The Olympic rings are seen on a basketball during a training session. Photo: REUTERS/Andrew Boyers.

Japanese comedian Kentaro Kobayashi has been fired from his position as show director of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony over past jokes that he made about the Holocaust, the Tokyo Organizing Committee announced on Thursday.

Kobayashi, 48, who was previously part of a comedy duo called Ramens, mocked the mass murder of Jews by Nazi forces during World War II in a 1998 comedy act, where he said, “Let’s play Holocaust,” according to Japanese media reports.

The Daily Beast reported that he joked about the Holocaust as a “let’s massacre Jewish people game,” and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) cited other “malicious and antisemitic jokes” and “distasteful jokes about disabled individuals.”

“Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide,” said SWC Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper. “The Nazi regime also gassed Germans with disabilities. Any association of this person to the Tokyo Olympics would insult the memory of six million Jews and make a cruel mockery of the Paralympics.”

In a press briefing, Japan’s Olympic Minister Seiko Hashimoto said she learned about Kobayashi’s offensive jokes on Tuesday morning and “as soon as possible we decided we will have to address the issue, and we decided on the dismissal.” She said she regretted that it took Olympic organizers so long to fire the comedian, and that she and other members of the Olympic planning commission would “review the entire program” of the opening ceremony on Thursday, the day before it is scheduled to take place.

“I’ll have to make sure first of all to establish a structure of operations so that we will never trouble any more people,” Hashimoto explained, according to the New York Times’ Motoko Rich.