A small scandal breaks: a local official’s private affair, the word “love hotel” pops up, and suddenly every variety show is clapping its hands like it’s festival season. Panels replay innuendo on loop. The public interest issue—abuse of office, misuse of public resources—gets five seconds. The sexual details get fifty minutes. Ratings are fed; citizens aren’t.
From abroad, this looks… odd. In many countries, coverage would center on misuse of power and public money. In Japan, sexual behavior itself becomes the show. It’s not news; it’s a shaming ritual dressed as news.
This is not about excusing misconduct. It’s about asking why a supposedly modern media ecosystem still treats sex as public humiliation content—and why so few of us find that strange.
Four reasons we keep turning sex into a spectacle
1) The long tail of the wide show.
Postwar TV normalized scandal as family-time entertainment. That habit calcified: framing sexual content as “軽いネタ” is muscle memory. Once your format is a laugh track, you chase shame, not facts.
2) Thin sex education, thick embarrassment.
If you grow up learning that sex is primarily embarrassing, you won’t debate it—you’ll giggle at it. Adult discourse remains adolescent. A mature vocabulary never forms, so TV defaults to euphemism and mockery.
3) Punching down is safer than looking up.
Structural critique (budgets, oversight, policy) is hard, risky, and sometimes impolite to sponsors. Individual moral outrage is easy. So we prosecute “who slept with whom” instead of “who spent what and why.”
4) The ‘shame culture’ switch.
Where “sin culture” asks Was a rule broken?, “shame culture” asks Were you seen? If being seen is the crime, then broadcasting the seeing becomes the punishment. Ratings = righteousness.
What gets lost when we make shame the headline
- Public accountability. If we obsess over bedrooms, we ignore boardrooms. Misuse of cars, budgets, staff time—these are the democratic issues.
- Media credibility. When national broadcasters sound like gossip columns, public trust drains—until crisis strikes and trustworthy information is actually needed.
- Women’s safety and dignity. In practice, women face harsher moral prosecution on-air. The “public shaming economy” disproportionately prices female bodies.
- Adult conversation about consent and power. Tabloid framing blurs core distinctions: private consensual sex vs. harassment; affair vs. coercion; personal failure vs. public malfeasance.
“But it’s cultural!” — Yes, and culture is editable
From the outside (say, British friends), I’ve been told flatly: “Japanese wives look like servants.” Cruel phrasing, yes—but the point was about optics of subservience. The same foreign gaze watches our TV and sees a country still treating sex as something to mock, fear, and punish on-air. If The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, our daytime panels sometimes feel like the nonfiction footnotes.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, too, plays with what societies choose to not say. Silence can be care; it can also be complicity. Our television often confuses the two: it’s noisy where privacy would be humane, and quiet where power needs scrutiny. That’s not “tradition.” That’s a broken setting.
A better public-interest test for sex-adjacent stories
Before airing sexual details, editors could run three simple checks:
- Power test: Is there a power differential (boss/subordinate, teacher/student, politician/citizen) that affects consent? If yes, report it as a power story.
- Public money test: Did public resources get used? If yes, cover the expenditure, and treat sex as incidental context.
- Necessity test: Do sexual particulars materially change the public’s understanding of harm or policy? If no, omit the bedroom, keep the budget.
This is not censorship. It’s editorial adulthood.
“But viewers want it.” Viewers also want vegetables.
Programming isn’t a weather report; it’s a menu. Audiences adapt to what you feed them. Give people twelve minutes on procurement oversight with clean visuals and human stakes, and they will watch. (Yes, they will. Add motion graphics. Hire one curious lawyer. It’s not that hard.) Keep serving humiliation, and we’ll keep mistaking shame for civic virtue.
What citizens can do tomorrow (besides roll our eyes)
- Change the channel. Outrage is still a rating. Indifference kills bad segments faster.
- Complain precisely. “Stop the sex play-by-play; focus on the resource misuse.” Producers hear specificity.
- Support outlets that act like adults. Subscribe, share, tip. Ethics needs oxygen.
- Teach vocabulary. Honest sex education is cultural infrastructure. The fewer things are “unsayable,” the fewer we must shame to sell ads.
A cultural footnote from home
As someone who writes in both Japanese and English, I see the split: in English, I can say feminism and mean equality; in Japanese, I say “女性の生きづらさ” so the door doesn’t slam before the sentence ends. Same point, different keys. When TV keeps making sex into a public flogging, it tells women—especially younger ones—that the cost of any misstep is nationwide humiliation. That’s not public morality. That’s a chilling effect.
If we actually care about “public morals,” aim them upward
Hold officials to standards on power and public money. Leave consensual adult sex off the stage unless it directly intersects those. We can be a country that treats citizens like adults and demands the same of our media. Or we can keep laughing at the shiny thing and call it news.
Laugh tracks are cheap. Democracies are not.
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Note for international readers: the tendency I describe isn’t every outlet, every day—but it is common enough on major networks to shape norms. If you’re watching from abroad and wondering why Japan’s sex-related “scandals” feel juvenile: you’re not imagining it. The real stories are often hiding behind the giggles.
TL;DR (JP)
日本のテレビは、性を「公共の恥の見世物」にしがち。
本来注目すべきは権力関係と公金の使い方なのに、性的ディテールを延々流して“正義をやってる気分”になっている。編集部には「権力テスト／公金テスト／必要性テスト」を導入してほしい。視聴者は“チャンネル変更・的確な苦情・まともな媒体の応援”で行動を。