The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee unveiled “We Have Wings” on Saturday as the motif for the upcoming Paralympic Games opening ceremony – but has elected to not publish the names of people working on the event until the day it takes place on August 24th.
As reported by Japanese outlet Nikkan Sports News, according to interviews with several stakeholders, the decision to hide the identities of people involved was made to avoid a repeat of controversies from the Olympic opening ceremony. That inauguration was marred by the dismissal of two key organizers after offensive remarks they had made in the past came to light shortly before the Games started.
The production team behind the Olympic opening ceremony had been publicly announced on July 14th, nine days before the event itself was scheduled. Soon afterward, it was found that lead composer Keigo Oyamada, known professionally as Cornelius, had boasted about bullying children with disabilities in a 1994 interview. This led to his resignation on July 19th and his contributions being cut from the ceremony’s performances at short notice.
On the day before the ceremony, director Kentaro Kobayashi was then also dismissed after footage, likewise from the 1990s, emerged of him joking about the Holocaust.
Nikkan Sports News’ report states that Tokyo’s organizing committee conducted thorough background checks of Paralympic opening ceremony contributors to preempt similar scandals. However, officials ultimately felt that there were too many “limits” to the vetting process to risk publicizing the team’s names in advance.
According to the blog SoraNews24, many Japanese netizens reacted with scorn to the news of Paralympic ceremony organizers being kept anonymous, believing that they too might have things to hide like Oyamada and Kobayashi did. Comments online said things such as: “Sounds like someone there definitely has a problem”, “Nothing like a shady cover-up to start off an international sports competition” and “I feel like I have a right to know where my tax dollars are going”.
Others, meanwhile, argued that revealing the identities of those involved would be an unnecessary distraction, with one person commenting: “That’s reasonable. There’s sure to be someone who did something questionable in the past 20 or 30 years. No one’s perfect.”
Games organizers did announce the concepts for the opening and closing ceremonies in a press release on Saturday, with “We Have Wings” for the former and “Harmonious Cacophony” for the latter. Both ceremonies are further joined by an overarching theme, “Moving Forward”.
In that same press release, it was also disclosed that 5,550 members of the public had applied to participate in the two Paralympic ceremonies as cast members. 161 people between 11 and 68 years old were selected and will be roughly evenly split between both events.
The opening ceremony for the Paralympic Games shall take place on August 24th, at 8pm Japan Standard Time. It will be held in Tokyo’s Japan National Stadium, the same venue as its Olympic counterpart last month.
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