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The Tokyo governor has said she will not attend a key meeting of Olympic officials next week as the dispute escalates over sexist comments made by the head of the 2020 Games organizing committee.
Yuriko Koike, who became the city’s first governor in 2016, said she saw no merit in attending the meeting between the committee chair, Yoshiro Mori, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, and the minister of Japan Olympics, Seiko Hashimoto.
“Given the current situation, I don’t think it sends a positive message,” Koike said.
He said the fallout from Mori’s claim last week that meetings tended to drag on because “competitive” women “talked too much” had unsettled people in the capital as they tried to weather the latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
“As governor of the host city, I think it is a great shame,” she said, adding that the Tokyo metropolitan government had received 1,400 complaints about Mori’s comments and 97 volunteers living in the city had withdrawn their offers of help during the games. , which should open a year later on July 23.
On Tuesday, the organizing committee said more than 400 Olympic and Paralympic volunteers across the country had resigned in protest.
One of Mori’s former colleagues in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Toshihiro Nikai, drew criticism after suggesting that the volunteers had abruptly resigned and could be replaced. Nikai, the PLD general secretary, said he hoped the volunteers would “change their minds once the situation calms down.”
He also said he would like to see Mori, a former prime minister, stay in his Olympic role and “work hard to meet the expectations of the people around him.”
The dispute, which is turning into a national conversation about outdated attitudes towards women in some sectors of Japanese society, has only escalated since Mori apologized but refused to resign late last week.
On Tuesday, opposition female parliamentarians attended a debate in the lower house of parliament dressed in white, a gesture inspired by US congresswomen during Donald Trump’s State of the Union speeches in 2019 and 2020. Some of the male colleagues of the Japanese MPs on the opposition benches wore white roses in solidarity.
Wearing white as a form of protest dates back to America’s women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century.
After initially insisting that Mori’s apology and retraction meant the matter was closed, the IOC backtracked on Tuesday, saying it viewed his comments as “absolutely inappropriate and in contradiction with the IOC’s commitments and reforms to its agenda. Olympic 2020 “.
She added: “In addition to Mr. Mori’s apology, the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee also considers his comment inappropriate and has reaffirmed its commitment to gender equality.”
