Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister and the current president of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, believes sports has the power to connect people's hearts and encourage them to overcome obstacles.

That belief motivated Mori to make a major contribution to successful bids for the 2019 Rugby World Cup and 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

"When Tokyo hosted the 1964 Olympics, it had not been long since the city had been ruined during World War II and many people doubted we could handle that big event," the 81-year-old Mori told The Japan Times earlier this month in an exclusive interview at the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee office. "But we made it with cooperation from the world. We showed the world that we had recovered from the damage of the war. This is one of the powers sports have."