Lessons Learned? A Look at the Entertainment Industry After the Johnny Kitagawa Sexual Abuse Scandal

Serious Reforms or a Simple Façade?

On March 7, 2023, the BBC aired a documentary titled Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop, the first TV program to publicly expose Johnny Kitagawa’s sexual abuse of young boys. Kitagawa, who passed away in 2019, was the founder of the talent agency Johnny and Associates.

Following the BBC report, an independent investigative team commissioned by Johnny and Associates (now renamed Smile-Up) and led by lawyer Hayashi Makoto (a former top public prosecutor) confirmed in late August 2023 that Kitagawa had indeed engaged in sexual abuse. This development was a major blow to the agency, leading its management to hold a press conference on September 7 that year.

Among those that attended were the company’s former president Julie Fujishima, its new president Higashiyama Noriyuki, and Inohara Yoshihiko, president of the subsidiary Johnny’s Island.

From left, Johnny’s Island head Inohara Yoshihiko, Johnny and Associates President Higashiyama Noriyuki, former President Julie Fujishima, and lawyer Kimeda Hiroshi appear at the press conference on September 7, 2023 in Chiyoda, Tokyo. (© Jiji)

Julie Fujishima tearfully apologized, saying, “These were my uncle’s actions, and I take responsibility as his niece.” The entertainer Higashiyama Noriyuki, a close protégé of Kitagawa, condemned him, calling his actions atrocious. On October 2, Higashiyama and Inohara Yoshihiko, another performer from the Johnny’s stable, held another press conference where they expressed further remorse.

Until then, Johnny and Associates’ management team had never once held a press conference, operating a highly insular organization. However, Higashiyama and the others now appeared to signal a shift. In their second press conference, they pledged to compensate victims beyond legal requirements and announced that, once compensations were complete, the agency would be dissolved, with its operations transferred to a new company—one in which Julie Fujishima would have no involvement. They seemed genuinely committed to reform.

Returning to Its Former Secretive State

However, the course shifted in November when it was decided that Fukuda Atsushi, a former president of a Sony entertainment subsidiary, would take over as CEO of the new company, which had been named Starto Entertainment.

Fukuda spoke to a selected handful of newspapers and press agencies in December 2023, but has yet to hold a press conference.

In April 2024, Starto signed contracts with 295 individuals in 28 talent groups from Johnny and Associates, backed by an initial capital infusion of 10 million yen. While it is said that the funds came from management and employees, the details have not been revealed.

This lack of transparency has fueled speculation in the entertainment and TV industries that the initial funding, as well as the millions of yen in operational funds, were either provided or guaranteed by Julie Fujishima. If true, this would mean that Starto is nothing more than a rebranded version of Johnny and Associates.

Holding a press conference would be an essential step in dispelling such doubts, but Fukuda has shown no sign of doing so. Instead, the agency appears to have reverted to the same secretive and insular culture as its predecessor.

Progress in Victim Compensation, but Criteria Still Unclear

Meanwhile, Julie Fujishima continues in her post as representative director of the former Johnny’s and Associates, which changed its name to Smile-Up in October 2023. The company now operates solely to handle victim compensation.

As of December 13, 2024, a total of 1,008 individuals had come forward to report abuse, of which 538 had reached a compensation agreement, 215 had been told by the company they would not receive compensation, 237 could no longer be contacted, and 9 were still undergoing assessment or verification. The company has not yet disclosed details such as its criteria for compensation.

Voices in the media have been urging the company to provide more detailed explanations, but neither Fujishima nor Higashiyama appear willing to hold a press conference. So far, they have only addressed the public when the backlash was at its peak, immediately after the sexual abuse was confirmed.

Recently, some victims and claimants have entered arbitration or legal proceedings against Smile-Up. Additionally, a lawsuit has been filed in Las Vegas, Nevada, by victims alleging sexual abuse that took place there.

Starto Exhibiting Same Hardline Stance as Before

As for the new company, Starto, some have noticed that its hardline approach toward TV networks is beginning to resemble that of Johnny and Associates. A particularly symbolic example is how the agency withdrew its talent from Kōhaku Uta Gassen, an annual New Year’s Eve music show broadcast by NHK.

Since September 2023, NHK had ceased hiring new talent from the former Johnny and Associates. The Kōhaku that year marked the first in 44 years without any participants from the agency. NHK maintained this stance even after the establishment of the new company in April 2024. However, on October 16, the broadcaster announced that it would resume using Starto performers.

“In addition to their compensation efforts for victims and measures to prevent recurrence, we’ve seen that the division of management between Smile-Up and Starto is also making progress,” NHK president Inaba Nobuo Inaba stated in an October 2024 press conference.

When I interviewed an NHK production staffer, I was told that the lead Kōhaku producer had been negotiating with Starto from before the October announcement. However, they were not able to reach an agreement about the number of singers that would participate.

The Kōhaku Uta Gassen production team had proposed including the idol group Snow Man and one other Starto group in the show. No artists from the agency had made new appearances on NHK since September 2023, and given that participation in NHK broadcasting activities is one of the criteria for participation, the proposal—amounting to roughly one-tenth of the total of 21 participating groups—does not seem all that unreasonable. This is especially true considering that from 1997 to 2008, only one or two groups from Johnny and Associates took part in the show each year.

Starto, however, pushed for three or four groups to appear on the show. While this may seem like a lot, it could be justified by the fact that in 2022, before NHK stopped featuring Johnny’s artists, six groups had participated.

