According to the Reference News, in the men's triathlon competition of the Tokyo Olympic Games held on July 26, several runners vomited after the swimming competition.
For a time, the discussion about the water quality of the Tokyo Olympics became the focus of the Internet. Several media outlets, including Fox News, The New York Post and Russia Today, reported on the incident with headlines and photos of triathletes vomiting after the game.
Previously, japanese media, including the Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese media, had said that places in Tokyo Bay that held open water swimming and triathlon competitions smelled "like a toilet," a "stinky bay," or "didn't smell like a healthy feeling of water quality." Agence France-Presse pointed out that since an Ironman race was cancelled in 2019 due to high levels of E. coli, the water quality problems of the Odaiba Aquatic Center in Tokyo Bay have been questioned.
Many netizens suspect that the reason for the player's vomiting is that the water quality of the arena is too poor, and some Japanese media believe that the weather is too hot. No official explanation has been given.
What is the story of Tokyo Bay, a world-famous bay area?
Text | Gu Yue a knife
This article is reproduced from the WeChat public account "Look at the World Magazine" (ID: ksj-worldview), the original article was first published on April 25, 2019, the original title is "Tokyo Minato City Story", does not represent the view of the Lookout Think Tank.
1 Uneven "Port Opening Road"
In Tokyo's real estate sector, there is a long chain of contempt, with each of the 23 wards having its own place. What Chiyoda District has an imperial temperament, Shinjuku District is mixed with fish and dragons, Bunkyo District residents have a high level of cultivation, etc., each district has its own characteristics, but shining at the top of the chain of contempt, there will always be "Minato District".
This area, which is home to Tokyo Towers, high-end residences, high-end office buildings, foreign embassies, and high-end fashion fronts, is known as the "Tokyo of Tokyo" with many well-known neighborhoods such as Roppongi, Odaiba, Akasaka, Aoyama, and Shirogane.
"Where do you live?" It is one of the favorite questions for residents of the port area to answer. When the people of Minato pretend to say the word "Minato" carelessly, with the strength of the Japanese like to cooperate vigorously, the People of Minato will receive a set of exaggerated emojis with the sound effect of "Wow you are really rich".
Why is the port area so popular with the wealthy? This has to say that the port of Tokyo and the entire Tokyo Bay are backed by the minato area.
As we all know, the original name of Tokyo was "Edo". The so-called Edo, literally translated as "E の入り口" (the entrance of the river), in Japanese "river" can mean the sea, lake, "Edo" can be understood as the meaning of the harbor, the mouth of the sea. At that time, Edo was located on the west side of the estuary of the Sumida River, which was the boundary between the Musashi Kingdom and the Shimosō Kingdom. This Sumida River is the main river that flows into present-day Tokyo Bay.
Before the Japanese capital had been relocated, the richest and most traded area in the Edo region was in the area adjacent to the port. At that time, the social status of merchants was not high, because the convenience of logistics and trading lived here. Today, the willingness of wealthy businessmen and celebrities to gather here is the result of the development of the port of Tokyo over the centuries.
In 1456, Ota Michikan, a vassal of the Uesugi clan of Ogaya, began to build Edo Castle, building a small port at the mouth of the Hirakawa River on Edo-mae Island, called "Edo Minato", the predecessor of the Port of Tokyo. After the completion of the Edo Minami, many commoners bought and sold daily necessities such as rice, fresh fish, and medicines near the wharf, which promoted trade in the area. In 1612, the Tokugawa shogunate rebuilt Edo Minaku and built a large wharf on the site.
In the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, with the signing of the Treaty of Treaty of Good Trade between the United States and Japan, the port of Yokohama in the eastern part of Kanagawa Prefecture was successfully opened, and it was rapidly developed as a raw silk trading port, a commercial port, a passenger port, and an industrial port, and in a short period of time it had the scale of an international port. Yokohama stole the limelight of Edo for a time, and Edo failed to open a port.
Indeed, in terms of the natural conditions for the opening of the port, Yokohama is superior to Tokyo. The Yokohama estuary is very deep, naturally suitable for large ships to dock, and the Edo estuary at that time was shallow. As a result, the impression that Yokohama-Tsuchi is "international" and Edo-dori is "domestic" is gradually determined.
