THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
September 13, 2022 at 18:50 JST
An Olympic rings monument in Odori Park in Sapporo, which was unveiled in February to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Winter Olympics in the northern city (Kaede Sano)
A majority of respondents to a new nationwide survey support holding the 2030 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sapporo.
More than half, or 55 percent, said they support hosting the Winter Games while 38 percent replied that they don’t, in the survey conducted by The Asahi Shimbun on Sept. 10 and 11.
In addition, about 70 percent of all the respondents in their 30s or younger support holding the 2030 Games in Sapporo.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will decide the site of the 2030 Winter Olympics and Paralympics at its general conference next year.
However, the survey broken down by Hokkaido residents only showed that almost an equal percentage either support or don't support holding the sporting events in Sapporo.
In comparison, in a survey conducted of Tokyo residents in December 2012, 60 percent of respondents supported holding the 2020 Games in the Japanese capital and 27 percent didn’t.
The survey was conducted before Tokyo was chosen as the site of the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, which were postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although a simple comparison could be misleading as the surveys were conducted on different audiences or for other reasons, it seems that local residents are less enthusiastic about hosting the Olympics in Sapporo than Tokyo people were 10 years ago.
The Asahi Shimbun conducted the survey on Sept. 10 and 11 of voters across Japan using the random digit dialing method.
With the RDD method, landline and mobile phone numbers are generated by a computer at random to be contacted.
The newspaper collected valid responses from 1,462 voters. Of these, there were 581 people with landline phones and 881 people with mobile phones.
The paper contacted landline phone numbers of 1,103 households that had an eligible voter, meaning the response rate among these was 53 percent.
It also called 2,046 mobile phone numbers with eligible voters, meaning the response rate among these was 43 percent.
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