Maebashi mayor Akira Ogawa wins re-election weeks after resigning over sex scandal

And she’s back. Just weeks after she was forced to resign over a sex scandal, Akira Ogawa has won re-election as mayor of Maebashi in Gunma.

Ogawa resigned in late November after a series of love hotel trysts with an older, married city worker were exposed by a tabloid scoop.

The 42-year-old Ogawa tried to claim the hotel meetings with the 54-year-old subordinate were just that, meetings related to work, but the public was unconvinced, and both she and the unnamed senior male civil servant resigned their positions. We speculated at the time that her career was then over, but she clearly had other ideas.

In the election held on January 12, Ogawa beat four other candidates and won by more than 10,000 votes. Turnout was 47.32%, which is 7.9% higher than before, suggesting that voters came out to make their voice heard. Though she faced more candidates this time, she increased her votes by over 2,000. She will now serve as mayor until February 2028.

Now that’s what we call putting paid to your critics and winning a mandate. While it is true that the city authorities received a lot of complaints after the scandal broke, mainly due to the allegations over use of an official car and the fact that the rendezvous took place during office hours, Ogawa remained a popular figure, not least because she’s a local gal (the Chiba-born Ogawa moved to Gunma in her twenties, shortly after qualifying as a lawyer) with a strong track record in Maebashi politics. Before winning her first term as mayor in 2024, she served in the Gunma Prefectural Assembly for four terms.

Like most local politicians, Ogawa is officially unaffiliated with any party, but she enjoys the support of left-wing and center-leaning opposition parties. In 2024, she beat the current mayor, who had received the backing of the conservative-leaning Liberal Democratic Party.

It is common for male politicians to overcome scandals in which their affair with a woman, usually younger, is rumbled. In most cases, they apologize, keep their head low for a while, and then things are able to continue business as usual. (Witness opposition leader Yuichiro Tamaki, who had an affair with a much-younger gravure idol. How quickly the public and tabloids move on from that.)

In this case, the proverbial shoe was on the other foot: it was an unmarried woman of a certain age (she has now turned 43), allegedly having an affair with a slightly older married colleague. She denied the affair, so could run for re-election nominally with a clear conscience (and without fear of the man’s wife suing her damages, which is allowed under Japanese law — remember, Ogawa is a lawyer by training). The only “stain” on her reputation was that she had possibly misused work time and resources, and met in inappropriate locations (on, ahem, multiple locations). Everything else was, well, pure speculation!

We’re not convinced, and would respect her far more if she just came clean, but nonetheless also like the idea of a single woman in her forties refusing to kowtow to social expectations and tabloid pressure, and just doing her own thing. You go, girl!