They'll be the most tightly controlled Games ever. Athletes have been told they must wear masks at all times when not competing or training, to clap not cheer when watching an event, and to stay in their country's pod in the Games village.
However, the plans to stop the Games triggering another wave of Covid-19, in a country where the virus has just taken another surge, haven't impressed the locals.
New surveys show that 70% of the Japanese people are opposed to the idea of allowing 11,000 athletes and officials into Tokyo, some from countries where Covid-19 is still raging.
But unpopularity in the host country has never changed the mind of the International Olympic Committee.
At the last Games in Rio in 2016 a poll two weeks before the opening ceremony showed two out of every three Brazilians believed holding the Games, at a cost of $17 billion, as the country plunged further into recession, would do more harm than good. Money for everything else was so short police stations in the crime ravaged city weren't even being supplied with toilet paper. Local cops were picketing the airport with signs saying, "Welcome To Hell."
The Games went ahead.
Even protests turning deadly have little effect.
One October night in 1968 in Mexico City I sat in a group of stunned journalists at the Olympic press centre as a sobbing Italian reporter for the Reuters news agency told us how he had just seen innocent people massacred by Mexican troops.
There was a peaceful demonstration against the government in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the city's downtown area, he said. It was just ten days before the Olympics began, and the government had issued a warning they would not tolerate "embarrassments" before the Games.
Japanese flag with Olympic Rings above the entrance to Japan Olympic Museum in Shinjuku. Photo / Getty Images.
Early that evening Army trucks had pulled up, blocking the exits, said the journalist. Soldiers started firing into the crowd. "I just ran for my life." At the time the government said 26 people had died, but 50 years later it was admitted that the number of deaths was more than 300.
Boycotts have kept large blocks of countries away from the Olympics. In 1976, in protest at the All Blacks touring apartheid era South Africa, African countries stayed home. In 1980 western nations didn't go to Moscow, and in retaliation communist block teams shunned the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
But here's the weird thing. To all but the most politically and culturally obsessed, something happens once the Games start.
When the sport begins, what amounts to a form of Games amnesia kicks in for the vast majority of us.
Think of 1976 and in your mind's eye do you, as I do, see John Walker flinging his arms in the air as he celebrates being the third great Kiwi runner to win the 1500 metres? Fast forward to '84 and does the gold medal rush in kayaking, and Ian Ferguson being the only New Zealand to ever win three golds at one Games, have the same effect?
Yes, if you wanted to be a killjoy you might recall that Walker's greatest rival, Filbert Bayi of Tanzania, wasn't in Montreal, or that the Soviets and East Germans, who had dominated the 1983 world kayak championships, weren't in California in'84.
The reality is that whatever the background machinations, when the Olympics are in full swing they do what great sport does so well, lifting us, in the same way brilliant theatre or music does, out of the tedium that can be day to day life.
Whether it's Dame Valerie Adams, or Lisa Carrington, or Peter Burling and Blair Tuke, or the sevens rugby teams, when black singlets and jerseys start appearing on our screens in July then I'll be one of a vast number of New Zealanders who'll be excited, and emotionally involved.
In fact, after the privations of the last 12 months, and with apologies to the good people of Japan who feel differently, I don't think I've ever looked forward to an Olympics as much as I am to Tokyo 2021.
