The Truce at Nagoya

The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here, by those who would make the Asian Games at Aichi-Nagoya one more theatre for the quarrels of chancelleries, violates the canon I have always held most necessary: that custom, convention, and old prescription restrain both man’s anarchic impulse and the innovator’s lust for power. Men do not keep the peace because they have reasoned their way to it. They keep it because they have inherited forms that make keeping it habitual.

The argument against me deserves to be put at full strength. Sport has never been innocent of politics. The modern Olympic revival was born in the anxieties of French national decline, and every march of nations since has been a parade of flags. On this view it is hypocrisy to call the Games apolitical, and an organizing committee that pretends otherwise is only hiding whose politics it serves. Better, say the critics, to let the competing nations quarrel openly.

All of this is true, and none of it touches the point. The Games were never meant to abolish rivalry among nations. They were meant to give it a form: a measured track, a weighed bar, a referee whose whistle every nation agrees beforehand to obey. The medieval tournament did not end feudal enmity. It gave that enmity rules, and for an afternoon the rules held. Their value lies in being prescriptive, accepted rather than renegotiated. Once each delegation treats the anthem, the accreditation list, and the seating of officials as instruments of present policy, the form stops containing politics and starts conducting it, the way a lightning rod that has lost its grounding wire becomes only a tall piece of metal.

Some sixty miles from Nagoya, at Ise, the Japanese have for more than a thousand years torn down their holiest shrine and rebuilt it, plank for plank, every twenty years. The carpenters do not improve the design, and no minister votes on the dimensions. The rebuilding is the tradition. Each generation proves its fidelity by labour rather than by argument. An international games is a younger and frailer thing, but it lives by the same law. It survives only if every competing nation reconstructs it faithfully each time, setting aside for a fortnight its liberty to amend.

What the host nation’s organizers risk is not a ruined festival. They risk the quieter corrosion of precedent. Every concession made at Aichi-Nagoya will be cited at the next Games as established practice, and the next committee will inherit a form with one more joint loosened.

Picture a single weightlifter, chalk on her palms, standing before the bar while officials in the corridor dispute whose flag may hang above the platform. Her contest is the oldest thing in the building. She waits, and the chalk dries.