‘This is an excellent piece of work that combines fascinating ethnographic

and historical data in a well-rounded and well thought out theoretical per-
spective. The only other book that I know in English that is anything like
this book is the work of Mark West mentioned by the author several times.
This book is superior to West’s book in that it puts its material in a theoret-
ical framework that allows us to make comparisons not only with other
cases in Japan but also with cases elsewhere.’
Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Japanese Studies,
University of Oxford

‘This is an astonishing book. You may start reading thinking that “scan-
dals” are marginal if entertaining, and you soon find yourself learning and
thinking about the most probing issues and intricate mechanisms of the
contemporary Japanese society. By combining the analytical insights from
philology, media studies, and cultural sociology with an intimate knowledge
of Japan, the author succeeds in explicating the social functioning of scan-
dals as highly mediatized rituals that tend to preserve the status quo, while
shedding lights on the range of roles and strategies of the actors involved.’
Koichi Nakano, Professor of Japanese Politics,
Sophia University Tokyo

‘Theoretically engaging and interdisciplinary in its approach, Scandal in Ja-

pan provides an insightful critique of the Japanese media’s complicity in the
ritualized performance of scandals. Beyond showing how media scandals
serve to reproduce society and social norms, Prusa’s careful analysis – rang-
ing from celebrity to political to corporate scandals –reveals the ways that
spectacle, pseudo-events, and fake news distract from meaningful social
change.’
Jason G. Karlin, Professor of Interdisciplinary Information Studies,
The University of Tokyo
SCANDAL IN JAPAN

This book is an exploration of media scandals in contemporary Japanese soci-

ety. In shedding new light on the study of scandal in Japan, the book offers a
novel view of scandal as a specific mediatized ritual which follows moral dis-
turbances throughout Japanese history. Media and society are analyzed largely
in terms of social performances, while the focus is on how Japanese transgres-
sors talk and act when explaining their scandals to the public. A detailed anal-
ysis of three case studies is provided: the drug scandal of the popular Japanese
celebrity Sakai Noriko; the donation scandal centering the heavyweight politi-
cian Ozawa Ichirō; and the Olympus accounting fraud revealed by the British
CEO Michael Woodford.
This book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese culture and so-
ciety, anthropology, communication and media studies.

Igor Prusa is a Czech scholar in Japanese studies and media studies, currently
affiliated with Ambis University, Prague. He worked at the Czech Academy of
Sciences. Prusa received his first PhD in media studies at Prague’s Charles Uni-
versity in 2010. In 2017 he defended his second doctoral thesis at the Univer-
sity of Tokyo. His research interests include contemporary Japanese society,
media scandals, and anti-heroism in popular fiction. His research has appeared
in a wide range of publications, including Media, Culture & Society and Japan
Forum. Apart from his academic activities, Igor Prusa is a music composer in a
Japan-themed band, Nantokanaru.
Japan Anthropology Workshop Series
Series Editor:
Joy Hendry
Oxford Brookes University

Editorial Board:
Pamela Asquith
University of Alberta
Eyal Ben Ari
Kinneret Academic College, Sea of Galilee
Christoph Brumann
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Munich
Henry Johnson
Otago University
Hirochika Nakamaki
The Suita City Museum

Escaping Japan
Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Blai Guarné and Paul Hansen

Women Managers in Neoliberal Japan

Gender, Precarious Labour and Everyday Lives
Swee-Lin Ho

Global Coffee and Cultural Change in Modern Japan

Helena Grinshpun

Inside a Japanese Sharehouse

Caitlin Meagher

Mental Health and Social Withdrawal in Contemporary Japan

Nicolas Tajan

Japanese Diaspora and Migration Reconsidered

Yvonne Siemann

Revitalization and Internal Colonialism in Rural Japan

Timo Thelen

Scandal in Japan
Transgression, Performance and Ritual
Igor Prusa

For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Japan-

Anthropology-Workshop-Series/book-series/SE0627
Scandal in Japan
Transgression, Performance and Ritual

