How a young woman helped topple Tokyo 2020 president
TOKYO — When a 22-yearold Japanese college student launched an online campaign against the powerful Tokyo Olympics chief and the sexist remarks he made, she was not sure it would go very far.
But in less than two weeks, Momoko Nojo’s #DontBe Silent campaign, organized with other activists, gathered more than 150,000 signatures, galvanizing global outrage against Yoshiro Mori, the president of Tokyo 2020.
He quit last week and has been replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympic Games for Japan in cycling and skating.
The hashtag was coined in response to remarks by Mori, an octogenarian former prime minister, that women talk too much. Nojo used it on Twitter and other social media platforms to gather support for a petition calling for action against him.
“Few petitions have got 150,000 signatures before. I thought it was really great. People take this personally, too, not seeing this as only Mori’s problem,” said a smiling Nojo in a Zoom interview.
Her activism, born from a year studying in Denmark, is the latest example of women outside mainstream politics in Japan taking to keyboards to bring social change in the world’s third-largest economy, where gender discrimination, pay gaps and stereotyping are rampant.
“It made me realize that this is a good opportunity to push for gender equality in Japan,” said Nojo, a fourth-year economics student at Keio University in Tokyo.
She said her activism was motivated by questions she has often heard from male peers like, “You’re a girl, so you have to go to a high school that has pretty school uniforms, don’t you?” or “Even if you don’t have a job after graduating from college, you can be a housewife, no?”
Nojo started her nonprofit “NO YOUTH NO JAPAN” in 2019, while she was in Denmark, where she saw how the country chose Mette Frederiksen, a woman in her early 40s, as prime minister.
The time in Denmark, she said, made her realize how much Japanese politics was dominated by older men.