TOKYO – An online petition with more than 350,000 signatures calling for the Tokyo Games to be canceled was submitted Friday to local organizers, the International Olympic Committee and others.
The Olympics are scheduled to open in just 10 weeks on July 23 in the midst of a pandemic with Tokyo and other areas under a state of emergency.
Cases continue to rise in Japan, where less than 2% of the population has been fully vaccinated. The petition campaign — called “Stop Tokyo Olympics” — was drafted by well-known lawyer Kenji Utsunomiya, who has also run for governor of Tokyo.
He said the response was surprising but acknowledged that this was too little, and probably too late. “I think that the media coverage puts a lot of pressure on the