The creative director of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Tokyo was fired on Thursday, one day before the event is set to take place. Kentaro Kobayashi, who had previously been a member of a popular comedy duo, was terminated after a video of a comedy routine he performed in the 1990s surfaced in which he appeared to joke about the Holocaust.
Social media users aren't very happy with Tokyo Jetz right now after she made a joke on social media about George Floyd, the Black man who was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minn. last week.
Tokyo is a recurring joke on Good Mythical Morning. Whenever somebody other than Rhett mentions the word "Tokyo," Rhett will shout "What" for a length of time, and an overlay appears with the word "Tokyo," stylized to look like the Japanese flag, the cityscape of Tokyo, and a cat chasing a red laser beam, while a bell rings in the background.
The joke first appeared in the episode called Odd Self-Defense Techniques. When Link read the word "Tokyo" from a fan-sent letter, Rhett said "What," which he compared to a Japanese game show, and said that he would do it every time somebody else mentions Tokyo in the show.
On Thursday, the Tokyo 2020 organising committee confirmed Kobayashi was dismissed over the joke. In a statement, Kobayashi apologised, describing the skit as containing "extremely inappropriate" lines.
Taro Tsujimoto[a] is a fictitious Japanese ice hockey player who was selected in the 1974 National Hockey League Amateur Draft as the 183rd overall pick by the Buffalo Sabres. The decision to draft a non-existent player was made by Sabres general manager Punch Imlach, who was frustrated by the absurd length of the draft, and in the late rounds decided to have fun and draft someone unusual. Together with Sabres director of communications Paul Wieland, they created Taro Tsujimoto, a twenty-year-old Japanese forward who played for the fictional Tokyo Katanas of the Japan Ice Hockey League. The name was inspired by Japanese American Joshua Tsujimoto, who owned a grocery store Wieland would regularly drive by. Taro Tsujimoto quickly became an inside joke for Sabres fans, and is a beloved figure in team history.
The Hockey News noted in a 2014 article that the Sabres could have drafted three other players instead of wasting the selection on a joke. Dave Lumley was selected as the 199th pick by the Montreal Canadiens, Stefan Persson was selected as the 214th pick by the New York Islanders, and Warren Miller was selected as the 241st pick by the New York Rangers. Both Lumley and Persson contributed to multiple Stanley Cup-winning teams in the 1980s, while Miller played in 262 NHL games.[5]
Tsujimoto quickly became an inside joke for Sabres fans, with many fans still wearing custom jerseys to this day.[5] For years after the draft, Sabres fans at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium would hang banners stating "Taro Says..." followed by a witty comment against an opposing team or player, and would chant "We Want Taro" when games became one-sided.[5][9] In 2011, Panini America created a Taro Tsujimoto hockey card, and included it within select box sets as a collector's item.[10] In 2013, the New Era Cap Company sold Tokyo Katanas hats to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Tsujimoto's draft selection.[4] Wieland himself referenced the joke in his 2019 autobiography Taro Lives!: Confessions of the Sabres Hoaxer.[6]
Organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said a day ahead of the opening ceremony that director Kentaro Kobayashi has been dismissed. He was accused of using a joke about the Holocaust in his comedy act, including the phrase "Let's play Holocaust."
Kobayashi's Holocaust joke and Oyamada's resignation were the latest to plague the Games. Yoshiro Mori resigned as organizing committee president over sexist remarks. Hiroshi Sasaki also stepped down as creative director for the opening and closing ceremonies after suggesting a Japanese actress should dress as a pig.
For a long while, there was an industry in Japan called Nihonjin-ron: amultimillion-dollar traffic in theories of the Japanese nationalcharacter.
The Japanese of the 1960's and 70's discovered to their surprise, notonly that they were prosperous, but that other people wanted to knowmore about them; suddenly they were aware that they didn't have anygood explanations of what it meant to be Japanese, even amongstthemselves. Theories of the national character became immenselypopular. Everybody with a contribution to offer got a hearing: eminentsociologists, journalists, doctors, politicians. Foreigners wereespecially welcome to join in, and a good many of them did. TheJapanese are the Japanese, we were told, because (a) they have avertical society, (b) they were rice farmers for so many centuries, orbecause of (c) their dependency relations or (d) their managementsystem or (e) their climate, or because (f ) they learn to usechopsticks in early childhood, or (g) their ancestors were nomadichorse drovers from Central Asia, or (h) all of the above, (i) none ofthe above, or (j) any of hundreds of other probable and improbablecauses.
Curiously enough, Nihonjin-ron-ists are for the most part reluctant totalk about Japanese humor. What makes the Japanese laugh? If laughteris mentioned at all, it is only to say that the Japanese laugh whenthey are nervous or embarrassed: "another of those gossamer veils ofreserve," writes one observer, "that partly . . . cover certainemotional reactions." The theories seem to share a common assumptionthat the inhabitants of these isles take themselves and the worldaround them too seriously to have funnybones.
