On Feb. 17, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for a remark he made in response to a comment from opposition lawmaker Kiyomi Tsujimoto during a Lower House Budget Committee meeting in the Diet. Tsujimoto was talking about what she perceived to be corruption in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Abe appeared to be annoyed by the comment, saying it was "meaningless." The opposition demanded an apology and, while Abe did say he was sorry, he qualified his remorse by saying the outburst was a reaction to Tsujimoto's "abuse."

Tsujimoto has always been a forceful foil to the LDP, not so much because she is a member of the opposition but more because she's a woman. Her aggressive debating style, as with those of other female opposition lawmakers such as Mizuho Fukushima and Shiori Yamao, seems to get under the skin of the LDP's boys club in ways that the debating style of male opposition lawmakers does not. 

Women have long complained about this distinction. Men who are confrontational when they assert their views tend to be seen as assertive and forthright, while women who do the same thing are considered emotional. In Japan, the woman who best provokes this prejudice is Yoko Tajima, a women's studies scholar who became a TV personality in the 1990s, mainly through her regular appearances on the TV Asahi political talk show "Beat Takeshi's TV Tackle," where she locked horns with male pundits. Tajima earned a reputation as an "angry feminist," a label TV producers played up to boost ratings. Eventually, Tajima left the show as a regular and, although she still appears on TV, she's mostly faded from the public's consciousness. Her cultural residue has become that of a woman who exploited her scholarship for the sake of notoriety. When men called her a feminist they used the term derisively, and many avowed feminists didn't take her seriously.