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Director of the Olympic opening ceremony fired after joking about the Holocaust

2021-07-22T05:44:54.922Z


The Olympics in Tokyo are scheduled to officially begin with the opening ceremony on Friday. Now it came out: The creative director used to play down the Holocaust. It's not the first scandal leading up to the Games.


Enlarge image

Kentaro Kobayashi (archive photo)

Photo: Uncredited / dpa

The director of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony has been sacked for joking about the Holocaust.

The organizing committee announced the day before the ceremony.

The fired Kentaro Kobayashi, a 48-year-old Japanese comedian, used anti-Semitic slogans on a show in 1998.

The videos have recently been circulating increasingly on the Internet.

In the sketch, Kobayashi made fun of the murder of the Jews under National Socialism.

One of the participants said among other things: "Let's play the Holocaust".

"It has emerged that Kobayashi has used expressions during past appearances that mocked a tragic part of history," said Seiko Hashimoto, head of the Summer Games Organizing Committee.

The organizing committee has therefore decided to release him from his post.

Hashimoto announced that it would review the entire program for the opening ceremony.

At the beginning of the week, the Japanese musician Cornelius announced that he would not appear at the opening ceremony on Friday.

The J-Pop artist, whose real name is Keigo Oyamada, withdrew from him after strong public criticism of earlier statements.

Previously, videos from the 1990s had surfaced in which Oyamada spoke with no apparent regret about how he used to bully disabled classmates.

There was already excitement about the staging of the opening ceremony in March.

Creative director Hiroshi Sasaki had resigned after he had planned to let a plus-size model float into the stadium as an "Olympig" - as an Olympic pig - at the opening ceremony.

Sexist comments from the head of the organization

In February, the head of Olympia, Yoshiro Mori, resigned because of a scandal over sexist comments. At a meeting of the organizing committee, the 83-year-old former head of government said that the planned doubling of the quota of women on executive bodies of the sports associations to 40 percent said that women talked a lot, which is why board meetings would take time. “If either of them raise their hand, they'll probably think they have to say something too. And then everyone says something «, Mori is supposed to have said. There was heavy criticism of this. Around 390 Olympic volunteers declared that they did not want to compete in protest. The organizing committee judged Mori's statements to be inappropriate.

The Olympic Games will officially begin with the opening ceremony on Friday.

The Japanese capital is hosting the Games for the second time since 1964.

Because of the corona pandemic, no spectators are admitted to the competitions.

lau / sid / dpa

Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2021-07-22

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