Which is, of course, nonsense. You don't have to spend very much timein Japan, or with Japanese people, to notice that humor plays asubstantial part in their lives. An outsider may not always be able toshare the joke, but the Japanese certainly do laugh; what's more, theylaugh in many different ways at a wide spectrum of things, frompie-in-the-face buffoonery and vaudeville monologues to witty politicalsatires and bittersweet social comedies.
Understanding some Japanese humor is purely a language problem on thesimplest level: there are comic characters and comic situations that,once you know roughly what's going on, are just as recognizable, justas funny to outsiders, as they are to the Japanese themselves. Withother forms, you might need a much deeper understanding of the languageto get the point at all; a fairly large proportion of Japanese humor isin fact verbal humor. And inevitably, there is humor that it doesn'teven help to understand: you can know exactly what's being said andstill not know why it's funny. This sort of humor is only accessible ifyou can think like a Japanese -- a very difficult requirement indeed.
As it happens, that last category is surprisingly small. For thisarticle, we talked to a novelist and a storyteller; we sifted jokes andsatiric poetry and comic books. From the outset, we decreed ourselvesonly one principle: nothing kills a joke deader than an explanation. Wewanted material, in other words, that spoke for itself, even intranslations, and we didn't have to look very far for it. For thecasual visitor, there really isn't enough of that sort of translationaround; so we hope we've been able to add a little to the supply.
Tall Tales and Purple Cushions
When you tell funny stories for a living in Japan, you don't stand upin front of your audience: you sit -- on a purple cushion, in formalkimono -- and ply your trade with a fan.
The trade is called rakugo; the storyteller is a rakugo-ka. Scholarstrace the origins of rakugo back some 400 years, to a period when Japanwas cut up into feudal baronies invading, betraying and generallymaking life miserable for one another. It was not wise for a warlord tosleep too early or too well, for fear of assassins; very often he had aretainer called an otogi-shu, whose job it was to keep his master up,amusing him with anecdotes and stories and bits of odd news. By theearly 17th century, Japan was at peace again, under the TokugawaShoguns, and the first collections of these stories began to appear inprint.
By the 1670's, the raconteur had emerged as a professional entertainer,with a stall on a likely street corner, drawing crowds with the storieshe made up, and passing the hat. Rakugo was known then as karukuchi, or"idle chatter." Monologues crafted in this period were handed down fromgeneration to generation; they're still in the repertoire today,getting laughs from audiences that have probably heard them 10 or 20times already. Some 500 of these tales have survived, but only 80 or soare actually performed. A professional rakugo-ka will usuallyspecialize in stories on one theme -- samurai stories, townsmanstories, dumb son stories, mother-in-law stories -- and work regularlywith 30 or 40 of these. He will also add to the repertoire with storiesof his own, on the lighter side of current events, discarding themoften for fresh ones.
In the 18th century, the popularity of rakugo spread from Kyoto andOsaka east to Edo (present-day Tokyo); the eastern and western stylesof delivery have different, fiercely loyal partisans. In Osaka, theysay that Tokyo rakugo is pretentious and over-refined; in Tokyo, theyargue that Osaka storytellers sink a little too far into low comedy.
Eventually, the rakugo-ka moved indoors, to become top attractions inthe yose -- Japanese vaudeville. The first theater exclusively forrakugo was built in Edo in 1687; yose theaters, with their widervariety of entertainment, began to appear about 100 years later,offering three hours or so of light comedy at admission pricesvirtually anyone could afford. (In 1825, there were about 130 yosetheatres in Tokyo; today there are only four.) One of the early greatsof yose vaudeville, Sanshotei Karaku, is credited with the invention ofsandai-banashi, a rakugo tour de force in which the storyteller takesthree completely unrelated items at random from his audience, andweaves them instantly into a comic improvisation -- preferably with apun in the punch line.
Over the years, rakugo developed subspecialties of all sorts: tales ofpathos, called ninjo-banashi, tales of the supernatural; satires on theevents of the day. Even so, as Japan modernized, vaudeville startedlosing audiences to music hall reviews and movies. Really hard timescame in the 1930's and 1940's, when rakugo lost about half itsrepertoire to official censorship. (Military governments always seem tohave very high standards of propriety.) After the war, however, thepicture brightened. Television gave the rakugo-ka a new and vastlylarger following; comedy born and bred in the cities was now beamedinto homes all over the country. A weekly rakugo program on the Asahinetwork, on Friday nights at midnight, currently has between 600,000and 700,000 viewers in the Kanto (Tokyo) area alone; there are rivalprograms on most networks.
