Tokyo Games and Naomi Osaka lay bare Japan’s cultural reckoning

Tokyo: Naomi Osaka woke up in Tokyo on Saturday still trying to wrap her head around what happened the night before.

Just before midnight, the four-time tennis grand slam champion had climbed the stairs of the “Mt Fuji” cauldron to light the Olympic flame and officially begin the Tokyo Olympics.

“Crazy,” she said on Saturday morning. “[This is] undoubtedly the greatest athletic achievement and honour I will ever have in my life.”

Naomi Osaka carries the Olympic torch during the Tokyo Games opening ceremony.Credit: AP

Osaka, born to a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, has come to embody what advocates say is a new, progressive Japan. One that is unburdened by its centuries of isolation, ethnocentrism and an entrenched power structure that preferences older Japanese males.

But as she stood in the centre of the Olympic stadium on Friday she also threw the spotlight on the intersection of three of Japan’s great unspokens – racism, sexism and discrimination. The opening ceremony focused on “unity through diversity” but all three continue to penetrate Japanese society.

The past week has seen the resignation of not one but two of the opening ceremony’s lead creatives. First, composer Keigo Oyamada quit after interviews emerged in which he boasted about abusing disabled children while at school. Then, Kentaro Kobayashi, responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies, was sacked after a video clip emerged of the comedian describing the Holocaust as a “let’s massacre Jewish people game”.

Kentaro Kobayashi, creative director of Tokyo Olympics was sacked a day before the opening ceremony.Credit: AP

Both episodes had been on the public record for years, prompting questions about what institutional structures could have allowed the two men to rise to such senior Olympic positions.

Observers did not need to look far to see discriminatory views have long permeated the very top levels of Tokyo’s organising committee and the Japanese government.

The previous creative director, Hiroshi Sasaki, resigned after labelling a prominent Japanese comedian, who was scheduled to perform at the opening ceremony, an “Olympig”.

And until February, the committee that appointed him was led by Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister who said women should not be admitted to cabinet because they talk too much. The Asahi Shimbun reported on Saturday that the 84-year-old Mori was set to return to the Olympic organising committee as an “honorary supreme adviser” despite his resignation over the comments.

Reported to be ready to return: former Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games Organising Committee president Yoshiro Mori.Credit: AP

Dr Emma Dalton, an expert in the political under-representation of women in Japan at RMIT University called Mori’s February resignation a watershed moment. “It is very unusual for men in power to make these comments and resign,” she said.

Maki Kobayashi, an executive director on the Tokyo Organising Committee, vowed the Olympics would make society more accessible and easier for all. “This is a much bigger issue than the Olympic Games – hopefully, it will help to change much bigger structures in place in Japanese society.”

But just five months later, it appears Mori’s return could entrench the conditions that have caused the world’s third-largest economy to remain stuck at 121st on the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Index.

Osaka had called Mori’s comments “really uninformed and a bit ignorant,” the same labels she has used to describe her treatment as a Haitian-Japanese child in Japan.

Hafu, the Japanese term for the children of foreigners and Japanese citizens like Osaka, is slowly becoming a term of empowerment for some members of the community but for others, its statistics remain difficult to escape. More than 98 per cent of Japanese residents are of Japanese ethnicity, making racial diversity a rare and often marginalising attribute.

In 2017, the Justice Ministry released a survey of racial discrimination in the country. It found 40 per cent of non-Japanese residents had been victims of housing discrimination and 30 per cent had been targeted by discriminatory speech.

Osaka said last year that one of her earlier memories as a tennis player was overhearing other Japanese players talk about her. “Oh, that black girl. Is she supposed to be Japanese?” she told The Wall St Journal.

The 23-year-old said she was trying “to put a platform out for all the Japanese people that look like me and live in Japan and when they go to a restaurant, they get handed an English menu,” she said.

Osaka, who has had to navigate a maze of public expectation and anxiety, said she had no intention of sticking to on-court matters.

“I hate when random people say athletes shouldn’t get involved with politics and just entertain,” she said in 2020. “Firstly, this is a human rights issue. Secondly, what gives you more right to speak than me? By that logic if you work at Ikea you are only allowed to talk about [furniture]?”

The Olympic flame has vaulted Osaka into the pantheon of Japanese national icons. The footage will be played back for generations. When young Japanese fans watch in the decades to come, they will see Osaka, resplendent in the braids of her Haitian heritage, her hair dyed red for her Japanese birthplace.

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