Tokyo vs Paris: who did the Paralympics better?
While France didn't have the challenge of hosting a worldwide event in the middle of a global pandemic like Japan, it still fell short when accessibility is discussed. Even after the games, a mere (and frankly rather baffling) 3% of its metro stations in Paris were fully accessible. The worst part? Increasing the accessibility would be "too costly", as if this isn't the number 1 city in tourism and receives people from all over the world with an infinite range of disabilities and locomotion issues. Only the newest Metro line is accessible for wheelchair users and, as the parathletes themselves have said, “it’s an utopia… until we leave the Athletes Village”, a factoid that continues to be shocking.
Tokyo isn't perfect and a lot had to be done (the metro station, known as the most complex in the world, had to be updated) won this dispute in pretty much everything related to infrastructure. And that's considering the hotel industry was not fully ready for the games, as even with renovation programs, the industry wasn't able to refit 1% of the rooms pre-games.
However, Japan is a super-ageing society and the Tokyo infrastructure in particular is and has been adapted to a variety of people with low mobilities, mainly the elderly. The metro stations, streets, stores and government buildings already had a continuing goal of providing accessibility to its ageing population, which greatly helped make the city accessible for the Paralympic games in 2020.
But the real question should be this: Is life better in Japan for a person with disabilities compared to France?
Short answer: It depends. On what exactly? Well, the type of disability and what aspect we're dealing with: infrastructure or social participation?
Japan has good infrastructure but the reality is that then majority of people with disabilities live in a bubble, a process that starts when they're still children and isolates them further as they grow older.
In this article,I go over what exactly happens in Japan for young people with disabilities as they enter school and join the workforce (or not necessarily, as that bubble remains for most of them when they grow up) in this article. I originally wrote this in Portuguese years ago before the Tokyo Paralympics in 2020. With the Paris 2024 Paralympics happening, I decided to update this article on what was (and still is) the current situation for people with disabilities in Japan according to my research.
Something fun I found out? Anime, series and movies made a huge change in how the Japanese society saw people with disabilities. Fiction, when done right, can give visibility and humanize all sorts of experiences and livelihoods - even when we never went through any of this ourselves. And I can only be happy for seeing more and more (good) media showing people with all sorts of disabilities in positions where they can motivate and build up readers!
You can read more about this topic in this article I wrote and translated to English this year!
Source for images in the article are by the author (Bia Kaori Mi). The header was created with Adore Firefly.