Tokyo Olympic organizing committee on Thursday fired Kentaro Kobayashi , the director of the Opening Ceremony over a joke he made about the Holocaust as a comedian in 1998.
The firing of Kobayash came on the eve of the Opening Ceremony.
According to the committee, Kobayashi was in charge of coordinating the entire direction of the ceremonies. He was involved in planning and writing scripts for the stage productions after working as a member of comedy duo Rahmens.
A video clip resurfaced online of Kentaro Kobayashi’s performance during a comedy show more than 20 years ago, in which he joked about a game he called: “Let’s play Holocaust.” Criticism of Kobayashi, a former member of the popular Japanese comedy duo Rahmens, quickly spread on social media.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization in Los Angeles, expressed outrage.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemns past anti-Semitic jokes as well as reported bullying of disabled individuals, made by Japanese comedian Kentaro Kobayashi, who is the show director of the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics,” the Center said in a statement on Wednesday
“Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide,” the center said in a statement issued on July 21. “The Nazi regime also 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.”
The organizing committee moved quickly in dismissing the comedian for “having made mocking remarks in the past about the tragic event.”
“We offer our deep apology to the many Olympic officials as well as residents of Tokyo and the rest of the Japanese population for causing trouble and concerns at a time when the Olympic Games are just around the corner,” the Tokyo Organizing Committee said, according to Asahi Shimbun.
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