Johnny Kitagawa sex abuse claims prompt questions over Japan media's complicity

Japan's most powerful entertainment agency is facing growing scrutiny over its founder's alleged sexual abuse of teenage boys, in a scandal that has prompted questions over the firm's influence and whether media silence had allowed the issue to fester for decades.

Pressure is mounting on Julie Keiko Fujishima, head of Johnny & Associates and niece of its late founder Johnny Kitagawa, after a former pop idol last month lifted the lid on his experience at the label.

Kitagawa had made an indelible mark on Japan's pop industry, shaping its growth over decades with a stable of wildly popular boy bands that included SMAP, Arashi, Hikaru Genji and Sexy Zone. But behind the bright lights of success lay what insiders say was a dark industry secret - that Kitagawa was an alleged predator who not only coerced boys into sex acts for years but wielded his power and influence to diminish reports of his behaviour.

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Fujishima earlier this month expressed her "deepest apologies" to those who had asserted they were victims, but said it was impossible to verify the claims, given that Kitagawa had died in 2019. "It is not easy to say in one word whether we recognise it as a fact or not," she said.

Her minute-long video statement came after Japanese-Brazilian singer Kauan Okamoto, 26, claimed the music mogul sexually assaulted him on as many as 20 occasions in the four years before he left the agency in 2016.

Okamoto believed that most of the agency's "100 to 200" boy-band trainees at the time would have been abused by Kitagawa, who regularly invited them to his house. "I think everyone should speak out, it's probably a shocking number of people," he said at a press conference on April 12 hosted by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

The former member of Antime said he decided to come forward after the BBC released a documentary in March, titled Predator, that detailed allegations against Kitagawa going back to the 1960s. The investigation claimed that Kitagawa had forced himself on as many as 200 boys who had joined the agency dreaming of stardom and feared that speaking up would have ended their prospects in the lucrative J-pop industry.

Okamoto's testimony has also convinced more young men to share their experiences.

After raising the allegations, Okamoto took part in a Diet panel hearing, where he was joined by another alleged victim, actor and dancer Yasushi Hashida.

The pair were asked what measures could be taken to ensure a similar situation would not happen again, with Hashida, 37, suggesting revisions to the law on child abuse and making sure that the law was enforced.

Former singer Ryu Takahashi told the Asahi newspaper on May 15 that he had fought off Kitagawa's sexual advances as a boy and described Fujishima's comments as "an act of desperation".

Takahashi, 31, also dismissed Fujishima's claim that she knew nothing about the abuse, which was widely rumoured in the industry for decades. The same allegations were aired in court in 1999, he added, after which it would have been impossible for the company or domestic media to not know about the claims.

On Friday, Fujishima announced that the company would take remedial steps, including asking a panel of independent experts to suggest policies to prevent a recurrence of such claims.

But even as Johnny & Associates' crisis grows, it remains to be seen if the scandal would lead to any consequences.

Japanese media outlet ENCOUNT reported that the agency was exploring the option of removing "Johnny" from the company name in an effort to distance itself from the allegations surrounding Kitagawa.

Johnny & Associates has dominated the music scene for generations and still represents many of Japan's top boy bands today, including Arashi and Hey Say Jump, whose popularity shows no signs of declining in the world's second-largest market for recorded music.

The growing controversy has prompted a reckoning by at least two large newspapers, which acknowledged the Japanese media's past coverage on Kitagawa had been lacking.

The Mainichi newspaper in a May 16 editorial said: "The media must reflect on whether they have dealt with this grave problem properly."

A similar editorial in the Sankei Shimbun said: "Major newspapers and television networks, including the Sankei Shimbun, have largely remained silent on this issue. But now, this 'abnormality' is coming under intense pressure."

Some critics have suggested that Japanese media conglomerates' heavy reliance on Johnny & Associates' acts to sell newspapers or promote evening entertainment shows may have deterred them from being critical of Kitagawa.

"When my magazine first printed the allegations against Kitagawa back in 1999, the rest of the Japanese media just ignored the story," said Shiro Saito, a journalist with the Shukan Bunshun weekly news magazine, which ran a series of reports quoting 10 teenage talents who were allegedly abused by the mogul.

Kitagawa sued the magazine for libel and won some US$10,000 in damages for one claim in the series, that his agency had supplied alcohol and cigarettes to minors.

The court declared that the reports of sexual abuse had "validity", but as none of the boys filed a formal police complaint, Kitagawa walked free.

Meanwhile, others have questioned if Japanese society is prepared to treat sexual assault seriously.

Japanese journalist Takao Yamada, writing in a column in the Mainichi newspaper about the scandal, quoted a colleague on the sex-crimes beat as suggesting: "Rather than it being hard to write about them, the fact is that few people see them as a problem."

Saito said: "I think the atmosphere is changing, although only gradually. They are reporting about the sexual abuse and they are finally saying that it was terrible, but they are not really going as far as admitting that they knew, that they did not speak up and that if they had acted then, maybe the abuse would have stopped many years earlier."

Haruko Watanabe, a veteran Tokyo-based journalist, is less than optimistic that the Japanese media's newfound interest in covering a story that has been under its noses for decades would last very long.

"Japanese reporters are salarymen, not journalists," she said, using the term disparagingly. "The only real journalists in Japan today are the Bunshun reporters who initially broke this story."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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