Computer generated image of the 2020 central stadium.

AFP/Tokyo

An Olympic-sized spat over the centrepiece stadium for the 2020 Games has escalated in Japan after Tokyo’s governor urged Premier Shinzo Abe to take his sports minister’s pronouncements with a pinch of salt.
The outburst is the latest episode in a long-running row over who should foot the bill for the Japanese capital’s controversial $1.4 billion showpiece venue, in which Tokyo Governor Yoichi Masuzoe has likened the central government to Japan’s wartime Imperial Army.
Masuzoe said “secret” agreements between his predecessor and Sports Minister Hakubun Shimomura whereby the Tokyo government would pay for around a third of the cost would not wash with taxpayers. Organisers, however, said he had been fully informed.
“Whatever a former governor and the incumbent minister have done, it is akin to a secret promise,” Masuzoe told reporters Tuesday, after it emerged this month that Shimomura had asked him to pay 58 billion yen ($470 million) towards the new stadium.
He said the sports ministry had offered to explain “by late May” exactly why they needed a huge cash injection from Tokyo.
“But if they are just going to come back with this same figure they have reported to the prime minister’s office, which was seemingly plucked out of thin air, there is no need for them to bother.
“My answer will be the same as it is now.”
Masuzoe said he told Shimomura “that the figure of 50-plus billion yen... is a made-up number that has no basis. The bureaucrats at the sports ministry know five billion yen is what Tokyo can offer under the law.
“This is a figure that was cooked up in order to make Tokyo carry the 50 billion yen burden, and Prime Minister Abe must not approve the explanation as it is.”
The 2020 Olympic stadium has faced two years of criticism, with prominent Japanese architects launching scathing attacks on Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid’s futuristic designs.
Managers have since unveiled plans to scale back the venue, including scrapping a retractable roof to help slim costs by 40 percent.
Tokyo 2020 President Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister, hit back on Tuesday, saying there were no secrets in the process and that he had personally informed Masuzoe about the plan.
“I told him everything, the whole sequence of events,” Mori told journalists.
Masuzoe urged the prime minister not to give credence to the sports ministry’s plan, and called for a national debate on how to improve the proposed stadium.
“The opaque process and the bad habit of deciding everything in an inner circle of sports-related people should be stopped,” Masuzoe wrote in a column published Tuesday.
“We must build a national consensus through public debates involving a wide range of people. There is no other way to solve this problem,” the governor wrote.
Masuzoe took office in February 2014 to replace Naoki Inose, who abruptly resigned over a financial scandal after he led the successful campaign to win the rights to host the 2020 Games.
But while his relations with Abe have been cordial, his ties with the sports ministry have been far from smooth. Last week he launched a scathing attack comparing its attitude over the stadium to that of the military during World War II.
“It’s irresponsible to keep repeating ‘we can build it’,” he said last week.