Igor Prusa
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 Igor Prusa
The right of Igor Prusa to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-47248-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-47249-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-38525-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003385257
Typeset in Times New Roman
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents

List of Figures viii

Series Editor’s Foreword by Joy Hendry ix
Acknowledgements xi
Permissions xii

1 Introduction 1

2 Theoretical Background 4
2.1 Analytical Framework  5
2.2 The Social Meaning of Scandal  6
2.3 Scandal as Media Text  15

3 Case Studies 29
3.1 Celebrity Scandal: Sakai Noriko  30
3.2 Political Scandal: Ozawa Ichirō 40
3.3 Corporate Scandal: Olympus/Woodford  49

4 Japanese Scandal as Social Ritual 68

4.1 Bridging Scandal and Ritual  68
4.2 On the Japanese Sense of Ritual  70
4.3 Performing Scandals  71

5 Japanese Scandal as Media Product 84

5.1 Mediopolitical Background  84
5.2 The Power Circles  86
5.3 The Outside-Media  91
5.4 Producing Scandals  93
5.5 Scandal Consequences  100

6 Concluding Remarks 107

Index 113
Figures

2.1 Scandal methodology 6

2.2 General scandal flow 7
2.3 The narrative flow of scandal 17
2.4 Media framing in scandal 20
2.5 Scandal as a hybrid form of ordinary news and media event 21
3.1 Sakai Noriko scandal flow 39
3.2 Ozawa Ichirō scandal flow 48
3.3 Olympus scandal flow 58
4.1 Scandal exclusion as a movement from sacred to profane 75
4.2 Scandal as a ritual of confession, exclusion and reintegration 77
5.1 The power-network behind Japanese scandals 86
5.2 Case studies: main scandal actors 94
5.3 Transforming leaks into scandals 96
5.4 Scandal mediation process in Japan 100
6.1 Case studies: the dramatic structure 108
6.2 Case studies: scandal development 109
Series Editor’s Foreword

This latest new contribution to our series calls itself “interdisciplinary” and
indeed refers to works from several disciplines, notably philology, media stud-
ies and cultural sociology, according to the author’s own Introduction. How-
ever, when Igor Prusa presented a paper to the Japan Anthropology Workshop
in Barcelona in July 2022, at our first in-person gathering since the Covid-19
lockdown, his approach went down wonderfully well with our anthropological
audience. Indeed, I was not the only editor to ask him about joining a book
series, and I am delighted that our Board agreed with my assessment. This
book is pure social anthropological analysis in my view: call it what you will!
There are, of course, references to our standard works: to Turner, as may be
inferred from the title; to Mary Douglas, as the content of the book will reveal;
to Gluckman’s work on gossip; and to – my favorite – Levi-Strauss on trick-
sters. As usual in this series, the discussion of Japanese scandals brings us to
the heart of understanding how Japanese society works. Three scandals are
described in detail, each from a different area of society and, actually, are even-
tually shown to vary quite substantially, but that ethnographic material is me-
ticulously analyzed within the major institutions that make up the social
structure, and they demonstrate a very neat and clever understanding of the
way that Japanese society works in practice.
The theoretical framework is not limited to Japan, indeed the nature and
background of all the scandals discussed will be familiar to readers everywhere.
As Prusa explains, “scandal can be conceived of as social statement, or a dec-
laration of what values are considered by the society to be sacred… reminding
players of the rules of the game”. Using the same principles of folk tales of the
ancient world, journalists of modern society use narrative form to become sto-
rytellers “following an adventurous pursuit of truth” eventually producing a
good supply of books and films, all generating commercial profit.
However, Prusa goes on to consider the language used in the Japanese ac-
counts, particularly the importance of the words chosen, and he identifies ex-
amples of Japan’s “long tradition of indirect communication”, allowing
“blurring sources and obfuscating reports” in the accounts. This kind of de-
tailed analysis opens a window into the specifically Japanese characteristics of
the way scandals are handled in Japan, and ultimately, what we can learn about
x  Series Editor’s Foreword

