Two weeks ago one of the big stories in the tabloid press was on Jurip Al-Asa, the father of popular TV personality Rola. He was in the news because the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of swindling. Allegedly, Jurip, a Bangladesh national, conspired with a compatriot to defraud the national health insurance system of ¥875,000 in benefits by claiming that the compatriot, who lives in Japan and pays into the system, received medical care abroad and was thus entitled to be reimbursed. The police claim that the receipt for the medical care was forged. He has since fled Japan.

Anyone who watches any amount of Japanese TV will conclude that the story wouldn't have warranted coverage if Jurip wasn't Rola's father; which isn't to say that such fraud cases don't deserve media attention, only that they normally don't get it unless the amount of money is particularly large or there are extenuating circumstances, such as the fact that the suspect's daughter is a media fixture. In any case, the combination of high-profile relation and foreign passport automatically makes tabloid reporters think: That's exactly the sort of thing I'm supposed to cover.

The coverage was snarky but also fat-free. The weekly magazine Bunshun barely concealed it's lack of genuine interest but acknowledged that it needed to address the story with a gratuitous one-page knockoff that took advantage of a brief telephone conversation one of its reporters had with Jurip seven months ago, when the magazine was pursuing a different story that implied he had brought relatives to Japan from Bangladesh to work illegally. The quotes used in the piece made him look rude and thus suspicious, but the article didn't bring up anything new. The celebrity gossip magazine Asahi Geino suggested that Jurip might be a "mafia boss" in Bangladesh, based on police statements, and then speculated that as a result of the story Rola isn't long for the show business world.