Former gravure model Chisato Morishita has won her seat in the snap election called by Sanae Takaichi, which saw the ruling Liberal Democratic Party secured a big majority and wipe out much of the opposition.
After some years of campaigning and failing to win a seat, Morishita finally became a member of the lower house in the 2024 election (and thus, Japan's hottest lawmaker) through the LDP's proportional representation allocation. She was then given a minor Cabinet position in 2025, like other prominent women in the Takaichi government.
This time, she won her seat outright, comfortably ...
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called a snap election for February and Japan's crowded political landscape is scrambling to catch up. As always, we can expect some wacky candidates from the fringe parties and some crazy attention-seeking stunts.
There are always a few celebrities who throw their proverbial hats into the rings too.
While she's not a celebrity, music idol Nana Matsuura quit her group, dela, and agency last week to contest a seat in the election.
Matsuura is running as a candidate for the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin), which is a conservative party with a very strong ...
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 ...
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 ...
Maebashi is a small city in Gunma, a short distance north from Tokyo and rarely in the news. That all changed this week, however, with the intense media response to reports that the female mayor has been allegedly conducting an affair with a male staffer.
Society seems to respond more strongly to adultery claims when it involves a woman. A male politician having an affair would result in nary an eyebrow raised (opposition party leader Yuichiro Tamaki quickly recovered from his scandal), but it's a very different situation for women in her early forties.
It should be noted from the start, ...
With a few notable and noble exceptions, politicians are mostly on the fiddle or on the pull, their hands in the expenses till or around some girl's body. It's a story as old as the hills and pretty much the same in any country, including Japan.
You might think that any politician from the Democratic Party for the People would be a bit more cautious after the leader, Yuichiro Tamaki, was caught having a long-term affair with a gravure model, but temptation plays to a different tune.
The party was forced to punish Masaki Hiraiwa, indefinitely suspending him after allegations emerged of his ...
We reported earlier this summer on the silly circus that was the Tokyo gubernatorial election, with a female candidate stripping off during her TV broadcast and another using pornographic posters that police ordered to be taken down.
One of the slightly more serious candidates, at least in terms of mainstream fame, was Toshio Tamogami, who finished fourth with 3.9% and around 270,000 votes.
The right-wing former Air Self-Defense Force general has stood for election several times, never winning public office but using the campaigns to maintain his profile and platform as a nationalist ...
Election broadcasts are a bit of a circus in Japan. Legally, the public broadcaster NHK is obliged to show them and this is why so many fringe and wacky candidates ultimately pay to stand for election, because it means they're guaranteed several minutes of fame.
This year is particularly strange with the July election for Tokyo governor, since there are so many candidates (but only two or three serious ones). Already, the "poster hijacks" by the NHK Party, which has sold its candidates' slots to anyone willing to pay, have generated lots of attention, as have the nude images of a woman on ...
A candidate for the upcoming Tokyo governor election is using a naked female model on his campaign posters.
Yusuke Kawai's schtick is cosplaying as the Joker and doing provocative stuff, though this might be the most extreme of all his stunts to date.
The model is Miu Sakurai, a gyaru model, music idol (with the group Devilsis), and race queen who has appeared in beauty contests and who appears to have Filipino roots. She describes herself as the "world's top will-do-anything gyaru" and has also been helping Kawai put up the posters of her naked body on boards around Tokyo.
Various ...
We have written before about political candidate Yukiko Kaname, who is hoping to win election one day as a Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker.
Having failed to win a seat in 2022, the sex-positive feminist Kaname is undeterred and her main campaigning revolves around key issues related to equality for sex workers.
With a Lower House election likely to happen this year, the 47-year-old Kaname is still working hard to make a name for herself among potential voters.
She recently stirred up controversy by promising a since-deleted tweet to ask the prime minister if he has ever ...
