Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshitada Konoike resigned May 13 for "personal reasons" after a magazine hit newsstands with a full account of a trip he and a lover took to a hot-spring resort, during which he used a special JR pass that lets Diet members ride shinkansen for free.

Shukan Shincho, which went on sale May 13, exposed the three-day rendezvous between the married Konoike and a woman at the Atami resort in Shizuoka Prefecture, where they played golf and dined in high style from April 28 to 30. That was around the time the government started scrambling to deal with swine flu concerns.