Reports indicate Yoshiro Mori will resign as president of the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee. He should have quit or been forced out within hours of the appalling comments he made about women last week.
There are two possible explanations for the delay. The first is that the country’s political leadership does not consider those comments as cause to remove him from that post. The second is that they do not have the power to do so. While neither reflects well on them, we hope the answer is the second, a failure of capacity, rather than the first, a failure of will.
Controversy erupted last week when Mori, during an online Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) meeting, said that women in board meetings “take too much time” as a comment upon a Japanese government initiative to increase the number of women on executive boards. “Women have a strong sense of competition,” and “speak so much.”