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Olympic organizers on Thursday sacked the opening ceremony director, Kentaro Kobayashi, following reports of his past remarks about the Holocaust.
The Tokyo Games organizers have sacked one of the directors of the opening ceremony just a day before the event. They say Kobayashi Kentaro made anti-Semitic remarks as part of a comedy act in the 1990s.
It comes after an international Jewish human rights organization took aim at Kobayashi’s comments, which were related to the Holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said nobody has the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide.
In the same statement, Rabbi Abraham Cooper said “Any association of this person to the Tokyo Olympics would insult the memory of six million Jews”.
President of the organizing committee Hashimoto Seiko apologized for the latest scandal to hit the Games. Kobayashi was also helping to direct the closing ceremony.
The move follows the decision to cut music from the opening ceremony by a composer under fire for abusing classmates as a student.
The opening ceremony is set for Friday. While details are kept secret, some 950 people will be allowed to attend at the 68,000-capacity Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Due to coronavirus restrictions, nearly all other events will be held with spectators present.
Kobayashi apologizes
The well-known figure in Japanese theater apologized in a statement. “In a video that was released in 1998 to introduce young comedians… a skit that I wrote contained lines that were extremely inappropriate,” he said.
“It was from a time when I was not able to get laughs the way I wanted, and I believe I was trying to grab people’s attention in a shallow-minded way.”
In the sketch, Kobayashi and a comedy partner were pretending to be famous children’s TV entertainers. Kobayashi then referred to some paper doll cutouts as “the ones from that time you said ‘let’s play the Holocaust.'”
Another blow to Tokyo Olympics
The months leading up to the Tokyo Games have been mired in scandals. The ceremony was already set to go ahead without its planned opening music after composer Keigo Oyamada was forced to quit. Oyamada had bragged in interviews about bullying his disabled classmates in the past.
Ready for sober opening ceremony
Sports fans across the world are eagerly awaiting the start of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo from tomorrow, after a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The mega quadrennial event will kick off with a highly-anticipated Opening Ceremony tomorrow from 4:30 pm Indian time.
However, the event to be held at the newly-built National Stadium in the Japanese capital, will be a scaled down and sobering affair amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The ceremony will have none of the usual splendour and grandiosity. It will be lacking the mass choreography, the huge props and the cornucopia of dancers, actors and lights associated with an Olympic Games opening ceremony.
Long-time opening ceremony executive producer, Marco Balich, said that the opening ceremony of Summer Games will be a sobering show in Tokyo and will feature beautiful Japanese aesthetics. He said, the event will be very Japanese but also in sync with the sentiment of today, the reality.
Rising COVID-19 cases in Tokyo have cast a large shadow over an event that had already been postponed last year because of the pandemic. Japan had announced that the participants will be competing in empty venues so that the health risks amid the COVID-19 pandemic can be minimised.
Fans will see a much smaller team parade taking place in an almost empty Tokyo Olympic stadium. Deputy chef-de-mission Prem Kumar Verma said that only six officials from every country are allowed at the ceremony although there is no cap on athletes.