Tokyo Games organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said Thursday she regrets being reactive to a scandal surrounding an executive member of the Games opening and closing ceremonies. Hashimoto said she did not know that Kentaro Kobayashi, whom the committee fired Thursday as director of the ceremonies, had made jokes about the holocaust in a comedy skit decades ago.
"I regret that we have been reactive in the past. Recognizing the seriousness this time, we have taken immediate action to dismiss him [Kobayashi]," Hashimoto said in a press conference announcing the dismissal of the former comedian on Thursday, the day before the opening ceremony.
Kobayashi, 48, is the third person on the ceremony production team this year to resign or be fired after scandals came to light.
Regarding the fact that Kobayashi had joked about the holocaust, Hashimoto said, "I was not at all aware of the existence of such a thing."
A video of the skit in question spread on social media, and Hashimoto confirmed it for the first time Thursday morning, she said.
-- Lack of governance
By Hiroyuki Shimoyama / Yomiuri Shimbun Sportswriter
The string of troubles surrounding the person in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies exposes the lack of governance by the organizing committee.
In March, Hiroshi Sasaki resigned as creative director of the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. With the opening of the Games just four months away, the organizing committee left it to the remaining creative team members to select new staff to be added to the team. The organizing committee only approved the selections at a later date, and did not take the initiative in the selection process, which led to the current debacle.
On Monday, Keigo Oyamada resigned as opening ceremony composer, and on Tuesday, picture book author Nobumi, who wrote in his autobiography that he made his homeroom teacher drink rotten milk when he was a junior high school student, declined to take charge of the Games' cultural program. Busy with the measures against the coronavirus, organizing committee Director General Toshiro Muto said, "It was difficult to find out what each person had done in the past."
Insulting a person's appearance, bullying in the past and turning genocide into a laughing matter. The misconduct of the ceremonies' production team has seriously damaged the credibility of the Tokyo Games, which is supposed to uphold the concepts of "diversity and inclusion."
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