Rakugo audiences today are mostly middle-aged and older, but youngpeople are listening, too; it's rare to find a university in Japanwithout a rakugo club and a small band of devoted amateur performers.Very few of the amateurs turn pro, however: this is not an easybusiness to break into.
There are currently about 500 professional rakugo-ka; the number hasgrown by nearly 20% in the past 10 years. Almost all of them belong toone of three organizations (two in Tokyo and one in Osaka) that serveprimarily as booking agencies. The Rakugo Geijutsu Kyokai in Tokyo, forexample, represents 46 performers, scheduling appearances for them atthe yose theaters (which change programs every 10 days) and out oftown.
One of the things audiences enjoy most about rakugo is the rich fund ofwordplay it uses. The Japanese language has vast numbers of words thatsound exactly the same; depending on the way they are written, forexample, koko can mean "a senior high school," "a mine shaft," "filialpiety" or "pickled vegetables" -- or any one of 16 other things. Withopportunities like that, the rakugo-ka is expected to be -- and is -- amaster of the outrageous pun, the more outrageous the better. Equallyimportant is the storyteller's dramatic talents: a mastery of dialectsand voices, a mobile face, and an ability to create whole scenes withjust a fan and a handtowel for props.
Rakugo characters and their misadventures would be at home onvaudeville stages anywhere in the world. A con artist deftly swindles astreet vendor; his hapless fellow townsman tries the same ploy -- andfumbles. A doctor confronts a patient who has swallowed his glass eye.A samurai forgets the important message he's been sent to deliver, andneeds some unusual help to jog his memory. Rakugo delights income-uppances, but it is a gentle delight that finds its victims on alllevels of society, rumpling the foolish and thumping the would-be wise,but leaving nobody very much the worse for wear.
The Magician of Wordplay
An Interview With Hisashi Inoue
If best-selling comic novels are anything to go by, Hisashi Inoue isone of the people who make their fellow Japanese laugh. Inoue was bornin Yamagata prefecture in 1934; his father died when he was three, andhe was raised in the Tohoku region of northern Japan -- part of thattime in a Catholic orphanage in Sendai -- until coming to Tokyo in 1956to enter Sophia University. His Jesuit teachers were not pleased,perhaps, to learn that he was working part-time as a scenario writerfor a striptease theater downtown; his first play, however, won agovernment-sponsored Arts Festival prize in 1958, and when he graduatedfrom Sophia he was hired as a television writer.
Inoue spent most of the next 10 years creating scripts for comedies andchildren's programs. With the success of his play "The Adventures ofDogen" in 1970, he became an independent; in 1971, a novel calledTegusari Shinju, a parody on the classic theme of double suicide, wonthe coveted Naoki Prize for that year. Inoue is perhaps the mostpopular satirist and humorist in Japan today; critics have called him"the magician of wordplay." His Kiri-kiri-jin (1981), a sprawling,Rabelaisian novel about a tiny village in Tohoku that secedes fromJapan, has sold over 800,000 copies and been reprinted 36 times.
Q. It seems fair to say that your writing has a great deal of social satire in it. Does that play a big part in Japanese humor?
A. I don't think you can generalize that way. Japanese people come inall sorts. It might be better to ask when we laugh, instead of why. InJapan, if you aren't on some kind of comfortable good terms -- if youaren't with people you know -- you can't joke with them. You have toknow where everybody stands with everybody else, first; then you canget together, you have a few drinks, and people can be very funny. Idon't think that's so different from anywhere else in the world. Butyou don't try to break the ice with humor when you first meet somebody-- just as a politician would never dream of making a joke in a publicspeech.
Q. Is that because the rules of decorum are so strict?
A. It's more a matter of caution than decorum. In a sense, you assumethat strangers are hostile until proven otherwise. There used to be asaying that a samurai could lift one side of his mouth in a grin oncein three years; a whole laugh was all right every five or six. Thattradition is still alive: the samurai in modern Japan -- thebureaucrats, the white-collar employees in the big companies have nosense of humor at all. The more important you are in someorganizational way, the more serious you have to be. Japanese humorcomes from ordinary people like me who work for themselves.
Q. When humor does come out, is it something that non-Japanese can understand?
A. To tell the truth, there are plenty of times when we can't understand it ourselves.
Q. What about laughing at yourself? Foreigners often say that peoplehere take themselves and their problems too seriously for that kind ofhumor.
A. Not really. We have that tradition, too, of laughter as a way ofreleasing the pressure. You find it especially in the popularliterature of the Edo period, the dime-novelists of the 18th and 19thcenturies would poke fun at themselves, and then use that pose to pokea little fun at the upper classes, too: "I'm only a fool, of course,but it seems to me that our estimable leaders have their heads on wrongabout such-and-such." I suppose I fit into that tradition somewheremyself. Then again, if you did that too much in the Edo period, youcould lose your head for it.
b73f46f91f