In her regular column in the Dec. 11 issue of Shukan Bunshun, novelist Mariko Hayashi blasted the weekly magazines, including Bunshun, for failing to follow up on a scandal that, under normal circumstances, should have been right up their alley. The daughter of the late Osaka-based singer and TV host, Takajin Yashiki, is suing author Naoki Hyakuta over his new book, "Junai," which purports to tell the true story of Takajin's "pure love" for the much younger woman he married in 2013, just before he died of esophageal cancer at the age of 64. The daughter claims that the book defames her character and covers up the truth that Takajin's young bride, Sakura, was only after his money.

What Hayashi found strange is that Bunshun was the first media outlet to report on Sakura's alleged gold-digging intentions, but once Hyakuta became her biographer, everyone decided the story was off-limits, because Hyakuta is such a powerful figure in the media — the writer of best-sellers like kamikaze-loving war novel "Eien no Zero" ("The Eternal Zero"), a member of the NHK board of governors and a friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. She goes on to say that she gave up on "television wide shows" a long time ago "because all they cover is what major show biz production companies tell them to cover," but expects more of the weeklies. "How can they call themselves journalists?" she asks, and adds that they are in no position to criticize Asahi Shimbun, which all of them did vociferously after the national daily retracted reports related to "comfort women" and other issues last summer.

It might seem doubly strange that Bunshun even ran her column, but it actually makes sense within the logic of the reasoning Hayashi derides. If the weeklies have decided to avoid the Takajin scandal so as not to provoke Hyakuta's displeasure and risk being blackballed by him — he's reportedly scheduled to start a new serial for Bunshun in the near future — they also wouldn't want to make Hayashi mad, since she is just as popular a writer as Hyakuta is. And with regards to the Asahi persecution, Bunshun's publisher, Bungeishunju, certainly noted the uproar that resulted when the newspaper didn't initially run its regular column by news explainer and top TV personality Akira Ikegami in which he complained about Asahi's integrity.