It's assumed that the heckling of Tokyo assembly member Ayaka Shiomura by some of her male colleagues on June 18 became a major news story in Japan only after the foreign press picked it up as an example of intractable Japanese sexism. The situation is more nuanced than how Western media described it, but that doesn't mean it wasn't appreciated by Japanese media.

Nevertheless, the news conference held on June 23 by Akihiro Suzuki, the Liberal Democratic Party member who admitted to making one of the disparaging comments, suggests that the point of the scandal may have been lost on some local reporters. Whatever it was that Suzuki yelled during Shiomura's speech about the difficulties women face having children these days, the accepted version is, "Why don't you get married soon?", and while he now says he regrets the remark he insists it was uttered in the spirit of concern over the issue of "delayed marriage and the falling birthrate." His presentation may have been crude, but his intentions were pure.

But reporters were only interested in tripping him up. Some knew Suzuki was one of the hecklers and confronted him early on in order to give him a chance to confess, but at the time he denied it was him and compounded the lie by agreeing that whoever it was should resign from the assembly. At the news conference they asked him if he was prepared to put his money where his mouth had been several days earlier, and he dodged the question by reasserting his commitment to doing whatever it was he said he'd do when he was first elected to the Tokyo assembly. The coverage suggested that Shiomura was less the target of abject sexism than a victim of the kind of juvenile taunts you hear when a girl insists on joining an organization the boys think is exclusively theirs. The difference may be academic, but Suzuki claims he got caught up in the adolescent excitement and had no desire to hurt Shiomura's feelings.