National Post (National Edition)
`IT IS NOT A GAFFE'
MORI SAGA SHINES LIGHT ON ABUSE OF CHILDREN AND SEXISM IN JAPANESE SPORT
Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old who headed the Tokyo 2020 Olympic organizing committee, announced his resignation on Friday after an uproar over remarks demeaning women, including saying that female colleagues talk too long at meetings.
But the leadership change also served as reminder of sexism and persistent claims of institutionalized harassment that tarnishes Japanese sport and casts a shadow over the Summer Olympics, sports administrators and human rights activists say.
“When I see Mori's comments described as a gaffe, it makes me irate because it is not a gaffe. It's a verbal expression of national policy,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch.
“This is an active policy of excluding women from positions that they are qualified to occupy and frankly would do a better job than men.”
The fallout exposed how a male-dominated and intensely hierarchical elite have resisted calls for reform in sports, opposed greater representation for women and perpetuated a system where coaches have been accused of beating child athletes, experts say.
Mori expressed “deepest apologies” for the “chaos” caused by his comments while trying to justify the lack of women at a senior level in the Japanese Olympic Committee and the organization's failure to meet an official target of more than 40-per-cent female board members.
He said women talk too much at meetings and make them run on too long. The remarks touched off outrage and demands for Mori's resignation.
“The important thing is that the Olympic Games should be held in July, and we should avoid a situation where my presence is a hindrance to the delivery of the Games,” he said Friday.
Yet it was far from clear Mori was really repentant.
His parting gesture had been to try to hand-pick a successor, ignoring calls to choose a woman or even just a younger man, and attempting to hand the job of overseeing the Games to an even older man who supports corporal punishment for children.
Mori's attempt to put forward Saburo Kawabuchi, 84, a former Olympic soccer player and experienced sports administrator, is likely to be thwarted. Olympics Minister Seiko Hashimoto said on Friday that nothing had been decided, and the choice of Mori's successor would have to go through a “formal process.”
The World Economic Forum ranks Japan 121st out of 153 countries in terms of gender parity, with the largest gender gap among advanced economies. Women made up only 5.2 per cent of executives at all listed Japanese companies in 2019, according to government data, and men dominate the ranks of sports.
Last year, Human Rights Watch issued a report into the physical, sexual and verbal abuse that young athletes routinely suffer while training for sport in Japan, frequently leading to depression, suicides, physical disabilities and lifelong trauma.
Worden says the system is fuelled by a culture that punishes people for speaking out, and has far too few women in positions of authority who could help to protect young athletes, especially girls.
“It is not cost-free to keep appointing men who refuse to create space for women and girls to advance and to access their basic rights, like to be free of abuse in sport, to get paid, to get medical care,” she said. “So long as dinosaurs control the top of sport, it's going to have a detrimental effect on the career and the prospect of a talented young female players who are the best hope for Japan's future.”
Teenage table tennis, basketball and volleyball players have all committed suicide in recent years after
complaining of verbal or physical abuse by their coaches.
Kaori Yamaguchi, a former Olympic judo medallist and female board member of the Japan Olympic Committee, has struggled for many years to have more women in decision-making roles in Japanese sport. Men say they support the idea, she said, but when it comes to actually making room for women “they start making excuses like women not having enough knowledge.”
Yamaguchi said there is a shortage of female coaches in Japan, which not only closes off a career option for female former athletes, it also fuels a sports culture where winning is everything. That in turn puts off many children from taking part, with one survey showing between 30 and 40 per cent of elementary schoolchildren exercise for less than an hour a week, she said.
“Sports in Japan is all about working hard rather than having fun,” she said. “Coaches who have themselves received physical punishment then do it their students, like children of domestic violence growing up and doing the same to their children.”
Yamaguchi said children playing sports tend to blame themselves for not reaching performance goals.
“In Japan, the self-esteem of children who play sport is very low, whereas sports should be giving people self-esteem,” she said.
But Mori's comments also point to the structural issues preventing change.
“What Mori's remarks show is the underlying atmosphere that people from below cannot voice an opinion, a feeling that is particularly strong in Japanese sport,” she said.
Yuko Inazawa, a director of the Japan Rugby Football Union, said that the sport had made efforts to embrace a more positive culture and allow people to voice concerns in recent years, with coaches from countries such as New Zealand helping to foster change, while business executive Kimie Iwata had taken measures to protect female judo players from abuse after joining the board of that sport in 2015.
But Inazawa said more action was needed across sports as a whole to have women in senior roles and address what is known in Japan as “power harassment.”
“Increasing the number of women on boards can diminish power harassment and sexual harassment,” she said. “Doing so will provide a strong shield to women athletes.”
Kawabuchi, Mori's choice to succeed him, would have been a deeply problematic choice in the Japanese context, experts say, after he enthusiastically tweeted in favour of parents and teachers “raising a hand” to children when they “take a wrong turn” in 2019.
But it now seems unlikely he will be picked.
“With criticism domestically and from abroad, we would not get an impression of a change without a woman or a change in generation,” a government official was quoted as telling Fuji TV.