British Paralympic officials expressed shock that hotels in Yokohama, Japan, demanded payment to make their rooms accessible for wheelchair athletes in the run-up to the 2020 Paralympics. According to an April 24 article in The Guardian, an unnamed senior British official says there was a “total lack of interest” from Yokohama hotels to accommodate the British Paralympic team.

Yokohama is a city on the outskirts of Tokyo and the location of Team GB’s preparatory training camp for the 2020 Paralympics. British officials have been working for more than 18 months to secure appropriate lodging for their athletes. Hotels in the area are allegedly trying to charge the team both for making rooms accessible and for the cost of changing them back to their previous configuration when the athletes leave.

It appears that for the British team a solution has been found, as the Yokohama City government has agreed to create a fund to pay for the room modifications. But the controversy points to larger concerns surrounding the Tokyo Paralympics — whether there will be sufficient accessible hotel rooms for disabled spectators, officials and journalists during the games and whether the games will have any lasting impact on disability access in Japan.

“This is not a Games specific issue. There is an issue with the legislation in Japan when it comes to the number of accessible rooms. In hotels with more than 50 rooms you have to have one accessible room but it doesn’t matter if that hotel has 500 rooms, it can still just be one accessible room,” said Andrew Parsons, the president of the International Paralympic Committee.

Parsons added that the athlete village is fully accessible and praised the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee for working to find solutions to accessibility problems. Private businesses, however, often see little economic incentive to improve accessibility, especially in dense urban areas where space is at a premium.

The hope for many is that Olympic/Paralympic spotlight brings greater visibility to the needs of Japan’s disability community. “The Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games offer a huge opportunity for the city and for Japan as a whole, and it’s one that should be capitalized on,” writes British Paralympian Anne Wafula Strike, in an opinion response for the Guardian. “The question we should be asking is, what do the disabled people of Japan expect to gain from the Games being held there?”