A day before opening ceremonies for the 2021 Olympic Games were set to take place, the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee fired its director for making a joke about the Holocaust back in 1998.
Organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto announced Kentaro Kobayashi’s dismissal Thursday. “The Opening Ceremony is just around the corner, I apologize deeply to the many relevant people, the people of Tokyo, and the people of the nation for causing inconvenience,” Hashimoto said.
Kobayashi is a former member of a popular comedy duo. The joke was allegedly used in Kobayashi’s comedy act, and it included the phrase “Let’s play Holocaust.”
“We did not know at all that such a thing existed,” Hashimoto said. “This time we found these problems, and as this can have various diplomatic issues, we thought it would be important to deal with it as soon as possible, and hence our decision to dismiss him.”
Soon after a video clip and the script of Kobayashi’s performance were revealed, criticism flooded social media.
“Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the global social action director of a Los Angeles-based human rights group.
In his criticism, he noted that the Nazis gassed Germans with disabilities. “Any association of this person to the Tokyo Olympics would insult the memory of 6 million Jews and make a cruel mockery of the Paralympics,” Rabbi Cooper said.
This isn’t the first Olympic official to resign in the wake of controversy.
Earlier this week, a composer whose music is expected to be used at the opening ceremony was forced to resign because of past bullying of his classmates. Keigo Oyamada boasted about the bullying in magazine interviews. His music will not be used at the ceremonies.
Scandals related to this year’s Olympics go all the way back to when Tokyo was first awarded the games back in 2013. Currently, French investigators are looking into alleged bribes paid to International Olympic Committee members to influence the vote for Tokyo. The fallout forced the resignation of former Japanese Olympic Committee President and IOC Member Tsunekazu Takeda.