In the Meiji period, considering that the capital backed by Tokyo Bay did not have a port, the "opening of the port of Tokyo" was finally put on the agenda of the government. Preparations for the estuary of the Sumida River began, and Tsukishima and Shibaura became the first man-made land in the minato area.
What really made the port of Tokyo quickly built was the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932. The earthquake paralyzed land transportation for a time, and the port of Tokyo, which was still in its initial development, suddenly became a transportation hub at that time. In order to use the waterway to transport materials, the government went all out to open the port, excavated the waterway, cleaned the sediment, and artificially built the three major docks of Sunrise, Shibaura and Takeshiba. After nine years of construction, the port of Tokyo was finally reborn in 1941.
The city of Yokohama was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932
However, in December 1941, the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor directly ignited the Pacific Naval War with the United States. After the port of Tokyo was taken over by the U.S. military, it was basically stopped. Having been weaned at birth, the port of Tokyo has a troubled fate.
Entering the Cold War period between the United States and the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States gradually transformed into allies. After the Japanese economy continued to soar, bringing strong logistics demand, the Port of Tokyo began to exert its true strength. At the end of the 1960s, the container logistics revolution swept through major ports around the world, and the late tokyo port keenly sensed this trend and took the lead in equipping the port with corresponding container facilities.
On the one hand, the Tokyo business district is close to the port industrial area, the outside parts have just been transported to the assembly line, and the products can be put on the shelves just after being assembled, forming a virtuous cycle of production-consumption-reproduction, and making Japanese-made products begin to be cost-competitive in the world.
Container shipping, on the other hand, links the Port of Tokyo to the U.S. consumer market across the Pacific, as well as the middle east's energy supply to iron ore from Australia, India, and Brazil. Especially from the perspective of trans-Pacific shipping routes, Tokyo Bay has the advantage of being close to the water towers first compared to the Kansai region, and the Port of Tokyo is closer to the economic center of Japan than the Port of Yokohama. As a result, more and more ocean-going ships are entering and leaving the Port of Tokyo.
Since 1998, the Port of Tokyo has finally surpassed the Port of Yokohama, and the throughput of foreign trade containers has reached the first place in Japan. It has a sea area of 5453 hectares, a land area of 1080 hectares, a total of 24 domestic and foreign trade terminals, and a total of 115 berths. Among them, there are 4 container terminals (Oai, Qinghai, Shinagawa, Odaiba) and 16 container berths. Today, the port of Yokohama on the west bank of Tokyo Bay is often regarded as Tokyo's outer port.
2 From the port area to the bay area
Standing on Tokyo Tower, the city's neon twinkling at night, the traffic is busy, and the houses are arranged like matchboxes in the city, which is unforgettable.
The Tokyo Bay Area, formed by the Tokyo Minato Area, is 80 kilometers deep and is surrounded by the Bansho Peninsula (Chiba Prefecture) and miura Peninsula (Kanagawa Prefecture) on the east and west sides, and is connected to the Pacific Ocean through the narrow Uraga Waterway between the two peninsulas and Sagami Bay to the west. The surrounding cities are organically integrated, making it the world's most populous and most complete metropolitan area with the most complete urban infrastructure.
The Tokyo Bay Area has a population of 41 million, accounting for 1/3 of Japan's population. In 2010, the real GDP of the Bay Area was 198 trillion yen, accounting for 38% of Japan's total GDP, equivalent to the GDP of Italy as a whole.
In less than 200 years, Tokyo Bay has transformed from a logistics center into a top bay area in the world, and there are many inspiring places in this.
More than 90% of the land close to the ocean that can be stepped on in Tokyo Bay is artificial coastline
The port of Tokyo was initially shallow, restricting the development of logistics, and the government began to reclaim land and let the wharf extend into the deep water area. As urbanization has accelerated, so has the landfilling of Tokyo's port. Today, more than 90 percent of the land close to the ocean that you can set foot on in Tokyo Bay is artificial coastline, with a total reclaimed area of more than 250 square kilometers.
