Japan won’t send any government representatives to the Beijing Olympics next year, effectively throwing its support behind the U.S.-led diplomatic boycott of the games.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced Friday that Japan would dispatch three non-governmental officials. The move comes after growing pressure from conservatives within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to join in protests by wealthy democracies against alleged human rights abuses by China.
Beijing has warned countries would “pay a price for their wrong moves.”
The choice was a particularly hard one for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who must tread a fine line between the U.S., his country’s only military ally, and China, Japan’s neighbor and biggest trading partner.
Among other prominent U.S. allies, Australia, Canada and the U.K. are joining the Biden administration’s diplomatic boycott, while South Korea and France are not. Paris is set to host the next Summer Games in 2024. New Zealand has said it won’t send diplomatic representatives, but cited concerns over COVID-19 as the reason.
All the countries joining the diplomatic boycott will allow their athletes to compete. Tokyo welcomed only a sprinkling of foreign government delegates to the Summer Games it hosted this year, which coincided with the country’s worst wave of virus cases.
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