Few recent scandals have been as entertaining as Lower House lawmaker Mayuko Toyota's verbal and physical attack on her secretary as revealed in a recording leaked to the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. With the recording coming to light in the week before the Tokyo assembly elections, Toyota decided to resign from the Liberal Democratic Party (though not her seat) to save the party some grief, but the scandal has subsequently lingered on the fringes of the tabloid media, providing insight into everyday office shenanigans in Nagatacho.
Toyota's tantrum was extreme by any standard. Making fun of her male secretary's baldness ("Kono hage!") as he was driving and she sat in the back seat and beating him hard enough to cause injury was bad enough, but what was really disturbing was Toyota's comment about a hypothetical car accident in which his grown daughter's "head is crushed." Shukan Shincho, understanding that transcribing Toyota's outburst could not do justice to its dramatic quality, released the recording publicly and it was picked up by every TV station in the country.
The performance was unjustifiable, but to some it was forgivable. Former LDP secretary-general Takeo Kawamura, Toyota's mentor in the party, commented on his Facebook page that he "heard" it is "normal" for male lawmakers to treat their secretaries in such a way. His defense of Toyota was couched in the logic of anti-sexism — that because Toyota is a woman she was being punished for behavior that is not considered unusual among men. Most secretaries absorb the abuse and get on with their jobs, he implied. Certainly none would ever secretly record such a tirade and then take it to a weekly magazine. Kawamura eventually removed the Facbook post.