Japan could have given itself points by leaving its judge in the team event. The Japanese dance team has a bunch of points on the line for their team. They do have a member on the tech panel. Higashino was on the panel in 2019 when K&K missed the FD cut also. She has been on 2 Worlds panels and now an Olympic panel in this quadrennium. Seems incredible even when you take into account the rule that none of the top contenders' countries are to have a member of their country on the tech panel.
Japan have only 1 ISU Ice Dance judge. So they are very dependant on her being available. If for whatever reasons (Covid, work, etc), she decides not to come, they can't replace her.
Thanks for having reminded the recent rule about top 5 contenders not being on the TP. I totally forgot about it. That also answers one thing I wondered about the Single/Pair panels for Beijing.
Indeed, 2 Worlds and 1 Olympic in 4 years (given that 1 edition of Worlds has been cancelled) is quite a lot.
The number of ISU specialists (35 in total) by ISU member is
Canada 3 (Marie Bowness, Rock LeMay, Laurean Senft)
Great Britain 3 (Doreen Hoppe, Helen Prior, Candice Towler-Green)
Italy 3 (Francesca Fermi, Maurizio Margaglio, Fabrizio Pedrazzini)
Ukraine 3 (Olga Akimova, Sergei Baranov, Maria Tumanoskaya)
USA 3 (Judy Blumberg, Julia Rey, Philipp Rey)
Poland 3 (Joanna Budner, Dostatni, Sylvia Nowak)
Russia 3 (Petr Durnev, Svetlanda Lyapina, Denis Samokhin)
Australia 2 (Maria Borounov, Monica MdDonald)
Japan 2 (Ayako Higashino, Nakako Tsuzuki)
Slovakia 2 (Slavka Grincova, Tomas Kika)
Azerbaijan 1 (Kristin Fraser)
Belarus 1 (Anna Krytskaya)
Finland 1 (Pia Maria Gustafsson)
France 1 (Roxane Petetin)
Hungary 1 (Gyorgy Elek)
Israel 1 (Galit Chait)
Netherlands 1 (Marie Louise Gijtenbeek)
South Korea 1 (Yang Tae Hwa)
Dostanti and Bowness did Turin 2006
Humphreys-Baranova (not active as TS anymore) and Fermi did Vancouver 2010
Elek and Higashino did Sochi 2014
Grinkova and Yang did PyeongChang 2018
I think some of the 35 have never called at ISU Championships level. Obviously, some of them are limited by being coach of some entries (Margaglio, Durnev, Chait, ..) or being relative of some of them (Lyapina, but she has been used for 4CC or Jr Worlds).