East Asian Olympic desires: identity on the global stage in the 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing games

The East Asia Olympic Games of 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing are symbolised to legitimate the Olympic Games as abstracted, universal parade of nations that is severed from their specific, geopolitical conditions. Celebrated as ‘coming out parties,’ these East Asian Olympics are visual spectacles of the globalisation of the Olympic Movement and its espoused universalism. Central to countering these Games as allegories of the ‘universalisation of universalism,’ however, is to historicise the Olympic desires of each host nation. The East Asian Olympic desires for each East Asian Olympic Games will be briefly discussed in terms of how they function within the Olympic Movement and global modernity.