Japan’s three-time Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka on Saturday said sexual comments with the head of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee were “ignorant” but she stopped calling for Yoshiro Mori to resign.
The 83-year-old Mori, former Japanese prime minister, said this week that women were talking too long in meetings. He withdrew and apologized for his remarks at a meeting with the Japanese Olympic Committee but refused to resign.
The comments halted a storm on social media at home and abroad, with a petition calling for action against Mori collecting tens of thousands of signatures on Friday, a day after it was launched by hackers -Japan campaign.
“I looked at the comments. I didn’t think they were good,” Osaka said at a news conference in Melbourne ahead of the Australian Open, which starts on Monday.
She said she wanted to hear the reasoning behind the ideas and the view of those around Mori.
“I think if you’re in a situation like that, you should think before you say anything. I don’t know in what situation he said those things, but I think it really is unconscious and a little ignorant. “
The 23-year-old Osaka, who was born in Japan to a Haitian father and Japanese mother and raised in the United States, is the poster daughter of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which was delayed for a year due to COVID-19 pandemic. She intends to represent Japan.
The first Asian tennis player to be named number one in the world, Osaka has been a prominent supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement in both Japan and the United States and has been named the last year to use its image to further the cause.
“I’m a tennis player – an interesting thing to throw,” Osaka said when asked to explain Mori ‘s views. “Do I think he should retire?
“I think for someone who makes ideas like that, they need to know more about what they’re talking about. I’m not sure if it’s a situation where it should for someone to ask him to retire or is it just something that people need to make him realize that what he said was not right. “
(Reuters)