The Olympic Games opened in Tokyo on October 10, 1964, the first ever held in Asia and the first carried live to other continents by satellite. Emperor Hirohito declared them open at the National Stadium in front of some 70,000 people. Ninety-four nations took part. The last runner in the torch relay was a young man named Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, and the choice was read everywhere as a statement about what the country was saying about itself.
The city was rebuilt. Japan had won the 1940 Olympics and lost them to the war, then was not invited to 1948, and hosting in 1964 was treated as a return: two new expressways, a monorail from the airport, a new subway line, the gymnasium Kenzo Tange designed with a cable-suspended roof, and the high-speed railway between Tokyo and Osaka, which opened nine days before the ceremony, all went up for the fortnight.
The technology was part of the point. Syncom 3, an American communications satellite, carried the opening ceremony and several events live to the United States and, a few hours later, to Europe, which had never been done. Results were processed by computer for the first time at an Olympics, and a quartz timer was used for the first time, and the broadcaster transmitted in a format that could be recorded at home by the few who had the equipment.
South Africa was absent. The committee had kept it out over racial policy. It did not return until 1992. The games ran until October 24 without incident, and Japan finished third in the medal table. Both Japanese accounts and foreign ones tend to date the country's postwar rehabilitation from those two weeks, which is a large claim to put on a sporting event and one that the rebuilding around the stadium makes easier to accept.