The Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) is reportedly planning to set up a special team to protect participants from potential online abuse.

Citing "an official familiar with the matters", Kyodo News reports that comments deemed malicious by the team created by the JOC will be flagged to other authorities to investigate.

Japan is set to enter its biggest ever Olympic team with 580 athletes expected to complete at Tokyo 2020.

The Games are due to be held in the face of public opposition because of concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic.

There remain fears from medical experts that hosting the event could help accelerate the spread of coronavirus.

Tennis players Naomi Osaka and Kei Nishikori have previously expressed concerns over the staging of the Games in their home country, but they are both set to compete.

Swimming star Rikako Ikee, who qualified for the Games two years after being diagnosed with leukaemia, received messages on social media calling for her to pull out of the event.

"It is very painful for an individual athlete to be hit by this (kind of an anti-Olympic message)," Ikee said on Twitter.

JOC President Yasuhiro Yamashita has called for the Japanese people not to condemn athletes for opting to participate at the Olympics.

A number of governing bodies joined a boycott of social media, which ran from April 30 to May 3 to protest against online abuse.

Players, clubs and organisations, including FIFA, the Commonwealth Games Federation and the International Tennis Federation, temporarily shut their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts for four days.

It was hoped the boycott would encourage social media companies to do more to eradicate racist and sexist abuse in response to athletes highlighting examples of discriminatory comments made against them.

In May, the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that it had joined forces with a specialist security company to help deal with hateful comments on social media during Tokyo 2020.

Britain’s Chef de Mission Mark England described the abuse as a "worrying trend" and revealed the BOA was in contact with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over the situation.

"Social media clearly plays an important part in everyday life of many people and what we do to control that is to just allow team leaders from individual sports to have their own protocols," England told Sky Sports.

"So you'll see as we get into the games some sports and some athletes will choose not to look at social media and others will thrive on that and that is their confidence builder throughout the games. Certainly, we will be taking a very, very close look at any adverse comments made to any member of the team.

"We're in constant dialogue with the International Olympic Committee and they'll have a very, very close lens on this as well and it's something I now think we now need to look at in light of what happened overnight.

"I think that's something we want to look at with all of our team leaders, all of our associated stakeholders and also with the IOC just to make sure that this is something that doesn't become the story of the games and doesn't become a story for Team GB athletes."