#Mori and the Emperor Cult
As if the two emergencies were not enough, in February 2021 there was an unexpected complication for Japan’s postponed Olympics. The head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, Mori Yoshiro, declared that meetings with many female participants were slow to get anything done, because women talked too much. As sexist comments go, this one was relatively mild, but it stirred a wave of outrage, from women and men alike, both in Japan and internationally.
Mori at first issued a perfunctory apology and retraction, while declaring that he had no intention of resigning. As the wave of sentiment in favor of sacking him spread, ten days after making his remark, Mori stepped down, still protesting that he had been misunderstood. Although he is now gone, the question remains of what his gaffe signified.
Mori is a major political figure, whose career includes a year (2000–1) as prime minister. He stands out in early twenty-first century Japan as a believer in the absolutist Shinto formula upon which the prewar Japanese state was built — a formula that ultimately led to war with much of the world in the 1930s and ’40s. As such, he has been a leading advocate for revision of the Japanese constitution to bring it back into accord with the 1889 imperial document.
As Mori put it in May 2000, addressing a Shinto politics forum: “Everyone should recognize that Japan is the land of the gods, centered on the emperor.” It was precisely this formula of the Japanese state that reached its apogee and then collapsed catastrophically in 1945, giving way to the postwar constitutional order based on popular sovereignty. After that 2000 statement, support for his government steadily drained away, recording an absolute nadir of 6.5 percent in February 2001, at which point Mori resigned as prime minister.
However, his archaic and reactionary worldview proved to be no serious obstacle for continued high-profile roles as a core member of the Shinto Politics League in the Diet, and a national coordinating figure for Japanese sport since 2005, first as president of the Japan Rugby Football Union and then as head of the organizing committee for the Tokyo Olympics. From time to time, Mori continued to provoke controversy by making statements that were calculated to outrage democratic constitutionalist sentiment.
In June 2003, when he was the chair of a committee for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Japan’s falling birth rate, Mori suggested that it was inappropriate for women who declare they will not have children to receive any subsidy from the public purse. In July 2016, in his capacity as Olympic president, he declared that that any athlete who was unwilling to sing the “Kimigayo” imperial anthem at a victory ceremony was not a representative of Japan, implying that their selection would be cancelled.
Mori’s latest contemptuous reference to women can be seen as another expression of the feudal framework of his thinking, with the emperor as the supreme, concentrated expression of unsullied Japanese-ness, while women are considered to be impure, inferior beings, summed up in the expression danson johi (men to be revered, women to be contemned).
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