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As Japan prepares to host the 2020 Olympics, a Tokyo-based sports and cultural events company has created a mosque on wheels in hopes of making Muslim visitors feel at home during the summer Olympics, says the London-based daily newspaper Evening Standard.
The director of Yasu Project, the company behind the project, Yasuharu Inoue warned against the possibility that the existing mosques in the city might not be enough for the Muslim visitors during the event. «As an open and hospitable country, we want to share the idea of `omotenashi' (Japanese hospitality) with Muslim people», he said in a recent interview.
The first mobile mosque was unveiled this week near Toyota Stadium, a J-League football venue in Toyota City. The mosque can accommodate 50 people and has outdoor taps and an ablution area and it can also move to different Olympic venues.
The company plans to target international sporting events not just in Japan but also abroad. The director said he hopes that the project «will do more than just fill a gap in the issue of religious infrastructure, I would be so happy if people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa, the Middle East and, and for example, refugees coming from Syria are able to use mosques as a tool to promote world peace,» he concluded.
