About the author: Roy Tomizawa celebrated his first birthday on the opening day of the 1964 Olympics. Roy has been a fan of the Olympics. A year after Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics, Roy went searching for an English-language book that recorded the 1964 Olympics — but he couldn’t find one. So Roy decided to combine his love of the Olympics and his skills for writing and record the event that symbolized the determination of the Japanese to survive and thrive after World War II.

About the book: Japan was a physical and psychological wasteland at the end of World War II. With over 3 million dead, 39 percent of city populations homeless, 40 percent of all urban areas flattened, 80 percent of all ships destroyed, and 33 percent of all industrial machine tools not usable, the country was destroyed.

And yet, just 19 years later, Japan stood proud-modern, peace-loving, and open-welcoming the world as the host of the 1964 Olympic, the largest global event of its time.

In 1964 — The Greatest Year in the History of Japan, Roy Tomizawa records how Japan rose from the destruction to create the greatest Asian economic miracle of the 20th century. He shares stories from the 1964 Olympics that created a level of adjustment and national pride never before seen in Japan, leaving an unforgettable mark in the heart of the Japanese for generations.

While watching the Olympics the other night, I came across an unbelievable sight. It was not a gold medal, or a world record broken, but a show of courage.

The event was swimming and started with only three men on the blocks. For one reason or another, two of them false started, so they were disqualified. That left only one to complete. It would have been difficult enough, not having anyone to race against, even though the time on the clock is important.

I watched the man dive off the block and knew right away that something was wrong. I’m not an expert swimmer, but I can tell a good dive from a poor one, and this was not exactly medal quality. When he resurfaced, it was evident that the man was not out for gold — his arms were waving in an attempt at freestyle. The crowd started to laugh. Clearly this man was not a medal competitor.

I listened to the crowd begin to laugh at this poor man who was clearly having a hard time. Finally he made his turn to start back. It was pitiful. He made a few desperate strokes and you could tell he was worn out.

But in those few awful strokes, the crowd had changed.

No longer were they laughing, but beginning to cheer. Some even began to stand and shout “Come on, you can do it!” and he did.

A clear minute past the average swimmer, this young man finally finished his race. The crowd went wild. You would have thought that he had won the gold, and he should have. Even though he was recorded one of the slowest times in Olympic history, this man gave more heart than any of the other competitors.

Just a short year ago, he had never even swum, let alone race. His country had been invited to Sydney.

In a competition where athletes remove their silver medals feeling they have somehow been cheated out of gold, or when they act so proudly in front of their competitors, it is nice to watch an underdog.

Figure skating, as we know, got its start in the mid-19th century, when an American named Jackson Haines combined dancing and skating for the first time. Americans did not accept Haines' technique at that time. 【小题1】There he was an immediate success. Some 50 years later, Haines' style finally caught on in the United States.

Figure skating become an Olympic sport before there were Winter Games. 【小题2】 Ice dancing joined the Olympics in 1976, when the Games were held in Innsbruck, Austria.

In singles skating, each skater performs a short routine of required steps. 【小题3】 The pairs event follows the same format, but with one male and one female performing together.

【小题4】But unlike pairs skating, ice dance does not include overhead lifts and jumps. An ice dance competition is made up of three parts: one set to music that has a required rhythm, and two parts set to whatever music the ice dancers choose.

A panel of nine judges scores the quality of each figure skating performance, but only seven out of nine scores are used. To determine which judges' scores will be used, there is a random draw before each event. Skaters are given a grade for each step, jump, spin, or any other element that is part of their routine. They also receive an “overall” score for each performance. 【小题5】