Nagano 1998: Some Like It Cool

There were no fireworks, no arrows arching toward the torch. Just children, scores of them, scattering like snowflakes, and the strangled cries of some costumed chanters. Innocent and esoteric by turn, the first Olympic opening ceremonies to have their very own 15th century landscape poster introduced the world to what might be seen as Japan's latest brand of high-tech traditionalism: a sumo wrestler and a schoolgirl walking hand in hand.

Just four days earlier, all over the island, faithful citizens had scattered roasted soybeans, in the annual Setsubun ceremony, crying, "Devils go out! Happiness come in!" Now a sumo wrestler whose Japanese name is an ancient word for dawn, attended by a sword-bearer and a dew sweeper, ritually purified the ground on a chilly silver morning. In something of the same spirit, International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch reminded the world (not least Baghdad and Washington) that the "Olympic truce" calls for an end to formal warfare during the competition.

The opening ceremonies of the Nagano Winter Games were as lyrical and spare as you might expect in a stadium shaped like a cherry blossom yet named, not memorably, the "Stadium for Opening and Closing Ceremonies." Helium doves fluttered prettily, Japan's Emperor and Empress clapped gamely for 40 minutes of parading athletes, and a large number of the contestants were dressed like secret policemen.

But the Games also unveiled a new kind of East-is-West spin to things. The 516-lb. wrestler who sanctified the earth, after all, was a Hawaiian (called in when the only wrestler stronger than he is contracted bronchitis), and the rousing chorus of Beethoven's Ninth (a perennial Japanese Christmas favorite) was conducted by Seiji Ozawa, just returned from Boston. Andrew Lloyd Webber was responsible for the ad-worthy chorus, When Children Rule the World (and the producer of the whole extravaganza was the man responsible for a Japanese West Side Story).

There were curlers here and a Kenyan skier there, female hockey players and an Indian luger. Now and then, perhaps, a few niceties got lost in translation ("Oh, we beseech you. Heave-ho, heave-ho," was one of the first lines to greet spectators on the scoreboard), but for the most part the ceremonies so conformed to the textbook that even their "image director" was a man whose first name is Man. Elegiacally minded Japanese may have been calling these the last Games of the 20th century, but the efflorescence of young faces suggested they are really the first of the 21st.

The ancient rites that opened the 18th Winter Games were, in fact, apt for an Olympiad that some had been crowning the Attitude Games. As beach volleyball brought tank tops and bikinied dudes to the Summer Games in Atlanta, snowboarding, most conspicuously, looked to be smuggling a radical edge and Technicolor glint to the mild-mannered Winter Games. With the world-champion shredder refusing to show up, and even the Chinese athletes showing off their backflips in freestyle skiing, it could look as if the I.O.C. were a global subsidiary of MTV. (CBS even hired former MTV veejay Kennedy to do color commentary.)