Scarlet Mona

不輪　For a country that has practically hailed cheating by men as a national past time, they sure don't like it when their women follow suit. Unfortunately I'm not very up on which public figures have cheated and been publicly admonished for it but I'll generalize and say that most male public figures who get caught with their dick out tend to apologize in a news conference and carry on with their lives. That and whatever organization they work for will try to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Cheating women, I'm not so sure.

Yesterday afternoon the TV talk shows all covered announcer Mona Yamamoto's affair with baseball player Nioko. Keep in mind that these are the same shows that a) Yamamoto has appeared on as guest and colleague and b) laugh and joke about men cheating all the time. I don't quite know why I was so surprised, people love to attack public figures when they're down but I guess I viewed her as a fairly popular gei no jin (entertainer) and as part of a team of announcers who regularly appear on TV. She wasn't just ridiculed and picked apart, she was dropped from all of her shows.

Apparently she has now acknowledged her transgression and publicly apologized but when I saw a clip of her yesterday she was saying that the taxi had stopped in front of the love hotel and that's just where they got out. OK. Denial is a powerful urge. But the fact that she was dropped from everything and now literally has no career is shocking. Now she was also caught last year with a married politician and at that time she was also dropped from her TBS mainstay. So just as she had erased that from people's memories and was back in the good books she does it again with a married athlete (she by the way, is not married).

I am the first person to condemn cheating (I figure unless there are extenuating circumstances you should have gotten out of the relationship before doing someone else) and to acknowledge that public figures in particular are asking to be caught if they cheat, my main beef lies with the fact that Japan is still shocked and horrified that surprise! women can cheat too. Not only that, but they also punish them far more severely than cheating men. Get with it Japan!