Tokyo Olympics organizing committee on Thursday appointed Seiko Hashimoto, one of Japan's two female Cabinet ministers, to replace the previous leader, who resigned last week after making sexist remarks
Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics Organising Committee, attends a press conference after the Tokyo 2020 Executive Board meeting in Tokyo on February 18, 2021.
Image: Yuichi Yamazaki / POOL / AFP
TOKYO — Bending to intense criticism from abroad and social media activism at home, the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee on Thursday appointed Seiko Hashimoto, one of Japan’s two female Cabinet ministers, to replace the previous leader, who resigned last week after making sexist remarks.
The selection of Hashimoto, 56, an Olympic medalist in speedskating, represented a stark generational and gender shift for the committee. The man she is succeeding, Yoshiro Mori, is an 83-year-old former prime minister who stepped down after saying that women talked too much in meetings. The man the committee had initially planned to turn to next — Mori’s handpicked choice — is an 84-year-old former leader of Japanese soccer.
The appointment of Hashimoto did not stray far from the entrenched establishment that governs Japan. But both Mori’s resignation and his successor’s ascension reflected the potent voice that Japanese people — especially women in a male-dominated society — have found online, swaying the course of what was viewed as an important symbolic decision.
“In the past, he would have been just criticized, and then the issue would have ended,” said Kazuyo Katsuma, a businesswoman and prominent author of best-selling books on gender and work-life balance, speaking about Mori. “But this time he had to resign because of a lot of criticism from women who raised their voices.”
Yet even as some praised the capitulation of Mori, others wondered whether Hashimoto’s appointment was much more than a cosmetic decision, made under duress, in a country that ranks 121st out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum's global gender gap index. Some of the most significant criticism of Mori had come from outside Japan, with many traditionalists inside the country defending him.
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