Good girl pays the price for being naughty instead of nice
Actress Akiko Yada's squeaky clean image took a battering when the paparazzi caught her on a dirty weekend trip to Hawaii with glitterati bad boy Manabu Oshio and now she looks like she'll pay for it with her career, according to Shukan Shincho.
Yada was the face of the enormously popular TV campaign for Aflac insurance company, but has lost the job after her photos were splashed all over the scandal sheets.
"She'd been appearing in the company's commercials since 2002, but won't be in any more ads after her contract runs out on July 28," a reporter on the entertainment beat tells Shukan Shincho. "Tetsuro Yanagiba, who has been appearing with her, is going to keep on doing the ads, which effectively means that Yada was sacked."
Producers of the commercial admit that Yada's scandal cost her the job.
"In today's society, there shouldn't be anything wrong with being spotted with a guy, but the image she has projected is of a well-mannered, prim-and-proper young lady, and the gap between the two is just too big," the producer says. "Oshio is notorious, swearing at reporters and generally being uncouth, which has left him with an awful reputation. When the women's magazine took photos of her pouring suntan lotion over the back of guy whose body was covered in tattoos she looked like nothing more than a typical yakuza whore."
The revealing shots are expected to be harmful for the 28-year-old actress.
"Yada'll probably lose lots of her sponsors," the producer says. "She was in the class making around 30 million yen a commercial, but she won't be able to command that much anymore."
Many feel the only hope Yada has of surviving in Japan's cutthroat entertainment world is to dump Oshio.
"What's most frightening about this whole thing is that she's not likely to give him the flick. Yada's incorrigible. Oshio is mainly making a living performing with his band and Yada, cool as you like, always turns up for his shows," the producer says. "Just the other day, they were spotted on a date at (Tokyo's) Odaiba -- right in front of the Fuji TV building. It was like as though she deliberately wanted somebody to spot her with him."
Not everybody sees the scandal as a total blight on the actress' name.
"If Yada eventually wants to be seen as a serious actress, she's got to make sure this scandal doesn't come to much," entertainment commentator Masaaki Hiruma says. "In some ways, the scandal could even open doors for her. But, she's got to get rid of Oshio. She's finished as an actress as long as she's with him."
Another entertainment beat reporter advises Yada to get in first.
"Oshio has gone out with and dumped Natsumi Abe, Naomi Zaisen, Ayana Hirayama and loads of other stars. He's you're archetypical playboy," the hack tells Shukan Shincho. "There are already whispers about that he's got another woman now. Yada might even end up finding herself dumped."