With opportunities increasingly difficult for Olympic host towns to engage in cultural exchanges with foreign athletes, Tateyama in Chiba Prefecture is using tulips and sunflowers to deepen ties with the Netherlands, whose Olympics and Paralympics athletes will attend training camps in the city.
Before the Olympics, training camps for the U.S. triathlon team, as well as the team from the Netherlands, will be held in Tateyama, which is known for the scenic flower-lined road that stretches along the coast of the Boso Peninsula and the calm waters of Tateyama Bay.
The two triathlon teams visited the city and interacted with local elementary and junior high school students when they participated in a test event in Tokyo in August 2019. However, the camps scheduled to be held in 2020 were canceled when the Games were postponed.
Planned exchanges were also suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In November last year, Tateyama residents were delighted to receive about 1,000 tulip bulbs from the Dutch Embassy in Japan along with a message from Dutch Ambassador to Japan Peter van der Vliet.
"The tulip bulb needs a cold period in the soil for it to blossom beautifully ... Let's make a thousand flowers of exchange between your municipality and my country bloom after this difficult period," the ambassador said in the message.
Tateyama has made the tulips a symbol of the city and wants them to become one of the legacies of the Games.
The bulbs, which were planted in a sports field among other locations, bloomed this spring. In return for the bulbs, the city sent the embassy about 15,000 seeds collected from sunflowers grown by local children.
The embassy said it would plant the seeds at the ambassador's official residence in Minato Ward, Tokyo, and at nearby Shiba Park, which is said to be the oldest park in Japan.
"The tulips have given us the courage to move forward from the pandemic. I hope that the sunflowers will bloom in the summer when the Olympics and Paralympics are held and light up the embassy," said Tateyama Mayor Kenichi Kanamaru in a letter to the embassy.
The Dutch team is scheduled to hold a training camp from July 19 to 29.
The city is now busy preparing for their arrival, including the introduction of infection control measures such as PCR testing for athletes at their accommodation.
A city official said: "We hope that local children and the athletes will be able to communicate with each other online and through other means during the camp."
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