severity?
Quit arbitrarily setting your own criteria and moving the goalposts.
Regardless of how Aichi did,
looking at the whole picture, the Tokyo Olympics was a failure.
But overseas, the Tokyo Olympics is generally rated as a failure.
Background and points of contention
The Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021) did run its full schedule as planned, but several people connected to the organizing committee were arrested over a bid-rigging and corruption scandal involving sponsor selection — so the “corruption” mentioned in the thread is a real event. That said, specific figures like the “3 trillion yen in unaccounted-for funds” are claims made by thread posters and have not been officially confirmed, so some caution is warranted. The Osaka-Kansai Expo faced pre-event worries such as sluggish advance ticket sales, but it wrapped up its run without major disruption. As for the claims swirling around this Asian Games — that “athletes couldn’t compete” and “broadcasts barely happened” — the sources are eyewitness accounts from residents and social media posts, and the thread contains no full confirmation via any official announcement. The real point of contention isn’t who won or lost in competition, but which yardstick defines “success”: whether the event “functioned operationally” or whether it was “free of scandal.” Readers can follow the thread’s fault lines more easily by noting which standard each argument is implicitly applying.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Live Galileo board) thread “Tokyo: ‘The Olympics were a success’ / Osaka: ‘The Expo was a success’ / Aichi: ‘Branded with the stamp of the worst Asian Games ever’.”
