But when he was evicted again in 2013 at age 80 so the government could rebuild the stadium for the 2020 Games, it felt like a bitter twist of fate made worse by what he saw as official indifference.
It also forced him and his wife, Yasuko, out of a tight-knit public housing community in the Kasumigaoka neighbourhood where they had lived for over half a century.
“It was so hard to leave,” said Kohei, now 87. “It was the place I’d lived the longest in my life.”
He had thought it too soon for Japan to host the Games again, and said the announcement that roughly 200 families – many elderly – were being evicted from their housing complex came from nowhere.
“There wasn’t any consideration. If there’d only been one example of, ‘You’re being asked to move, could you please possibly cooperate?'” Kohei said.
“Instead, it was pretty much, ‘We’re having the Olympics, you need to get out.'”
They moved to another public housing complex, but the old community was shattered.
“I would really have liked some understanding of how we felt,” Kohei said. “We got ¥170,000 (RM6,230). What can you do with that? I just had to laugh. It took ¥1 million to move.”
‘Standard payment’
A Tokyo city official said the amount is the standard payment in that situation.
“We’re trained to be very polite, there’s public housing nearby, and officials devised various arrangements,” the official added, declining to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
“But to somebody who’d lived there a long time, officials probably did seem cold.”
Olympic organisers declined to comment, noting that the stadium is the responsibility of the Japan Sport Council (JSC) and the relocation was handled by the Tokyo government in accordance with their laws.
The JSC said the relocation was done in consultation with the Tokyo and national governments.
Deep roots
Kohei, the fourth of nine brothers, was born in Kasumigaoka, not far from what is now the posh Omotesando area in downtown Tokyo. After that house burnt down in World War II, the family moved 20m away, where he ran a tobacco shop attached to the family home.
Ahead of the 1964 Olympics, they were evicted to make way for the stadium and a surrounding park. The site of their home was paved over, the greenery that blanketed the area cut down, and a nearby river buried in concrete.
Kohei washed cars to make ends meet, living with Yasuko and their two children in one tiny room. But in 1965 he moved into the public housing complex and reopened the tobacco shop.
They moved three years after their eviction notice in 2013. It was particularly hard on Yasuko, who Kohei said was “lonely, depressed”, and she died in 2018 at age 84.
Now living with his son in western Tokyo, Kohei visits the old neighbourhood every few months. Across from the gleaming new stadium, and just uphill from the site of his now-destroyed former home, is a small park with a set of Olympic rings where visitors pose and smile for photos.
Despite the impact of the Games on his life, he hopes they succeed and is saddened that the pandemic has subdued the high spirits that would normally surround them.
But visiting the area makes his heart pound.
“I remember that I was born here, I was raised here,” he said. “When I look at the trees along the street that haven’t changed at all, I feel nostalgic but at the same time overflowing with a sad, lonely feeling.”