the three major cultural components of his analysis, namely celebrity, politics
and corporations. In each case scandals come and go, they are dealt with, and
life moves on.
The arguments made here are disarmingly clear. Prusa sets out diagrams to
illustrate them, but only at the very end of the book does he directly address a
subject which bothered me throughout, and that is the extent to which Japa-
nese society is actually being changed by the so-called corruption which is be-
ing unearthed. The three major scandals discussed are “framed as a problem of
a few corrupt individuals, but, as a matter of fact, their alleged corruption was
rooted in institutional norms and political structures”, he writes. Whether or
not this is actually “corruption” or just the way Japanese society works, I will
leave up to you, the reader, to decide. Definitely a compelling read!
Joy Hendry
Series Editor
Acknowledgements

Some segments of the book were originally published in academic journals

and presented at conferences worldwide. It would have been impossible to
complete this book without the valuable support and encouragement of my
professors, colleagues and friends at the University of Tokyo and the Charles
University in Prague. Further, I am very grateful to Joy Hendry for giving me
the opportunity to publish the book, and to my editors at Routledge, Peter
Sowden and Stephanie Rogers for the invaluable help in preparing the final
manuscript. I am also very obliged to Sri Ayu Wulansari from the University
of Indonesia who helped me in so many different ways.
My principal thanks, however, go to my beloved family, Jana Prusova, Oto
Prusa and Viktor Prusa, whose love and affection have provided the very foun-
dation of my whole life.
Igor Prusa
Prague
Permissions

The article “Megaspectacle and Celebrity Transgression in Japan: the 2009

Media Scandal of Sakai Noriko” in Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Cul-
ture, Palgrave 2012 is reproduced in Subchapter 3.1 with permission of Pal-
grave Macmillan.
The article “Corporate Scandal in Japan and the Case Study of Olympus”
in Volume 16, Issue 3, of the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese
Studies, December, 2016 is reproduced in Subchapter 3.3 with permission of
the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.
The article “Japanese Scandals and their Ritualization” in Volume 33, Issue
2, of Japan Forum, 2021 is reproduced in Chapter 4 with permission of
Routledge.
The article “Japanese Scandals and their Production” in Volume 44, Issue 1,
of Media, Culture & Society, 2022 is reproduced in Chapter 5 with permission
of Sage.
1 Introduction

I was never really interested in scandals. They were part of my mediated reality,
but I paid attention to them only when they were juicy enough. Even now, I, at
times, feel that studying scandals is a Sisyphean task, given the few social con-
sequences they have, and the shallow, repetitive content they usually offer.
Moreover, the topic of scandal still seems to be perceived as too frivolous and
fleeting to arouse serious academic attention. However, during my first doc-
toral research on Japanese media at Charles University in Prague, I inevitably
stumbled upon scandal theory and realized that scandal in Japan and else-
where is not as frivolous as it may appear. It is a multifaceted social phenome-
non that indeed deserves academic scrutiny: while serving the interests of
media organizations, scandals define social norms, reflect societal values and
manage transgressions. Besides, my other research focuses on the function of
transgression in anti-heroic fiction (Prusa 2016; Prusa and Brummer 2022) and
so I realized that the basic tenets of fictional transgression (including the dia-
lectic of crime and punishment) can be translated into the discourse of factual
news reporting. While making use of my original training as a Japanese philol-
ogist, I decided to explore how scandals function in Japan, and consider their
usual symbolic implications.
I started working on this study at the University of Tokyo, where I had been
since 2008, writing my second doctorate, titled “Scandal, Ritual and Media in
Postwar Japan” and supervised by Professor Yoshimi Shunya. In the begin-
ning, I was simply astonished by the media extravaganza that surrounded every
minor transgression in a society that emphasizes consensus and harmony. I
was particularly struck by the kabuki-like quality of Japanese scandals, where
the disgraced elites assume their ritualized role, repeat a standard set of phrases,
shed a couple of tears, and bow deeply in a shower of camera flashes. The tel-
evised shaming of Japanese elites crying over spilled milk can be related to
what Waite and Brooker (2005) labeled as “humilitainment”. While depicting
the falls of others, this form of entertainment offers to scandal-hungry audi-
ences a pseudo-sadistic spectacle of public outrage and shame, while generat-
ing commercial profit. I soon realized that the form of Japanese scandal, by
necessity, prevails over its content, but I was not yet aware of the mediopoliti-
cal machinery behind these spectacles. Notwithstanding my initial disinterest

