Mayor Tasuku Tsukada has learned just enough English to compliment his city's vanquished opponent in the hard-fought battle for the 1998 Winter Games.
"Salt Lake City is a very nice city," he tells a Deseret News reporter and photographer, before turning to his translator for help with the rest of the interview.Such a gracious gesture is a way of life in Japan, where ceremony reigns even as communities like Nagano struggle to share in this island nation's economic spoils.
The Olympics are seen by Tsukada and other supporters as the key to bringing much needed transportation and other infrastructure improvements to the 350,000 residents of Nagano as well as the rest of the Nagano prefecture, or territory.
The mayor said he hopes hosting the next Winter Games will attract new industries to this prefectural government capital, as well as more tourists and conventioneers.
Nagano has long felt left out of the ongoing effort to modernize Japan, a situation most often blamed on lack of political clout with the national government. The Olympics, though, has changed that.
The national government is spending some $6 billion on infrastructure improvements alone, including a high-speed rail link between Toyko and Nagano that will cut the trip from more than three hours to just 90 minutes.
The Japanese government also is picking up the tab for widening several highways leading to mountain venues and for expanding the airport at Matsumoto, considered the prefecture's economic capital.
Nagano, which developed over the past 14 centuries around the city's chief attraction, the Zenkoji temple, is hoping to shake off its image as an isolated, conservative and rather ordinary city that has little else to offer outsiders.
Millions of visitors already pass through Nagano's bustling downtown annually, but they're on their way to the wildly popular summer and ski resorts in the Japanese Alps surrounding the city.
The visitors who do pause see markets filled with locally grown produce, including apples the size of softballs that can sell for $7 or more apiece, and department stores selling the latest French fashions.
Traditional Japanese restaurants serving such exotic fare as grasshoppers share the narrow side streets with Pachinko pinball parlors and video game arcades, where the sound of virtual reality street fighting is deafening.
Like so many cities before it, Nagano intends to use the Olympics to turn itself into a destination. But first, the city made up mostly of government employees and some high-technology workers must get ready.
Much to the frustration of the white-gloved taxi drivers in their neatly slipcover-upholstered vehicles, many roads in the city are torn up or blocked by other construction.
New, luxurious hotels are being built and others are being renovated to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of visitors anticipated for the two-week event, now just 796 days away.
"The name of Nagano will be known by people all over the world because of the Olympic Games," Tsukada said. "We are hoping to become a convention center after the Olympic Games."
Tomoko Wada, interpreter for the prefectural governor and a freelance guide who was hired in Nagano by the Deseret News, said the Olympics is changing the nature of the people.
Describing them as having "closed characteristics" for centuries due to their isolation from the rest of Japan, Wada said the people of Nagano are "encouraging themselves to be outgoing and accepting of foreigners."
Locals seem dubious that the Olympics will transform Nagano into a world-class destination, but they do expect the quality of their lives to improve as a result of all the new construction.
They're especially anxious for the Shinkansen line - the bullet train - to be completed. Scheduled to be operational next year, the line will make day trips to Tokyo for business, shopping or a visit to Tokyo Disneyland easy.
If there is any concern about hosting the Winter Games, it is, of course, about money. NAOC, the Nagano Olympic organizing committee, has not released a budget since winning the bid in 1991.
The budget then was $1.3 billion for the facilities alone. Half of that cost is being paid by the national government, with the prefectural government and the communities where the venues are located splitting the rest.
The worry is whether the Winter Games will leave a debt as well as where the money's going to come from to operate the facilities after the Winter Games are over.
NAOC Deputy Director General Naokichi Nishimura said through a translator that the communities will be responsible for maintaining the facilities - without any Olympic revenues.
Nagano plans to turn an ice hockey arena into a convention center after the Games, a project the mayor expects to return revenue to the city. Tsukada said discussions are under way about finding funding for the other facilities.
Longtime Olympic critic Juichiro Imai, who lost his seat on the Nagano city council in municipal elections earlier this year, believes the Winter Games is about benefiting construction companies.
"The Olympic Games will cost too much money and the municipal government of Nagano will have to have a big budget deficit," Imai told the Deseret News.
"Most people are very concerned about a budget deficit. Especially they worry that after the Winter Games, the facilities will not be (used)," Imai said.
Imai, a retired businessman joined only by environmental activists in publicly opposing the Olympics, said "there is a kind of taboo among the Nagano community that they cannot speak out against the Nagano Games."
Tadashi Nakamura, the political editor for The Shinano Mainichi newspaper who conducted and translated the interview with Imai for the Deseret News, disagreed. "I think almost all the people in this city and prefecture support the Olympics."
Nakamura said that's why the mayor was reelected and Imai defeated by voters. Still, he agreed there are concerns. "Almost all of us are afraid the Olympic Games will take too much money," he said.