On the eve of the Tokyo Games, organizers fired the director of the opening ceremony because of his jokes about the Holocaust.
This news is the latest in a series of difficulties for Tokyo organizers.
Earlier this year, the chairman of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee resigned after sexist remarks, and the creative director of the Tokyo Olympics followed him after he made derogatory comments about the popular Japanese artist.
Organizers of the Tokyo Games fired Kentaro Kobayashi on Thursday over a joke he made about the Holocaust as part of his 1990 comedy, which recently surfaced in the local media.
Earlier, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization, issued a statement saying that Kobayashi’s participation in the Olympic Games would “offend the memory” of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Kobayashi apologized for his past comments in a statement.