Asian Games Without a Village — Seoul's Became Apartments

Seoul's 1986 Games Village Is Still an Apartment Block — The Asian Games Open Tomorrow Without One

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Sept. 18, 2026 (Fri.)

Sports StorySept. 18, 2026

Seoul's 1986 Games Village Is Still an Apartment Block — The Asian Games Open Tomorrow Without One

The canceled plan described the competition itself as a "temporary use."

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The Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games open tomorrow without an athletes' village. Competitors and officials are sleeping on a cruise ship, in container cabins on a wharf, and in hotels scattered across the region.
What Aichi Prefecture had actually commissioned was a project named "post-Games use." The buildings were to go up first, and the Games would borrow them for two weeks.
This is not an argument about whether the beds are good enough. It is about what an athletes' village is built for in the first place.

A 290-meter Italian cruise ship has been tied up at Kinjo Pier in Nagoya Port since Sept. 15. The Costa Serena will not leave until early October. Its 1,500 cabins hold about 4,000 athletes and officials.

A short distance away, at Garden Pier, sit 200 mobile cabins built to shipping-container dimensions, two rooms to a unit. Another 2,000 people sleep there. The rest are spread across hotels in Nagoya and nearby cities. The 20th Asian Games, which open tomorrow, have no athletes' village.

The obvious reading arrives fast. The hosts ran out of money and skipped it. That reading is fair enough. Costs did balloon, and the prefecture says cutting the village is how it brought them down. But the canceled plan itself puts the events in a different order. Nagoya was never building an athletes' village. It was building a house nobody had moved into yet. Guests stay in a house like that for a few nights, then leave.

Six companies bought the ground

Aichi Prefecture and the city of Nagoya put the work out to tender as the Post-Games Use Project for the 20th Asian Games Athletes' Village. The operative phrase is the one about afterward. The project was named for what would happen once the athletes left.

In June 2021 a consortium of six companies won it, led by the utility Chubu Electric Power and filled out by real-estate, housing and construction firms. None of them runs sporting events. They buy land and put buildings on it.

The land is the site of the old Nagoya Racecourse in Minato Ward, which closed in March 2022. The prefecture's published zoning table lists what goes there. Two retail complexes, a condominium block, detached houses, a welfare center, a childcare facility, a dormitory for international students, a high school and two sports facilities. It is a neighborhood.

The plan called the competition a "temporary use"

The summary plan Aichi released in August 2022 sets out the sequence. Among the post-Games buildings, those that could double as athletes' housing were grouped together and labeled Facility Group 1. Construction was to finish by the end of March 2026. During the Games, those buildings would be temporarily used as village facilities. Once that period ended, the rest of the work would begin in May 2027.

The facilities usable as the athletes' village are to be temporarily used as village facilities during the Games period. — Aichi Prefecture, summary basic plan

The schedule chart includes a line item for village-specification work, and immediately after it, another for dismantling and removal. Whatever was added to turn apartments into a village was going to be stripped out again. The thing spectators picture when they hear "athletes' village" is not the building. It is the part that gets removed.

Housing put up for a two-week event stands empty the morning after the closing ceremony. So the sellable buildings get designed first, and the Games take the two weeks before anyone moves in. The village is the name of those two weeks.

Construction costs rose and the plan stopped

In March 2023, Japanese outlets reported that rising construction costs would force organizers to abandon the village. Aichi formally amended its plan on Feb. 28, 2025. The notice gives the reason plainly: the village construction at the racecourse site had been called off.

From the builder's side, the hesitation makes sense. When materials and labor get more expensive, ordinary people postpone building a house too. Here the deadline was fixed at March 2026. Miss it and the Games arrive first; meet it and you pay whatever the market is charging.

Aichi says dropping the village saved more than 60 billion yen. Securing and operating the cruise ship cost about 4.5 billion yen, roughly one-thirteenth of that.

¥4.5bn

The cruise ship contract: 1,500 cabins chartered for 22 days.

The overall budget moved anyway. In January, Nikkei reported that the Asian Games and Asian Para Games together had reached roughly 370 billion yen, more than triple the original estimate.

In Seoul, 1,356 apartments are still standing

South Korea did the same thing forty years ago. For the 1986 Asian Games, Seoul built the Asian Athletes' Village in Jamsil. City archives record that it opened that September on about 25 hectares, with 18 buildings and 1,356 apartments, plus a bank and a shopping center.

The athletes stayed only for the Games. Afterward the buildings passed into private hands, and people live there still. The bank and the shopping center stop being strange once the order is clear. It was an apartment complex from the start. It was an athletes' village for the length of one Games.

Tsunekazu Takeda, a vice president of the organizing committee, offered a different explanation at the 2024 assembly of the Olympic Council of Asia, the body of national Olympic committees that runs the Games. There would be no village, he said, because the Games were spread across two prefectures. He was right about the spread — venues reach well beyond Aichi, and swimming and diving are in Tokyo. The prefecture's own notice points at construction costs.

The village went; the development stayed

The post-Games project is still running, under the same name. What changed was the calendar. The land sale slipped from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2025, and the first buildings now open in fiscal 2029 rather than 2027.

Shops, homes and a school are still going onto that ground. Only the two weeks in the middle came out. And the gap could not simply be left open. When the plan shifted to a cruise ship and hotels, the Olympic Council of Asia objected that the athletes were scattered too widely, and last year organizers hurriedly commissioned the container cabins. Those too have a second life booked: hotel rooms in normal times, emergency housing after a disaster.

The arithmetic then slipped. Participation had been planned around 15,000. In March the council added two sports: teqball, played by kicking a ball over a curved table, and padel, a racket game in a walled court. The figure rose to roughly 17,000, made up of 11,000 athletes and 6,000 officials. Hideaki Omura, the Aichi governor who chairs the organizing committee, said last month that the host city agreement specifies 15,000 and that no budget had been set aside beyond it. Anyone still wishing to come, he said, would have to arrange their own room.

Athletes complained before the opening about mattresses too short for them and rooms handed over hours late. A structure is a structure and a mattress is a mattress.

An athletes' village is not a building put up for the athletes. It is a house raised early on ground the Games will cross. Nagoya postponed the house. The spare room went with it.

Sources

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