What I'm trying to get my head around is why in a country that is so self-conscious about how it is portrayed on the world stage, there was so little background checking on the people responsible for a ceremony that will be watched by billions.
Frankly, it doesn't surprise me at all. Sure, Japan is "self-conscious" in a general sense, but that doesn't mean that an organization run by crusty old politicians and in the pocket of too-big-to-fail corporations is going to have the cultural sensitivity and common sense to make decisions that present it in a good light on the world stage. I mean, this is a committee that was until recently run by serial bigot and gaffe-producing machine Yoshiro Mori, and even though they replaced him with Seiko Hashimoto (which a cynical observer might argue was more for appearances than a genuine effort to achieve gender diversity), I mean, she's an LDP lifer (and friend of Mori's) who is hardly a bastion of progressive views herself.
I actually read/heard that some of the younger staffers on the organizing committee raised the issue about Keigo Oyamada/Cornelius and were ignored by their bosses, who basically just brushed it off as "we have no time to find a replacement", "he'll apologize and everything will be fine", etc., without taking the trouble to be aware of the exact nature of the problem, which is
exactly what I'd expect from a Japanese corporate/political entity.
That said, I'm going to get on my soapbox again.
Kentaro Kobayashi, director of the Olympics opening ceremony, has been removed from his post following news reports about his past comments on the Holocaust, the Tokyo Organising Committee announced Thursday.
It really, really bothers me that this news is getting lumped together (especially abroad in English-language media) with that of Oyamada/Cornelius and just kind of painted in the same brush as "another Olympic-affiliated creator with a horrible past".
Oyamada's "past bullying" was again, I reiterate, a case where he not only
repeated physically, psychologically, and sexually abused disabled classmates as a high schooler, but
gloated, laughed, and bragged about it on multiple occasions even long after he had become a successful adult, not once showing
even the slightest hint of remorse, regret or self-reflection until last week, when he released a form-letter apology on Twitter.
What about Kobayashi? He used to be part of a comedy duo called Rahmens (full disclosure: much like Cornelius's music, I'd also consider myself a fan of their work), that—in one line of one segment of a skit produced over twenty years ago—made a flippant and ignorant reference to the Holocaust.
Look, I'm not defending the line itself. It certainly came from a lack of education/understanding about how taboo the subject matter is, especially abroad. But the Rahmens produced literally hundreds, if not
thousands of hours of comedy skits, and—even looking at the rest of that skit, let alone the entire body of their work—there is absolutely
zero indication of any sort of anti-semitic, bigoted, discriminatory views or mentality of any sort. (On the contrary, their work is generally absurdist/surrealist/quirky and pretty entertaining and intellectual, IMHO.)
"Past comments on the Holocaust" makes it sound like the man himself is some sort of Holocaust denier or history revisionist (along the lines of Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama), not a guy who added a line in ill-taste to a skit when he was a 20-something comedian barely out of college and probably wasn't fully educated/enlightened about the subject (as I imagine would also be true of many younger Japanese back then, including the audience he was writing for). Looking in context, you can see he was probably just looking for a suitable horrifying historical event to toss in for the absurdist/shock value of it. Was that smart/funny? No, but I would imagine there are many, many comedians out there who are at least as guilty of a similar crime.
To castigate this guy as if he's morally bankrupt in anywhere near the same way as someone
who made disabled classmates eat **** and perform sex acts, traumatizing them for life in the process, with zero regrets or remose just seems completely unfair to me.
If anything,
this should have been the case where they allowed someone to make a sincere apology—like they tried and failed to do with Cornelius—and used it as a teachable moment. (And if you read it, Kobayashi's apology is much, much more heartfelt and rings far more true than Cornelius's, in part because there is absolutely nothing in his behavior or body of work over the years to suggest that this one line was indicative of a deeper, more problematic mindset incompatible with the Olympic mission.)
But since they're just flailing now anyway, I guess I'm not surprised that they happily threw Kobayashi under the bus, one week after they made an effort to defend Oyamada, an actual psychopathic monster.
</rant>