TOKYO - Beneath the disquiet over the Olympic Games is a government fast losing the trust of the public, effectively since the coronavirus pandemic began.

The first signs of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's indecisiveness came late last year, when it took weeks of wrangling for him to pull the plug on his brainchild, the domestic Go To Travel domestic tourism campaign, despite the warnings of medical experts that incentivising the flow of people could only catalyse the spread of Covid-19.