Leave Tsuyoshi alone

After ten long seconds of silence at his guilt-admitting press conference, Kusanagi finally answered the question, "On what kinds of occasions do you feel like drinking?"
On the morning show replay, a stopwatch runs up as he looks down. Two hundred journalists hold their breaths. Music you would expect to hear played over a grainy, slo-mo image of an empty swing plinks away. And the tarnished aging boy band singer haltingly admits: "I've always liked alcohol."

Back to the studio, where an unlikely defender in the often-outraged conservative host stands up for him. "Only someone who doesn't drink could ask a question like that." A crusty panelist is unmoved. "I would have liked a better answer."

And then, a beautiful moment. Piko, a 64-year-old man wearing many pretty bracelets mists up and says Kusanagi must have felt under attack.

Let's back up a moment. It would be hard to overstate how much attention this has been getting. A couple visiting from Australia said they'd been flipping through the channels on their hotel TV and had seen the same urgent broadcast of the same downcast, clean-cut looking guy on every station. "Who did he kill? Was it a school shooting?" they wondered.

No. As an executive I know gravely reported to me, "He drank much, much sake and he stripped himself." This was in a park at 3 am in (party hell-hole) Roppongi with a few buddies. The cops came because he was whooping it up and the neighbors complained. He is said to have shouted at the police "So what if I'm naked, where's the harm?"

Where isn't it? The financial impact has been reported to be over 10 million dollars, as he's been yanked from everything from his toque-wearing turn on a weeknight cooking show to his narration of a fun children's educational TV segment. His commercials for Toyota and P&G have been pulled, and the Japanese government is "seeking and replacing" the posters on which he informed the public about the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.

The disappointment is palpable. My executive friend sighed, "I don't know why he stripped himself." The nation looks on in collective sadness and shock, looking for reasons, wondering the same thing.

There may not be a Chris Crocker here to smear his eyeliner over it, but I'm glad that Piko had the courage, in his own subtle way, to say, "Just leave him alone."