The show director of the Olympics opening ceremony has been dismissed, one day before the event is due to be held.
Footage of Kentaro Kobayashi from the 1990s recently emerged in which he seems to be making jokes about the Holocaust.
Japan’s Olympic chief Seiko Hashimoto said the video ridiculed “painful facts of history”.
The dismissal is the latest in a string of scandals to hit the Games.
It comes days after a composer quit the team creating the ceremony after it emerged he had bullied classmates with disabilities at school.
In March, creative chief Hiroshi Sasaki quit after suggesting that plus-size comedian Naomi Watanabe could appear as an “Olympig”. He later apologized.
And in February, Yoshiro Mori was forced to step down as the head of the organizing committee after he made remarks about women that were criticized as “inappropriate”.
Mr. Kobayashi then turns to his colleague, referring to some paper dolls, saying they are “the ones from that time you said ‘let’s play the Holocaust'”, according to news agency AFP.
“Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean and global social action director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), said.
“I understand that my stupid choice of words at that time was wrong, and I regret it,” it said.
