The flame will be on show from today until November 1 at the Japanese Olympic Museum, located next to the National Stadium purpose-built for the Games which were due to take place this year but were rescheduled for 2021 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Reuters reported.

The flame was last seen in Fukushima after the torch relay was canceled following its arrival from Greece but before it could start a planned tour of Japan following the decision to postpone the Games in March.

“Next year, this flame will be carried by about 10,000 torchbearers and will light the Olympic cauldron,” Tokyo 2020 president Yoshiro Mori said.

“We would like to make efforts toward this so that we can ensure a great success of the Games.”

Organizers have not announced details of the torch relay. The original 121-day plan had the torch traveling to all of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

“I suppose athletes aiming to participate in Olympics and Paralympics are training hard every day while having great anxiety (due to coronavirus),” said Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) president Yasuhiro Yamashita who received the flame from Mori.

“I am confident that this flame, which is displayed today, will be moral support for such athletes.”

To limit crowds gathering to view the flame, there will be a reservation system with a designated date and time.

The countdown clock will be reset as soon as organizers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decide when, exactly, a supposedly post-coronavirus world is ready for the second coming of the Tokyo Games.

Hours after Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo confirmed that the Games would be held “no later than next summer”, some Tokyoites were conflicted about their reaction.

Emi Hagino, a media consultant who was born and raised in the capital, said she had initially accepted the delay as inevitable, but then felt “massively let down”, as it would affect her business.

“My parents remember watching the 1964 Olympics here, so they have experienced it before, but for me it was going to be a magical once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually see the world’s biggest sporting event with my own eyes, with everyone’s focus on my city,” she said.

“I can wait for another year, but please, no longer.”

Koichi Teratani, who blogs about the city’s Kabukicho entertainment district – a popular destination among Chinese tourists – said the postponement was a second blow for local businesses still reeling from the financial costs inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Hotels are already struggling from cancellations, so the smaller ones that don’t have the means to weather the storm face even more uncertainty,” said Teratani, who had just started printing 40,000 copies of a bilingual guidebook to Kabukicho – an area packed with thousands of bars, restaurants, and clubs – hand out to visitors during the Olympics when the postponement was announced.

“We can hang on to them for another year, even though some of the information might be a bit out of date,” he said.

There was disappointment that the spectacle, more than six years in the planning, had been delayed, but relief, too, both that the speculation of recent weeks had ended and, crucially, that Abe and the IOC president, Thomas Bach, had agreed that cancellation was out of the question.

“I think the Japanese government and the IOC had no choice but to postpone because holding the Olympics without athletes from around the world would have run counter to the Olympic Charter,” said Akino Yoshihara, a Kyoto-based translator who had been looking forward to watching track and field events.

“It would have been unfair if some athletes had been denied the opportunity to compete because of the coronavirus situation in their countries.”

Yujiro Nakao, a Tokyo company employee, agreed that a delay was the only sensible response to the outbreak, but said he had “mixed feelings” about not being able to see athletes who had spent years preparing for the biggest moment of their careers.

The first postponement in the Olympics’ 124-year modern history is expected to create a financial headache for the myriad businesses with a financial stake in the Games.

The IOC and local organizers will have to renegotiate contracts with official broadcasters and sponsors and extend rent agreements on venues that, until Tuesday, were to have served their purpose by the time the Paralympics ended in early September.

The Nikkei business delay reported on Wednesday that the organizing committee estimates that the postponement will raise the total cost for the Games by 300 billion yen ($2.7 billion) due to additional labor and other costs. There is no guarantee, either, that the 80,000 volunteers who were due to descend on Tokyo this summer will be available next year.

“Obviously, the celebratory mood of the Olympics had already been fading due to the coronavirus,” an official from one of the Games’ sponsors told the newspaper.

“Perhaps it would not have been fully welcomed if the Games had gone on as scheduled. We just need to start afresh.”

The general mood was best summed up by the Japanese phrase shikata ga nai (it can’t be helped) – a catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. Recent polls indicated that about 70 percent of Japanese people had resigned themselves to a postponement as soon as it became clear that the coronavirus was going to take months, possibly much longer, to bring under control.

Ami Takada, a recent high school graduate, was among those enjoying the spring sunshine in Tokyo on Wednesday who wondered if a one-year delay would be long enough, given the virus’s seemingly unstoppable onslaught.

“If they don’t hold the Olympics [in 2021], it will be the end for the Japanese economy,” she said.

The fate of the 2020 Games, scheduled to open in Tokyo on July 24, has been thrown into doubt by the outbreak of the virus, now dubbed a pandemic, AFP reported.

But organizers, Japanese government officials and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have insisted preparation for the Games is on track, with no expectations of a postponement or cancelation.

“There is no change in the government policy in that we closely cooperate with the IOC, the organizing committee, and the Tokyo metropolitan government to steadily prepare for holding the Games as scheduled,” government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters.

He said Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and Trump had held a phone call to discuss the outbreak as well as the Olympics.

“In the telephone talks with President Trump, the prime minister mentioned our efforts toward holding the Games, and the president said he highly values Japan’s efforts on transparency,” Suga said.

He did not say whether Trump had repeated his suggestion, made a day earlier, that the Games might need to be delayed.

“I would say maybe they postpone it for a year,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.

“You know, I like that better than I like having empty stadiums all over the place. I think if you cancel it, make it a year later, that’s a better alternative than doing it with no crowd,” he said.

The suggestion was roundly dismissed by Japan’s Olympic Minister Seiko Hashimoto.

“I’m aware of President Trump’s remarks but neither the IOC nor the organizing committee is thinking about delaying or canceling the Games at all,” she said at a regular briefing Friday.

Asked about the possibility of scaling back the number of spectators, Hashimoto said, “We are not thinking about that at all.”

Suga also said the government “doesn’t envisage” either a Games without spectators or the prospect of athletes withdrawing from the event.

IOC chief Thomas Bach told German television ARD on Thursday that the body would follow recommendations by the World Health Organization, but for now, it continues to work for “successful” Games.

He acknowledged however that cancelations of Olympic qualifiers are starting to pose “serious problems”.

“Crowds of spectators who do not know each other prior to the Games will come together and learn that there is more that unites them than divides them,” Tokyo 2020 said as it unveiled the motto, AFP reported.

The official 2020 Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius” or “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, but each host city chooses its own motto to accompany that edition of the Games.

London’s motto in 2012 was “Inspire a Generation”, whereas Athens in 2004 went for “Welcome Home” – a nod to the birthplace of the Games in Olympia.

Less well-received was Sochi, which plumped for “Hot. Cool. Yours”, sparking derision in some quarters.

Tokyo said the motto would be beamed onto the Skytree tower in the Japanese capital to raise awareness as it will be seen for miles around.

The opening ceremony will be on July 24 and organizers have stressed there is no discussion about changing this date despite the coronavirus crisis hitting global transport.

Tokyo 2020 rollouts have not always been smooth. In September 2015, the Games logo was ditched after accusations of plagiarism.

Designer Olivier Debie said the design was stolen from his logo for a Belgian theater and threatened court action before officials withdrew the emblem, saying it “no longer has public support.”