Twenty-three-year-old footage of Kentaro Kobayashi seeming to make jokes about the Holocaust cost the director of the Olympics opening ceremony his job, on the eve of the event.
Japan’s Olympic chief Seiko Hashimoto said the video ridiculed ‘painful facts of history’, according to the BBC.
The dismissal is described as the latest in a string of scandals to hit the Games, coming days after a composer quit the team creating the ceremony because of claims that he had bullied classmates with disabilities at school.
In March, creative chief Hiroshi Sasaki quit after suggesting that plus-size comedian Naomi Watanabe could appear as an ‘Olympig’. He later apologised. And, in February, Yoshiro Mori was forced to step down as the head of the organising committee after he made remarks about women – he was quoted as saying that they talked too much – that were criticised as ‘inappropriate’.
In the latest incident, former comedian Kobayashi was fired over a sketch he performed in the 1990s, in which he and another comedian pretend to be a children’s entertainers. At one point in the sketch, Kobayashi turns to his colleague, and says – referring to some paper dolls – that they are ‘the ones from that time you said “let’s play the Holocaust”’.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean and global social action director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was quoted as saying: ‘Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide.’
In a statement, Kobayashi said: ‘Entertainment should not make people feel uncomfortable. I understand that my stupid choice of words at that time was wrong, and I regret it.’
The Tokyo 2020 Games got under way on Wednesday, with hosts Japan winning their softball match.