Only a few short days ago, we published a piece about Keigo Oyamada’s resignation from his position as Olympic and Paralympic opening ceremonies composer after bullying (borderline torture) allegations arose from his past. The most recent predicament involves Kentaro Kobayashi, the now-former ceremony show director who was sacked after footage was uncovered online featuring a controversial comedy skit he did in 1998.
From what I gathered from the crusty 23-year old footage, Kobayashi and his colleague are roleplaying children’s entertainers where he proposes using human-shaped paper cut-outs to fill the box seats of a baseball stadium. Kobayashi’s partner states that he already has some paper cut-outs from a previous proposal, to which Kobayashi comments “Ah, those must be from the time you said ‘Let’s play the Holocaust game.'”
His partner responds with the reaction that the producer gave him, saying “Mr. Toda was mad as hell. ‘It’s going to get banned from TV,’ he said.”
Kobayashi expressed remorse over what he said in the past, saying “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 Olympics opening ceremony is scheduled to proceed as planned, starting at 8:00 p.m. JST on Friday, July 23. At the time of this writing, the opening ceremony is only a mere 13 hours away. The gargantuan Olympic stadium, with a capacity for 68,000 spectators, will instead host only a meager 950 viewers instead.
The issues with the weather-beaten Tokyo 2020 Olympics have snowballed over the week, as more cases of Covid have arisen in both athletes and organizers alongside several more resignations and sackings pertaining to organizing officials. On the plus side, police found the absconded Ugandan weightlifter in Yokkaichi city, about 100 miles from Osaka. I personally can’t place too much fault with him though, the young and passionate 20-year old just wanted to weeb it out in Japan, even if absconding wasn’t exactly the legal way to go about it.
Source: BBC News