With the land, the traffic must also be solved. In addition to the ports of Tokyo and Yokohama, Tokyo Bay is also home to four ports: Chiba Port, Kawasaki Port, Yokosuka Port, and Kisarazu Port. Will these ports be managed separately by the corresponding institutions in their regions, will they cause vicious price competition between ports, increase unnecessary internal consumption of resources, and reduce the international competitiveness of the entire Tokyo Bay?
After realizing this problem, the Port and Bay Bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Transport proposed the "Basic Concept of the Tokyo Bay Harbor Plan", which organically integrates the above ports through top-level design to form a wide-area harbor to compete with other ports in the world.
Together with Haneda and Narita International Airports and the Shinkansen such as Tokaido, the six major ports form a three-dimensional transportation network between Tokyo Bay and major cities in Japan and around the world.
People who have been to Tokyo tend to be impressed by its complex tram route map. Behind these daunting and complex routes is a sophisticated network layout. The transportation system in the Tokyo Bay area has become the object of study and research of rail transit planning in various countries.
Tokyo's complex tram routes are behind a sophisticated network layout
Industry is the core competitiveness of the regional economy. Tokyo developed the Keihin Industrial Zone to the southwest and the Keiyo Industrial Zone to the east. The two major industrial zones of Keihin and Keiyo extend to the two sides of Tokyo Bay. It concentrates steel, nonferrous metallurgy, oil refining, petrochemical, machinery, electronics, automobiles, shipbuilding, modern logistics and other industries, becoming the world's largest industrial zone.
This layout isolates the industrial zone from the large population of Tokyo's main urban areas. The urban area mainly develops finance, research and development, culture, large-scale entertainment facilities and large-scale commercial facilities.
3 If the city is "fragrant", the population will come from itself
The success of the Tokyo Bay Area is also the result of rapid urbanization. More precisely, the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, located in Tokyo Bay, takes the route of "great urbanization".
An important feature of megacity is the huge size of the urban population. In 2015, Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Area), the number one global megacity, had a permanent population of 38 million. In the wave of urbanization, Tokyo and the surrounding three prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba have become integrated, forming the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which has the largest population in the world.
With a population of 1.5 million in 1900, Tokyo was only the seventh largest in the world. 50 years later, despite the war bombardment, the population has soared to 11.28 million. After that, the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area continued to swell, reaching 30 million in 1985. Population growth has since slowed, but reached about 38 million in 2015.
In the past 30 years, globalization has developed very rapidly, and there are more and more foreigners in Tokyo. Due to the decline in birthrates and the aging of the elderly, Japan has also become a developed country with a low immigration threshold. Some came to study, some came to seek employment, some married across borders, and some were introduced through labor, and they all lived in Tokyo.
Yokohama National University
Throughout the Tokyo Bay Area (Tokyo Metropolitan Area), there are 260 higher education institutions enrolled in more than 1.2 million college students. Among them, the Keihin Industrial Zone includes well-known research universities such as Keio University, Musashi Institute of Technology, and Yokohama National University.
Large-scale population gathering and large-scale industrial exchanges have made the entire Tokyo Bay full of vitality and vitality, but also brought about the so-called urban disease. However, when the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area reached 10 or 20 million, people exclaimed that the big city was sick. But when its population reaches 30 million or even close to 40 million, its big city disease is less obvious. At the very least, you're in tokyo, so densely populated, you won't see the traffic jams that are common in other big cities.
The reason is that Tokyo has improved its management and operation capabilities under the high-density population agglomeration, from planning and infrastructure construction to daily management level and ability.
Similarly, Tokyo Bay has caused serious environmental pollution in the development and construction. After the war, the shores of Tokyo Bay became an industrial battle area, with heavy polluting companies such as steel, chemicals, and shipbuilding discharging wastewater into Tokyo Bay, and large chimneys making Tokyo unable to see the blue sky. Large-scale land reclamation has also brought damage to the natural environment. After more than 30 years of pollution control efforts, the water in Tokyo Bay has become clear, the fish have swam back, the sky has turned blue, and the port area has returned to a quiet and pleasant living environment.
From the docks to the port area to the bay area, from Edo to Tokyo to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, the estuary of Honshu Island on the Toei Island chain has become the world's premier metropolitan area center.
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