DOI: 10.4324/9781003385257-1
2 Introduction

in scandals, I came to acknowledge that they indeed represent “culturally

meaningful products” (Geertz 1973) that can reveal a great deal about the so-
ciety which produces them.
I approached Japanese scandals really seriously only after I was literally
touched by one of them – namely the celebrity scandal of Sakai Noriko from
2009. On one early summer morning, I was awakened in my dormitory, located
on the artificial island of Odaiba, by buzzing sounds of helicopters approach-
ing my location. The situation resembled that of a serial-killer chase, but I soon
found out that the extraordinary frenzy pointed to Sakai Noriko, a popular
Japanese idol who was now being held for illicit drug use in Odaiba detention
center, which was located next to my dormitory. Perhaps needless to say, the
helicopters belonged to Japanese media organizations who struggled to offer a
glimpse of Sakai’s whereabouts from the bird’s-eye perspective. My initial im-
pression was that more than pursuing social consensus based on rational con-
flict resolution, Japanese scandals rather portend outrage, disgrace and
humiliation. I also noticed that the insignificant “moral disturbances” of
Japanese female celebrities lead to intense public shaming and media
over-exposure, while male politicians are treated rather benevolently, scheming
their comeback as soon as the scandal fades out.
The media-supported “scandal culture” seems to be experiencing a histori-
cal boom since the new millennium in Japan. Scandal became a cultural con-
stant, while scandal coverage moved from non-routine to routine mode. It is
not unusual anymore that serious magazines publish, toward year-end, their
“apology calendars” (shazai karendā), overfilled with bowing politicians and
sobbing celebrities (e.g. Nikkei Bijinesu, December 16, 2019), while other week-
lies speculate whose scandal will be the first in the coming year (e.g. Tōkyō
Supōtsu, January 9, 2020). However, the never-ending cries of corruption, the
scandal frenzies, and the apathy of the Japanese public are often misunder-
stood by foreign observers, who limit themselves to tongue-in-cheek explana-
tions of the “ridiculousness” of Japanese scandals. Still, these layperson voices
motivated me to specify the central questions of my study: what is the media
logic behind Japanese scandals? and how are scandals constituted by the ritu-
alized performances of their actors?
In the West, media scandals, pseudo-events and fake news have increasingly
been brought to the forefront of both mass media dialogue and academic dis-
course (see The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal from 2019). How-
ever, despite the enormous proliferation of scandal in Japan, there remains a
dearth of analytic and empirical research that would examine its complex na-
ture in the given context.1 Further, the existing literature often leaves many
important considerations unaddressed, including social, cultural and psycho-
logical interpretations of Japanese scandal. My research seeks to fill this con-
siderable gap in scholarly literature.
The book is divided into six chapters. Following this introduction, I provide
a basic theoretical background for understanding scandals in Chapter 2. Chap-
ter 3 offers three case studies of Japanese media scandal, namely the celebrity
 Introduction  3

scandal of Sakai Noriko, the political scandal of Ozawa Ichirō, and the corpo-
rate scandal of Olympus. Chapters 4 and 5 offer an advanced theoretical
framework for interpreting scandal in contemporary Japan: the former ap-
proaches scandals as performative rituals and confessional ceremonies, while
the latter looks at scandal as a product of media routines and journalistic prac-
tices. Chapter 6 offers a comparative analysis of all the scandals analyzed in
Chapter 3, and it is closed with concluding remarks.

Note
1 There exist only two full-volume English publications on Japanese scandal: Secret,
Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States (West 2006)
and Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan (Carlson and Reed 2018). The for-
mer focuses on the legal consequences of scandals from the perspective of compar-
ative law, while the latter examines what factors cause changes in the level of
political corruption over time.

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