The big tabloid scoop last week was snagged by the woman's weekly Josei Seven, which caught celebrity/announcer Mona Yamamoto and Yomiuri Giants shortstop Tomohiro Nioka in a love-hotel tryst. The reason the incident hit such a big nerve in the media is that the night the tryst took place was also the night Yamamoto made her big comeback as an announcer for Fuji TV's new Sunday newsmagazine Sakiyomi. The 32-year-old Hiroshima native got her start as a newsreader for Asahi Broadcasting in Osaka, and in 2006, she was hired by TBS for the network's nightly "News 23" program, working alongside veteran journalist Tetsuya Chikushi. However, only five days into that job she was spotted on the street in a passionate smooch with Goshi Hosono, an executive of the Democratic Party of Japan, who, like Nioka, is a married man. TBS quickly dumped her.

Though Mona was out of the news business, she wasn't out of show business, and her subsequent career as one of the busiest personalities on Japanese TV is solid proof that there's not a whole lot of difference between the two.

Even before the move to TBS, she was being handled by Kitano Office, the production company run by the king of all Japanese media, Beat Takeshi, which presumably took her on because of her more or less exotic appearance. Mona's father was Norwegian and her mother runs one of the most famous ryokan (Japanese inn) in Hiroshima Prefecture. However, her father died when she was young and she grew up in a totally Japanese environment.