Tokyo: Yoshinoya Holdings Co Ltd fired a managing director on Tuesday for making disparaging remarks about getting naive young women “hooked” on the company’s products, saying his conduct was “completely unacceptable.”

Masaaki Ito, the company’s managing director, made the remarks at a marketing lecture at Tokyo’s Waseda University over the weekend. He couldn’t confirm Ito’s exact words. No comment from Ito.

Yoshinoya, which has been working to make its dishes more appealing to women, said Ito had been fired from all of his positions as of Monday.

“His extremely unacceptable words and deeds could not be tolerated from the point of view of human rights and gender issues,” the company said in a statement.

In the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Index, Japan ranked 120th out of 156 nations in terms of women’s economic participation and opportunity.

On Japanese Twitter, many posters expressed outrage.

“Let’s deconstruct this remark – he showed contempt for women, young people, people from rural areas and his own company’s products,” one poster wrote. “In short, he pretty much insulted most of his company’s customers.”

The university apologised too.

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