Yoko Minamino Announces Divorce with Husband Mitsushi Kaneda Six Days After his Arrest
On November 27, Yoko Minamino announced that she had divorced her husband, Mitsushi Kaneda, four years her junior, six days after he was arrested by Shizuoka police on charges of embezzling 15 million yen from a social welfare corporation.
Minamino married the suspect in March of 2011, 12 years ago, and since the beginning of their marriage, there have been many unsavory rumors about Kanada, and people in the entertainment industry have been asking,
“Is Minamino okay?”
“I don’t think she’ll last long.”
In fact, in April of the same year, the president of a medical company, Mr. Kurokawa, was arrested.
In April of the same year, Nanno was suspected of defrauding the president of a medical company out of 480 million yen by offering him fictitious investments, followed by allegations of embezzlement at a clinic in Akasaka, Tokyo, where Kanada herself was the executive director, and the discovery of unaccounted for money at a clinic in Ginza. The financial troubles surrounding her husband were reported one after another immediately after their marriage.
To top it all off, at their wedding press conference
She said at her wedding press conference, “It seems that my husband did a lot of work.”
It turned out that Harry Winston’s engagement ring, which cost approximately 13 million yen, was paid for with Minamino’s credit card. Furthermore, in 2015, she was found to be having an affair with a mama of a club in Ginza, and she was involved in a court case over the child she bore to the mama.
One would have thought that Minamino would have gone through with the divorce, but there was no sign of it.
“I heard that there were people around her who advised her to get a divorce, and her agency at the time tried to persuade her, but she stubbornly refused,” said a staff member of a wide-ranging TV show.
Since then, they have been ranked in the “top ten couples about to divorce” predicted by the entertainment media every year. This is the reason why some people said what I did at the beginning of this article.
Why didn’t she try to get a divorce?
“She was starting to appear in more dramas and variety shows, and perhaps she was concerned that her divorce would affect her work. But what was probably even more significant was that she trusted her husband more than the news reports regarding the troubles he was involved in. I think she finally woke up when he was arrested.”
It was about 16 years ago. I once interviewed her when she appeared in a Kansai local TV drama.
Minamino had entered her 40s that year, but she still had the sharp smile of “Saki Asamiya the Second. Since the drama in which she appeared was a romantic drama, I asked her about her past relationships.
I had covered her love affairs and relationships many times when I was a reporter for “FRIDAY,” so I asked her what had really happened.
She admitted that most of what was reported in the media was true, and then said, “It was all a love affair that I never want to look back on or remember. I don’t even want to talk about them.”
During the interview, I got the impression that she did not approve of relationships that did not lead to marriage. She must have thought that she could not let go of the “marriage” that she had finally obtained so easily.
Perhaps it was the word “marriage” that made her blind to the voices around her and unable to objectively see the man who would become her husband.
“Love is blind”, it can sometimes destroy a person’s life. Fortunately, in Minamino’s case, it is not expected to have a major impact on her future work, and we hope she will make a comeback.
Interview and text： Hiroyuki Sasaki (Entertainment Journalist)
Born in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, Hiroyuki Sasaki became a reporter for FRIDAY at the age of 31, reporting numerous scoops during his time at FRIDAY and later working mainly for the weekly magazine. Currently, he also appears on TV and radio as a commentator.
PHOTO： Yasuo Ito/Afro
