The president of Japan’s biggest boyband talent agency has resigned after acknowledging for the first time that its late founder sexually abused aspiring young stars.
The country’s most powerful pop mogul, Johnny Kitagawa, who died in 2019 aged 87, was accused of sexually assaulting multiple teenagers over decades, but evaded justice because his victims feared he would destroy their careers if they spoke out.
On Thursday, his niece, Julie Fujishima, the president of the Johnny & Associates agency, apologised for her failure to take action while Kitagawa was still alive, and promised that victims would receive compensation as the agency battled to save its reputation.
“Both the agency itself and I myself as a person recognise that sex abuse by Johnny Kitagawa took place,” Fujishima told a packed press conference. “I apologise to his victims from the bottom of my heart.” She added that she was stepping down as head of Johnny & Associates “to take responsibility”.
“I take seriously what happened,” she said.
Fujishima, who holds 100% of the company’s shares, said she would stay on as a representative director to oversee compensation payments but would have no involvement in measures to address the health and welfare of survivors.
Her successor, the actor and singer Noriyuki Higashiyama, who has long been represented by the talent agency, said: “It will take a long time to win back the trust we have lost, but I will devote the rest of my life to dealing with this problem.”
Higashiyama, a former member of the popular 1980s boyband Shonentai, said he had not been abused by Kitagawa but had heard rumours that he had sexually assaulted other boys.
“In entertainment, the person who is in a position of absolute power treats the people beneath them like disciples … and that is the power structure that gave rise to this scandal,” he said. “And that is something we have to reflect on and create a healthier environment.”
Fujishima’s resignation comes weeks after a panel of experts commissioned by the agency concluded that Kitagawa’s abuse dated as far back as the 1950s, before the company was founded.
The panel recommended that Fujishima should resign because she had been aware of the allegations but “neglected to conduct an investigation”, adding that her attitude had perpetuated an attitude among the agency’s leadership that “they might as well treat Kitagawa’s sexual abuse as if it had never happened”.
Fujishima apologised in May but denied she had known about her uncle’s predatory behaviour.
The panel’s report quoted graphic accounts of abuse given in interviews with 41 alleged victims and company officials.
Many of the survivors told the panel they had been traumatised. “I had no prior sexual experience so my body went rigid,” one said. Another recalled that Kitagawa had given him 10,000 yen the day after abusing him. “It made me feel like I was engaging in prostitution,” he said.
A BBC documentary about the pop mogul that aired in March – Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop – triggered a wave of international coverage of Kitagawa’s alleged behaviour, which Japan’s domestic media found impossible to ignore.
Soon after, Kauan Okamoto, a Japanese-Brazilian singer-songwriter, told reporters he had been abused multiple times by Kitagawa, starting when he was 15, and had witnessed other boys being abused at the agency head’s penthouse in Tokyo.
Kitagawa engineered the rise of a string of J-pop groups, including Smap and Arashi, that went on to build huge followings across east Asia. At its peak, Johnny & Associates managed clients who appeared in dozens of TV programmes and commercials.
He was at the centre of sexual abuse allegations for years, but the claims were ignored by Japan’s biggest newspapers and TV networks, which feared losing access to the agency’s stars, who they depended on to attract a younger audience.
In 1999, the weekly magazine Shūkan Bunshun ran a series of articles based on interviews with teenage boys who said Kitagawa had sexually abused them. A legal battle ended in 2004 with the Tokyo high court ruling key parts of the magazine’s reporting were accurate. Kitagawa was never charged with a crime.
A UN human rights working group that visited Japan in July to investigate Kitagawa’s conduct said it had heard “deeply alarming allegations” that several hundred of the agency’s talents were sexually exploited and abused.
