Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Even More Upper House Election Trivia: This Time, Mr. Shiozaki (But That's Not My Point)

The latest Cabinet member to be implicated in the never-ending political financing scandal is Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki. The story itself is fairly run-of-the-mill, following what has now become a familiar pattern that ultimately winds up with the media deploring the lack of a satisfactory explanation; you can read the original story here if you can read Japanese. (Sorry, the English version did not carry it.) It was a very small article in the hard copy version as well, which should please conspiracy theorists.

But no, that's not what caught my attention; what struck me was the fact that the story was first carried by Akahata, or Red Flag, the Communist Party's official newspaper. And I know that because the Yomiuri article says so. (And so does Asahi, which I will do not link to unless it is absolutely material because Asashi links go dead too quickly to serve my purposes.)

You see, way, way back in the day, I used to joke that if you were afraid that a scandal would break out, you should leak it to the Akahata, since none of the mainstream newspapers would do follow up on an Akahata scoop. But that was then.

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