Road to the Tokyo Olympics: Education minister’s job up in the air after report on stadium fiasco

Road to the Tokyo Olympics: Education minister's job up in the air after report on stadium fiasco

TOKYO — Japan’s education minister will announce his response Friday to an independent panel’s report arguing that he and other senior officials share the responsibility for the demise of initial plans for a new National Stadium.

     Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is leaning toward replacing Hakubun Shimomura, whose ministry includes sports, in a cabinet reshuffling next month.

     The original design for the stadium, which will replace the one built for the 1964 Summer Olympics and serve as a venue when the games return to Tokyo in 2020, was scrapped after going far over budget. New plans were drawn up last month, and the deadline for a new tender for contractors has already passed.

     The report describes organizational flaws in this national project and blames Shimomura, Japan Sport Council President Ichiro Kono and the top bureaucrat at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology at the time. All of them proved “unable to put in place an organizational structure able to handle the project,” the report said.

     The panel cites groupthink as a factor in losing cost control. It also takes issue with an “expert” council that included Yoshiro Mori, the former prime minister serving as president of the Olympic organizing committee. The council, intended only to advise the JSC president, in essence came to wield consent power by virtue of its cast of bigwigs, delaying decision making, the report alleged. It “did more harm than good,” argued Noboru Kashiwagi, the University of Tokyo professor emeritus who chaired the investigative panel.

     Shimomura said Thursday he accepts the panel’s report “with humility” and that he would announce Friday how he and the others will “take responsibility.” For his part, Kono revealed he does not intend to stay on as Japan Sport Council president when his term ends this month.

     Asked about Shimomura’s fate, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhide Suga, the government’s top spokesman, said: “I think he’ll decide for himself.”

     Some people familiar with the investigative panel’s work say its probe appears insufficient. The panel did not interview Mori, arguing he was “not in a position of responsibility” for the stadium plans.

(Nikkei)

Road to the Tokyo Olympics: Education minister's job up in the air after report on stadium fiasco