Maebashi mayor and male staffer both resign over love hotel visits
One of the biggest media stories in the autumn was the salacious scoop about the female mayor of Maebashi, a small city just outside Tokyo, and her love hotel trysts with an older male staffer.
After admitting the meetings and in the inappropriateness of them, but continuing to denying she was having an affair with the married man, 42-year-old Akira Ogawa eventually resigned as mayor in late November.
Most voters interviewed by the media found Ogawa’s explanations unconvincing and it was clear that her position was untenable. The city set up a special hot line and received over 12,000 phone calls complaining about Ogawa’s actions.
She is unmarried and what happens between consenting adults is for them to decide, of course, but the 54-year-old man has a wife and, as a city employee, was also the mayor’s subordinate. Compounding matters was that the over 10 visits to love hotels at least sometimes took place during working hours, with Ogawa using her official car to drive there.
The man (unnamed in media reports) was punished with a six-month suspension (presumably for misuse of work time), but he chose to resign at the end of December, bringing to an end this titillating tale of provincial romance.
The vice mayor, who is filling in for Ogawa, commented: “This has led to a deterioration in the city’s image and has significantly damaged the trust of its citizens. We offer our sincere apologies.”
Much of the tabloid glee over the scandal was fueled by the idea of a slightly older unmarried woman enjoying a sex life. We suspect that the public would be less shocked by the notion of a male politician in his forties sneaking off to a hotel for a bit of hanky-panky in the afternoon, and we have come to expect such scandals on a regular basis. They only actually tend to become scandals if the politician in question is married, and even then most men bounce back quite quickly (case in point: leading opposition lawmaker Yuichiro Tamaki, whose affair with a minor gravure idol briefly threatened to derail his rise in late 2024, has since been rehabilitated — the scandal largely forgotten, though probably not by Mrs Tamaki).
We suspect that Ogawa’s political career, which included terms in the Gunma Prefectural Assembly before her election as mayor of Maebashi, is over.
