Olympic stadiums are a problem.
In Athens, many of the 2004 stadia now stand abandoned and
overgrown. Beijing's hugely expensive 2008 "Bird's Nest" may have become
a tourist attraction, but has been rarely used for anything else. Even London's "cheap" 2012 stadium is having a troubled and expensive rebirth as a football arena.
So what lessons has Tokyo taken away from all this? Huge and expensive state-of-the-art stadiums are a bad idea? Apparently not.
Renowned British architect Zaha Hadid has designed it. Some have likened it to a spaceship, others to a giant bicycle helmet.
The initial budget was $3bn (£1.8bn). That has since been
scaled back to "just" $1.7bn. The arching roof will rise 70m (230ft)
into the air. The original design would have been three times bigger
than London's Olympic stadium. The revised design is now only twice as
big. This has got some of Tokyo's more illustrious denizens up in arms. Primary among them is Fumihiko Maki, one of Japan's best-known architects who also designed the Tokyo gymnasium for the 1964 Olympics.
"I'm saying it's just ridiculous," he said. "We are raising our voices, but they don't listen."
It is hard to imagine this gentle, softly spoken 86-year-old getting angry, but it appears he has. "We are raising our voices, but they don't listen!" he says.
"My biggest objection is to cover the
stadium," he said. "Technically it's more difficult and costly. This
kind of system is not ideal for sports. All sports people would be
against having a covered field.
"If you make an open stadium then later you could reduce the
size to 60,000 as you have done in London. By building a covered stadium
for 80,000 you can't change it." The reason Tokyo is building such a complex retractable roof is so the stadium can be used for concerts after the Olympics is over.
Without a roof, the noise of rock and pop concerts would break Tokyo's tight noise restrictions, especially in the middle of a residential neighbourhood.
That brings us to the second big problem: location.
Green importance
Tokyo, rightly, has a reputation for being a huge sprawling mess, with little in the way of town-planning or green spaces. The ones that it does have are therefore precious.
The new stadium is being built smack in the middle of one of the greenest, most historic parts of the city - Meiji Jingu Gaen, whose name means "The outer garden of the Meiji Shrine". The Emperor Meiji is revered in Japan as the man who dragged the isolated backward country in the modern world.
When the Emperor Meiji passed away in 1912, people from all over Japan donated money to buy this land," said Nobuko Shimizu, a member of a group called "The Custodians of the National Stadium" that has been campaigning to stop the old stadium from being demolished.