Old Video From Japan Shared as Visuals From 'Tokyo Olympics Closing Ceremony'

We traced the video back to 2013 which showed a performance by the students from a university in Japan.

A six-minute video is doing the rounds on social media with the claim that it shows the "wonderful closing ceremony" at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

However, we traced the video back to 2013, which showed students from a university in Japan performing synchronised precision walking (collective action), or 'Shudankodo' as it is known as in Japanese.

CLAIM

The claim along with the video reads, "Wonderful closing ceremony of Tokyo Olympics. Like each person was digitally programmed...Too Good.. (sic)."

The video is also being massively shared on Facebook.

WHAT WE FOUND

Using Google Chrome's InVID extension, we fragmented the video into multiple keyframes and conducted a reverse image search on them.

The search results on Yandex led us to a video posted on Imgur, an online image sharing site, on 30 January 2017.

It also had a video link to YouTube and the video was posted there on 3 January 2014.

We then came across the same video on 'TV Asahi', a TV network based out of Tokyo, Japan.

The video posted on 20 January 2014 has 8.5 million views at the time of writing this article. A link in the description of the video had the word 'Shudankodo'.

Taking cue from here, we searched with relevant keywords on YouTube and found the video published on the channel of 'On Demand News' – a UK-based YouTube News Network – on 15 November 2013.

The description read that that the synchronised precision walking is called Shudankodo in Japanese, or Collective Action. A group of 77 students, from the Nippon Sports Science University in Japan spent five months to perform this.

A comparison can be seen below.

Another report by 'The Irish Times' along with the video published on 15 November 2013 added that the varsity has been doing 'Shudankodo' since 1966.

It must be noted that in view of the ongoing COVID pandemic, no fan or audience was allowed during the games or the closing ceremony, which was held on 8 August.

But a huge crowd can be seen in the viral video. Clearly, a video from 2013 is now being shared to falsely claim that it shows the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics.

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