The Asian Para Games are officially open in Nagoya. The city spent the early autumn hosting the Asian Games, and now it turns its venues over to a second set of competitors. About 3,000 athletes from 45 countries and regions are scheduled to take part, the Japan Times reported. Japan, as host, has entered roughly 280 of them. That is close to one in every ten athletes at the Games.
Aichi Prefecture and its capital are staging both events, with the para competition following the Asian Games after a short gap. Asia's multi-sport calendar now works this way as a matter of course. The able-bodied Games come first and the para event second, in the same city, often in the same arenas, run by many of the same staff.
The phrase "countries and regions" is deliberate. Asian sport counts places such as Hong Kong, Macau and Chinese Taipei as separate teams, so the tally of delegations does not match a list of sovereign states.
Back in the country where it began
Japan has a particular history with this event. The Asian Para Games grew out of the FESPIC Games, the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled, first held in 1975 in Oita on the southern island of Kyushu. Their founder was Yutaka Nakamura, an orthopaedic surgeon from Oita. Nakamura had spent time at Stoke Mandeville in England with Ludwig Guttmann, the doctor whose wheelchair games for injured veterans grew into the Paralympics.
FESPIC ran for three decades before it was folded into a new event under the Asian Paralympic Committee. The first Asian Para Games under that name were held in Guangzhou in 2010. Incheon hosted in 2014 and Jakarta in 2018. The Hangzhou edition was pushed back a year by the pandemic and held in 2023.
Nagoya is the first Japanese city to host since the change of name. It comes five years after Tokyo staged the Paralympics in 2021. Those Games went ahead almost entirely without spectators because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of the Japanese athletes in Nagoya competed in those empty stadiums. For them, a home event in front of a crowd would be something Tokyo could not give them.
A schedule shaped by classification
Para sport sorts athletes into classes according to the type and degree of their impairment, so that people compete against others with similar function. As a result, a single discipline can produce many finals. A men's 100 metres in para athletics, or a 50-metre freestyle in the pool, may be decided several times over, once for each class. That is why an event with 3,000 athletes can carry a medal table far longer than its headcount suggests. It also explains how a large host team, entered across many classes, can spread its chances.
Aichi's own Asian population
Aichi is Japan's manufacturing heartland. Toyota is based there, along with a long chain of parts suppliers, and that industry has drawn workers from across Asia and Latin America for decades. The prefecture has one of the largest foreign-resident populations in Japan, including a sizable Filipino community. Many Filipinos in the area work in factories, care facilities and service jobs. For some of them, these Games bring athletes from home to venues a short train ride away.
The Philippines has competed at past Asian Para Games through the Philippine Paralympic Committee. The feed report did not give the size of this year's Philippine team or of any delegation other than Japan's. Filipino families in Aichi who want to watch their country's athletes will need to look for the team list from the committee in Manila.
The Asian Para Games also fall roughly midway between two Paralympics. The next Summer Paralympics will be held in Los Angeles in 2028, a city with one of the largest Asian American and Filipino American populations in the United States. Results in Nagoya are an early marker for which athletes from across the region may compete there.