During the negotiations between NHK and Starto, on October 20, 2024, an NHK Special about Johnny Kitagawa and his “idol empire” was aired, complicating the negotiation process. The program included a scene in which a Smile-Up representative handling compensation spoke coldly to the family of a victim, which cast both Smile-Up and Starto in a negative light. However, what reportedly frustrated Starto the most was the documentary’s pointed criticism of Wakaizumi Hisaaki, an advisor at the company who had transitioned from Johnny and Associates. Wakaizumi, a former NHK director, had previously led the network’s production department.

Criticism of Starto from Other Agencies

Critics have pointed out NHK’s close ties to Johnny and Associates, which began around the end of the first decade of the 2000s. The number of the agency’s performers appearing in Kōhaku Uta Gassen began increasing in 2009, peaking at seven groups in 2015. The documentary made it seem as though Wakaizumi was solely responsible for this relationship, but this would clearly an oversimplification. Notably, no active NHK employees were featured as interview subjects in the program—a point of concern even among those within the network.

As a result of the airing of the documentary and disagreements over the number of participating acts, Starto withdrew from Kōhaku Uta Gassen. However, other entertainment agencies have voiced criticism of Starto.

“They won’t participate unless they get exactly what they want. It’s no different from Johnny and Associates,” said one agency executive I interviewed.

Johnny and Associates was known to impose its will on TV networks by withholding popular talent from programs that featured male idols represented by other agencies. It seems that this approach is starting to be revived.

Most Commercial Broadcasters Maintain Silence

Has there been any change among the TV networks that were criticized for their silence, which is said to have prolonged the sexual abuse scandal?

After Johnny and Associates apologized for the abuse in September 2023, NHK and TV Tokyo suspended their hiring of new performers from the agency, while Nippon TV stopped casting them in regular programs. However, the fact remains that none of these networks took action before the BBC’s report. This is problematic considering their responsibilities as media outlets.

For years, TV industry professionals were aware of rumors about Johnny Kitagawa’s abuse of boys, but they chose to look the other way. Around 20 years ago, a former TV Asahi executive (now deceased) even told me that, “Johnny is a problem.”

TV Asahi, TBS, and Fuji Television have continued hiring from the agency even after autumn 2023. Their reasoning is that “it’s not the performers’ fault.” However, this stance feels like a way to keep looking the other way, and their explanation seems disingenuous.

TV Asahi is set to open a 1,500-seat theater in Tokyo’s Ariake district in 2026. Even before the Johnny Kitagawa scandal became widely known, the television and entertainment industries had anticipated that the theater’s main attraction would be talent from the former Johnny and Associates.

Maintaining a theater is difficult without a main draw. It has been pointed out that the reason TV Asahi didn’t halt its hiring from Johnny and Associates and Starto is because of this theater.

Fuji Television, which also continued hiring from Johnny and Associates, took the unusual step of seconding one of its producers to the agency while still retaining her as an employee. This unprecedented personnel move highlighted just how close the two companies were.

TBS also never stopped hiring performers from the agency, while Nippon TV resumed hiring in April 2024.

Have Networks Already Gone Back to Pleasing the Agency?

The only private broadcaster to maintain the suspension for more than a year was TV Tokyo, which only lifted it on October 3. This is widely seen as being influenced by its parent company, Nikkei, a media company with strong ties to the business world, which likely made them more cautious. In the business world, the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (chaired by Niinami Takeshi, president and CEO of Suntory Holdings) had taken an especially hard stance on the issue.

But even TV Tokyo is going back to appeasing Starto. After the NHK documentary on the sexual abuse was aired, one of TV Tokyo’s PR executives reportedly asked a former employee who had participated in the program to refrain from using the title “former TV Tokyo employee” and to avoid discussing his time at the network.

That former employee is Tabuchi Toshihiko, a professor at J. F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. According to his blog and an article he contributed to President Online, the TV Tokyo executive asked him to refrain from speaking as a former employee, saying that the network’s production staff were unsettled by the large number of phone calls they received after the documentary aired.

What Tabuchi discussed on the documentary, however, were Johnny Kitagawa’s personality and the character of Johnny and Associates, which are clearly topics of public interest.

“It’s hard for TV professionals to speak up about talent agencies. It’s a mentality that’s permeated the industry for many years,” Tabuchi told me in an interview.

Tabuchi, who is also a journalist, knowingly took the risk and decided to speak out. If such voices had been shut down, the relationship between the TV industry and entertainment industry would still remain in the dark.

Should NHK, which aired the sexual abuse documentary in October 2024, be praised? Not necessarily. As a public broadcaster, NHK is expected to uphold a high level of responsibility. Its reporting division, which handles news and documentaries, and entertainment division are structurally separated. The documentary, produced by the reporting division, was able to expose the darker aspects of the entertainment industry. However, it was determined internally by April 2024 that it would be broadcast in September (it aired a month later), and it seems to me that NHK was planning to use the documentary as a way to clean its image before resuming the hiring of Starto talent, particularly in preparation for Kōhaku Uta Gassen (whose viewership ratings are closely watched), regardless of the progress made in compensating victims.

It’s true that featuring Starto talent on TV shows will ensure stronger ratings. However, if networks remain fixated on ratings and resume their old relationships with the former Johnny and Associates without fully reflecting on their role in the sexual abuse scandal, the issue will remain unsolved. It will only be a matter of time before the entertainment and TV industries face new waves of major scandals.

(Translated from Japanese. Banner photo: The former Johnny and Associates’ headquarters building at the time of the death of Johnny Kitagawa. Photographed in Minato, Tokyo, in July 2019. © AFP/Jiji.)