Olympic flame set to burn in Japan amid concerns

The Olympic flame from Greece is set to arrive in Japan despite mounting concerns that the novel coronavirus could bring a postponement or cancellation of the Tokyo Games.

A much scaled-down Olympic flame handover ceremony, part of the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Games, took place without an audience on Thursday at the Panathenaic Stadium in central Athens, where the first modern Olympics were held in 1896.

Naoko Imoto, a Japanese swimmer who represented Japan in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and now lives in Greece, received the flame, instead of a delegation from Tokyo, which decided not to come in a last-minute change as a precaution against the spread of the virus.

After the handover, the flame was carried aboard an aircraft named Tokyo 2020 Go to be carried to the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force base in Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture, on Friday. There, it will be used to ignite a cauldron before the official relay in Japan begins on March 26 from Fukushima prefecture, where an earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster devastated the region nine years ago.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo organizing committee said the torch relay in Japan will be much "scaled down".

Despite statements from the International Olympic Committee, Tokyo's organizing committee and the Japanese government that the Games will be held from July 24 as scheduled, every passing day is seeing more calls for a rethink of that position.

The latest to call for a postponement was Gilles Sezionale, the head of the French Swimming Federation, who said on Wednesday that the Games should be postponed because swimmers don't have a place to prepare. "Postponement seems logical to me ... If it lasts a long time, what are they (swimmers) going to do at the Games? Just participate? It has to stop," he said.

Mass gathering

Also, Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious disease at Kobe University who created a media firestorm with videos criticizing the quarantine of the cruise ship Diamond Princess, said on his blog on Thursday that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics should not go ahead as scheduled.

According to Iwata, it's not clear that the outbreak in Japan will have subsided by the start of the Games in July and the flood of foreign visitors could exacerbate the spread of the virus.

"The Olympics are not just a mass gathering, but a mass gathering from all over the world, while COVID is a pandemic," Iwata said."These two things don't go together."

Separately, in Japan, its Cabinet approved a policy on Thursday that enables the government to invalidate the visas of people coming from 36 European countries as well as Iran and Egypt in a bid to prevent the spread of the virus, as the number of cases reached 924 in the country.

And in a related development, an expert panel which is guiding Japan's coronavirus response called for new measures by local authorities, as Hokkaido, the region with the most cases in the country, prepared to end its state of emergency.

Agencies contributed to this story.