The chaotic situation surrounding Japan basketball seems to only continue to get worse.
Mitsuru Maruo, the acting president of the Japan Basketball Association, said on Wednesday that all of the JBA's 25 board members were going to "eventually" leave the board.
A week after it received a suspension from the FIBA, the JBA held an irregularly scheduled board meeting, and the 21 members who attended it came to that conclusion to take full responsibility for the disgrace of the FIBA ban. (The penalty was meted out by basketball's world governing body after the JBA failed to submit a merger plan for the 22-team bj-league and 13-team NBL by Oct. 31, among other demands.)
According to Maruo, four other members were absent from the meeting, but the board would ask them to take the same action.
But Maruo said that they would not be thrown out of their jobs right away, and they would remain on the board until the situation regarding the FIBA suspension improves.
"Until we get ourselves on the right track, we should stick to our jobs — that's how we discussed it (in the meeting)," Maruo said at a Tokyo news conference at the JBA office. "When we know we've clearly done it, then we should take responsibility as the board members."
Meanwhile, Maruo said that FIBA's task force was expected to come to Japan as early as mid-December. He added that the JBA hadn't been notified of the details of the task force, such as the number of members and the dates they'd be in Japan, yet expected FIBA secretary general Patrick Baumann would be included in it.
Also, the JBA has been in touch with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology "on a daily basis," JBA secretary general Yoshiki Hoshi commented.