舛添要一都知事,「sekoi」と報じられる ニューヨーク・タイムズ紙
アメリカ紙ニューヨーク・タイムズの電子版は6月15日、舛添要一東京都知事が高額の海外出張や公用車の私的使用などが次々に発覚し、政治資金流用などの疑惑で辞職を決めたことについて「sekoi（せこい）」という日本語を使って報じた。
同紙は、舛添氏の辞任騒動について「今回のエピソードを言い表すのに最も頻繁に使われた言葉は恐らく『sekoi』だろう」と指摘。
舛添氏が、温泉旅行や「たった数ドルの漫画本」などを政治資金で購入していたと説明。「This is sekoi — too sekoi.（あまりにせこい、せこ過ぎる）」と自民党の神林茂都議が舛添氏を批判した際の発言を引用した。
同紙は、舛添氏が「大金を盗んだのではなく、温泉旅行といった少額の出費で少しずつ納税者や献金した人々に損害を与えたことが（都民の）いら立ちを一層増したようだ」と論評した。
The Huffington Post 6/16
Tokyo Governor, Yoichi Masuzoe, Resigns Over Spending Scandal：
NY Times 6/15
The governor of Tokyo resigned on Wednesday, after he admitted using funds intended for political campaigns to pay for personal travel and entertainment, setting off a public furor.
The governor, Yoichi Masuzoe, is the second leader of the Japanese capital’s metropolitan government to leave office over a financial scandal in two and a half years, an especially embarrassing development because the city will host the Summer Olympic Games in 2020 and counts on the governor to act as an organizer and global ambassador.
Anger at Mr. Masuzoe’s spending had been building for months, but the governor told the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly that he had hoped to stay on long enough to attend this year’s Games in Rio de Janeiro, where Tokyo will receive a measure of attention as the event’s next host.
“I thought it would be disruptive to have an election with the Rio Olympics right around the corner,” he said in the assembly after submitting his resignation. “My main concern was for the Games.”
Plummeting approval ratings and defections by political allies ultimately persuaded him, however.
The amounts that Mr. Masuzoe has been accused of spending improperly on himself and his family are hardly vast by the standards of modern politics-and-money scandals. There are reimbursements of a few hundred dollars here for restaurant meals, and a few thousand dollars there for hotel stays.
In a report issued this month, lawyers hired by the governor to review his spending found 4.4 million yen, or about $41,000, in expenses over several years that they called “inappropriate, but not illegal.” Mr. Masuzoe apologized and said that there had been “some mixing of public and personal” in his spending, but that he had not knowingly broken any rules. He has not been charged with wrongdoing.
Still, the relatively minor scale of his reported excesses did not help him.
If anything, the public’s antagonism appears to have deepened. The word that has perhaps been most frequently used to describe the episode is sekoi, meaning cheap or petty. That Mr. Masuzoe might nickel-and-dime taxpayers and contributors for spa trips seems to have struck a rawer nerve than if he had engaged in wholesale theft.
“I’m angry. This is sekoi — too sekoi,” Shigeru Kamibayashi, a member of the assembly from the right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party, where Mr. Masuzoe has spent most of his political career and which supported his bid for governor, said after the lawyers issued their report. The word has been ubiquitous in newspaper and social media references to the scandal.
Among the spending that the lawyers labeled inappropriate were purchases of manga comic books, some worth just a few dollars, and a silk calligrapher’s robe from a Shanghai tourist gift shop. Mr. Masuzoe charged them to his campaign organization, which by law is supposed to finance only political activities, though experts say the definition is vague enough that politicians routinely stretch it to cover private expenses.
Mr. Masuzoe’s travel costs in office have also come under criticism. He has taken large groups of aides on trips to London, New York and Paris, flying first class and staying in upscale hotels. Japanese news outlets have reported that he has used government limousines to travel back and forth to a home he owns in a spa town southwest of Tokyo 48 times since April last year.
“Is the leader of a major global city supposed to stay in a second-rate business hotel?” he said on one occasion, defending his global travels as necessary to burnish Tokyo’s brand ahead of the Olympics. Later, after an outpouring of complaints, he began expressing more contrition, but the damage had already been done.
Mr. Masuzoe, 67, entered politics after a career as a political scientist and television commentator and served as health minister in the mid-2000s. He won the governorship in 2014 after his predecessor, Naoki Inose, resigned over a campaign-funding scandal.
Mr. Inose quit in December 2013 after he acknowledged receiving a loan of more than half a million dollars from a hospital operator during an election. He denied that the money was for political purposes, but critics called it an undisclosed campaign contribution.
His last day in office will be Tuesday, and an election to replace him is expected to take place on July 31 or Aug. 7. It will add to a busy political calendar in Japan, with elections for the upper house of the national Parliament set for July 10.
Like Mr. Inose, Mr. Masuzoe is a supporter of the Olympics, but he made reining in its growing cost a signature issue. His refusal to shoulder the expense of a main stadium that was increasingly over budget was a major reason that its design, by the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, who died in March, was scrapped in favor of a cheaper plan last year.
His repeated promises not to waste taxpayer money ultimately bounced back at him.
“I’ve eliminated waste,” he said in response to initial criticism of his travel spending in March. “But when you have to spend, you have to spend.”
| AFP-JIJI