She's the preferred candidate to run the Tokyo Olympics

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February 17, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Director Chloe Zhao is in demand in Hollywood, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka will face off at the Australian Open, and the Tokyo Olympics may have a new chief. Have a wonderful Wednesday.

– Torch bearer. When Yoshiro Mori announced his resignation as Tokyo 2020 chief on Friday, he said that it was “pathetic” that one “brief remark” about how women talk too much in meetings had led to his stepping down.

Mori’s comment was sexist and wrong, but his Friday statement was right in one regard; the comment on its own might not have led to the 83-year-old former prime minister’s ouster. But it happened to encapsulate the frustration that women in Japan have been seething with for decades, prompting a torrent of criticism and outrage.

“Many women who have probably been avoiding talking about gender issues are finally starting to talk,” Mari Kogiso, a former Fast Retailing executive, told Bloomberg.

Japan ranked 121st out of 153 nations on the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap report last year, and it’s so patriarchal that former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched a special initiative called “Womenomics” to elevate women in the labor force and in society in general. (It largely failed.)

Events that followed Mori’s resignation illustrate what gender equality advocates in Japan are up against. Initially, there were plans to replace Mori with another male octogenarian, former soccer player Saburo Kawabuchi, but more public outcry derailed that strategy. Then the Olympic organizing committee said a gender balanced-panel made up mostly of athletes would pick Mori’s successor. The leader of that initiative? The CEO of Canon Inc., Fujio Mitarai, who is 85.

This week, Japan’s ruling party weighed in on the whole women-in-meetings issue. Facing criticism that its board is too male-dominated, the Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday proposed a new plan that would allow five female lawmakers to join key meetings—so long as they don’t talk. Board members are elected, Toshihiro Nikai, the party’s 82-year-old secretary general, pointed out, so the new proposal would be a way for women, who haven’t won a seat, to “understand what kind of discussions are happening.” Opposition lawmakers seized on the initiative, calling it a “field trip.”

And then Kengo Sakurada, head of a powerful Japanese business lobby, rounded things out by saying Japan’s glass ceiling was “partly women’s fault.”

Anyone exasperated by this sequence of events may find some relief in news of Mori’s possible successor. Public broadcaster NHK reported Wednesday that Seiko Hashimoto is set to be selected as the new head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee. (The selection panel has decided to offer Hashimoto the role; she has not yet accepted.)

The 56-year-old member of the LDP is Japan’s minister for the Olympics and for gender equality. She’s also a former athlete, having taken part in seven Games, both summer and winter, as a track cyclist and speed skater. She competed in her last Olympics in 1996, a year after winning election to the upper house of parliament. Four years later, she became the first lawmaker in the upper house to ever give birth while in office.

And fittingly, she was born days before Japan hosted the 1964 summer games. She’s named after the Olympic flame.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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