#A Women’s Uprising
Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and his deputy, Minister of Finance Aso Taro, distanced themselves from Mori’s latest remark, though both men are known to share his attachment to the prewar, emperor-centered polity. While they were mildly critical of Mori, they refrained from issuing any call for his dismissal, focusing on the possible impact of Mori’s comment for the “national interest” (kokueki) rather than on its inherent sexism. It was only when the IOC itself intervened on February 9, declaring Mori’s remarks to be “absolutely inappropriate,” that the ground shifted underneath him. Three days later, he resigned.
Suga and Aso seemed not to realize that the problem with Mori’s statement was its breach of a fundamental principle of modern democracy rather than the damage it might cause to the national interest. It offended simultaneously against the Olympic Charter, which defines the Olympic movement as one transcending national interests, and Article 14 of the Constitution of Japan, which prohibits gender discrimination, not to mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1981 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women.
In the end, it was a kind of uprising by furious women that may have played the decisive role in forcing Mori’s resignation. Mori’s plan for the Games assigned a key role to an army of eighty thousand unpaid volunteers, including many talented bilingual or trilingual women. In light of Japan’s deeply entrenched institutional sexism — the country ranked 121st out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2020 “Gender Gap” table — the Mori remarks came as an intolerable insult. Women sent in their resignations by the hundreds, along with quite a few men, in a snowballing phenomenon that was only halted by his resignation.
However, the Mori affair is not going to be solved simply by his resignation, rooted as it was in the deep and ramified structures of Japanese sexism. The whole framework of the Olympic movement in Japan is imbued with his values and staffed by his appointees. Indeed, his controversial remarks signified Mori’s resistance to even modest efforts and pressure to address gender imbalances from within and beyond Japan. His words made this clear:
MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology] has been making itself a nuisance by demanding we raise the number of female board members to 40 percent. But the more women there are, the longer board meetings go on. I am embarrassed to have to mention it, but meetings of the Rugby Association take twice as long now that women are included.
On February 12, Hashimoto Seiko, a fifty-six-year-old former Olympic women’s speed skater, took Mori’s place at the helm. Hashimoto is well known to be Mori’s protégé, with the two referring to each other as being “like daughter” and “like dad.” Upon assuming the post, she had no words of criticism for her predecessor, instead offering effusive praise for Mori as her teacher and political exemplar. It is therefore most unlikely that Hashimoto is going to usher in a new era for the Olympic movement in Japan.
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