When A+E Networks’ original, "Tokyo Legacy", premieres across A+E Networks’ History channels on 20 Dec, the legacy viewers will see it’s not the story they were going to get, not at the time they were supposed to get it, with few of the people that were originally supposed to be involved.

Thank Covid-19, which crushed Japan’s 2020 Olympics ambitions, taking down the original plan to bookend the feature-length doc with the Games in Tokyo in 1964 and 2020, and sending A+E’s Asia-based creative team flying back to the drawing board. 

Or make that Zoom-ing. As country after country locked down in the face of the pandemic, not only did the original concept for the 90-minute documentary collapse, but the series of live interviews lined up across the U.S. fell apart, and a successful cross-border production started looking increasingly remote.

Nevertheless, the team in Tokyo decided to keep going with the core story of Japan’s post-war history centred on Tokyo; and change almost everything else. “It wasn’t quite going back to the drawing board, but it was major surgery,” says A+E Networks Japan general manager, John Flanagan. 

With the 2020 bookend gone, the team tossed plans to interview athletes, look at venues and dig deep into the details of the Olympics. 

Instead, the feature tackles events like the Olympics postponement, Covid-19, and the resignation of Shinzo Abe at the end of August this year, along with the impact of turning points such as the Sarin gas attacks in 1995 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, laced with pop culture, quirks like the country’s famed toilets, subways and technology, and ending with a look at the future of Tokyo.   

The story involves 26 interviews, archive footage and new material woven into a narrative of Japan. “It’s not just plain old history,” Flanagan adds. 

In many ways, being forced to adjust the original story was not the catastrophe it seemed at first to be. Flanagan says the rework “allowed us to tell a much deeper story about the post-war history of Japan, which makes it an evergreen product and not dependent on the Olympics”.  

The new version, directed by A+E Networks’ Singapore-based Chris Humphrey, targets an international audience, including Japan, and will be distributed globally by A+E.  

The final product, shot in English in 4K, takes A+E Networks’ original production in Japan “to a whole new level,” Flanagan says, describing the feature as “big budget”. The budget has not been disclosed.  

"Tokyo Legacy" was funded by A+E Networks Japan and platform partner SkyPerfect, which will air the programme on its 4K channel. 

Earlier this month, having showed the doc at a special screening in Tokyo, Flanagan talked of “an uplifting story that chronicles the ups and downs of Tokyo, while highlighting the metropolis’ resilience and ability to come back stronger”. Perhaps a bit like "Tokyo Legacy".