In Japan, a Sex Scandal Will Bury Her Career But He'll Be Fine, Thanks for Asking

Japan has a word — wakame sake — which roughly translates to drinking sake from a naked woman's body as if she were a serving bowl. I mention it only because it tells you something important about how Japan has traditionally thought about women: decorative, available, and definitely not running for parliament.

So when I started looking into whether political scandals hit male and female candidates differently there, I already had a pretty good hunch where this was going.

Spoiler: badly.

Japan ranks somewhere around 120th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum's gender gap index — and politics is doing most of the dragging. Women hold roughly 10% of seats in the lower house. Ten percent. They're barely in the room, and the ones who make it are expected to clear a bar the men in the same building couldn't find with a map and a flashlight.

Male Japanese politicians and scandals? Long and distinguished tradition. The Liberal Democratic Party has essentially run Japan since the 1950s, and its members have survived more extramarital affairs, hostess club receipts, and creative expense accounts than I can count on both hands. They hold a press conference. They bow. They return to their seats. Sometimes the bow is fairly shallow. Nobody seems to mind.

Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori once said women without children were a burden on the state — out loud, to other people, on the actual record. He'd already served as Prime Minister. Japan still made him chair the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee. It took international outrage to finally push him out of that too. Boys will be boys, apparently, even when they're in their eighties and being absolutely ghastly about it.

Here's your holy shit moment: a male Japanese politician can survive a sex tape, a hostess club affair, and two rounds of fraudulent expense accounts, and his party will back him at the next election. A female politician who turns up in a tabloid photo getting cozy with someone she shouldn't be getting cozy with? Done. Pack your desk. Go home and think about what you've done.

In 2017, journalist Shiori Ito went public with a rape allegation against a man with connections to the Abe government. He was not criminally charged. She received death threats and spent years fighting in civil court. She eventually won — but she shouldn't have had to fight that hard for that long.

The women who survive long-term in Japanese politics share exactly one trait: they are relentlessly, ferociously unscandalous. They don't divorce publicly. They don't appear in tabloids. They don't get caught anywhere near anyone they shouldn't be near. Because there is no coming back from it when you're a woman in Japanese politics. Zero. Voters forgive men almost anything — gambling debts, late nights in hostess bars, the whole lot — because somewhere deep in the national psyche, boys will be boys, while women in power are expected to be completely beyond reproach. They have to be smarter, cleaner, and more morally bulletproof just to reach the same starting line. Basically saints, but with a grasp of fiscal policy.

There's even a phrase — chanto shite — meaning "do things properly." Applied almost exclusively to women. Nobody tells the male politician on his third affair, currently expensing his sake as a business dinner, to chanto shite.

So. Practical advice.

If you're a woman in politics — Japanese, Canadian, American, anywhere with a similar cultural hangover — here's the truth nobody wants to say out loud: you don't get the same margin for error he does. He can wobble. You cannot. That's the infuriating reality, and pretending otherwise will get you burned faster than him.

Keep the complicated parts of your personal life completely airtight. Not mostly airtight — completely. Because one leaked photo does what three separate corruption investigations couldn't do to the man sitting in the office next to yours. He gets a news cycle. You get a career ending.

The voters who will forgive him anything will forgive her nothing. The fastest way to change that isn't to get caught and hope for sympathy. It's to stay in your seat long enough, do enough good work, and be loud enough about the right things that eventually the rules start to bend.

Slowly. Grudgingly.

But they bend.