The main concerns for the media right now with regard to the sex abuse scandal surrounding the male idol production company Johnny & Associates is the loss of advertising gigs for the company. There have already been announcements of certain companies cancelling contracts to use Johnny’s talent, which could have serious ramifications for its bottom line. Though the male stars that Johnny’s represents make money for the company doing many different things, appearing in print and broadcast ads may be the most lucrative. Various reports say that Johnny’s earns ¥80 billion a year from ads. The pay for appearing on variety shows and acting in movies and dramas is notoriously low in Japan because of all the time spent, and concerts involve lots of expenses and extra personnel that cut into profits, but TV commercials can be done in a day or less and the contracts are usually huge. In order to take some responsibility for the sins of their founder and show their seriousness, Johnny’s current management has offered to not take their usual share for advertising contracts, meaning all the money goes directly to the talent themselves. Nevertheless, advertisers are dropping the company.

However, according to an article that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun Sept. 15, there are other considerations at play that complicate the calculus used to determine whether holding on to Johnny’s talent is still worthwile for advertisers and, by extension, broadcasters. In the article, a 27-year-old female fan of an unnamed Johnny’s boy band explains how she has been following some of its members even before they formed the group, when they were members of the company’s stable of idols-in-waiting who basically support the banner stars by being backup dancers and other things. When these young idols finally debuted as a bona fide group, she attended their first concert and felt fulfilled herself that they had realized their dream.

So when the group—Travis Japan, in case you’re interested—did an ad campaign for Kagome vegetable juice, she wanted to “pay them back” for the happiness they had brought her and ordered a case of the beverage. “Now, everybody in my family drinks this juice,” she said. Of course, she has no particular opinion about the quality of the product and doesn’t even mention whether she drank vegetable juice in the past. She simply wants to “contribute to the sales of the juice” so that the members of Travis Japan will “get more jobs in the future.” 

This fan’s succinct rationale for patronizing a company that uses Johnny’s charges in its advertising—she’s doing it to help her idols—is what makes it difficult for advertisers to cut their relationships to Johnny’s. As an executive of a major advertising company points out in the article, it’s very easy for advertisers to project sales increases when they hire Johnny’s idols. And the effectiveness of the ads is exponential, since fans of a particular star not only buy the product or service advertised, but, using social media, spread the word to other fans and potential fans. The executive claims that only Johnny’s idols provide this kind of effectiveness. And as the above-mentioned fan herself said, she essentially infected her own family with her love of Travis Japan. One professor of pop music history told the Asahi that, in fact, advertisers tend to hire Johnny’s talent in order to sell products and services that specifically target families. 

This synergy explains why when the BBC documentary that explicated late founder Johnny Kitagawa’s decades-long abuse boys was aired in March, there was absolutely “no criticism of Johnny’s” within Japan’s corporate world, according to the ad executive. It wasn’t until August, after the UN Human Rights Council released a statement saying that Kitagawa’s victims should be compensated for their suffering, and Johnny & Associates established a special team to “prevent such abuse” in the future, thereby acknowledging the past abuse, that advertisers became concerned, since they could now be perceived as parties to that abuse. Suddenly, these advertisers were contacting broadcasters saying that they wanted to replace their advertising using Johnny’s talent with new ads that didn’t have Johnny’s talent. 

The reason for this abrubt change of heart, according to Asahi, is an international standard for businesses that went into effect around 2010: Any company that is even seen to be party to human rights violations has the responsibility to aid the victims of those violations. One of the lawyers who is now representing some of Kitagawa’s victims told the newspaper that, according to this standard, advertisers and TV stations have a moral responsibility to help the victims, since they benefited from using them. But while the lawyer thinks these advertisers do have that responsibility, he also sees it as a slippery slope. “If many of these companies cancel their contracts with Johnny’s,” he says, “then Johnny’s business will deteriorate and the talent they represent will lose work.” Consequently, Johnny’s ability to “monitor abuse” will also deteriorate and victims will not be compensated.

That’s why on Sept. 14, the victims of Kitagawa’s abuse, as a group, released a statement saying they didn’t want advertisers to stop doing business with Johnny’s. Though the group didn’t explicitly say why they wanted advertisers to continue to deal with Johnny’s, it’s likely they think that Johnny’s will not be able to compensate them if their revenues fall off. One casting company told Asahi that many advertisers are now afraid that using Johnny’s talent could be “risky.” Even after Johnny’s announced its policy for preventing abuse in the future, at least one advertiser told Asahi that they didn’t think it was enough, and have already cancelled their contract. 

But such cancellations will not be fatal. Johnny’s plan to not take money from advertisers, but simply pass it on directly to the talent, was described by a weekly magazine reporter in the Sept. 15 issue of the tabloid Nikkan Gendai as being a shrewd gambit on the part of the company. Even if Johnny’s forfeited its cut for a full year, it would not seriously affect its financial standing because they have so much money saved and invested in assets like Tokyo real estate. The real reason they came up with such a gambit is to prevent their talent from leaving. The same reporter, however, also says that Johnny’s would probably have a better chance of keeping both advertisers and talent if the company simply changed its name. 

And that brings up the ultimate unasked question: Why aren’t these talent simply leaving Johnny’s, either to work for another production company or set up their own management? In the past, due to that unspoken Japan show biz policy of blacklisting any talent that attempts to go solo, such initiative could almost never be realized, but now it would seem that all bets are off. Would the aforementioned fan reject Travis Japan if they were no longer a Johnny’s act? Maybe we’ll never know. Another entertainment writer told Gendai that the abuse scandal has had no effect on the various fan clubs attached to Johnny’s stars—membership remains as high as it’s ever been, and all that money (the weekly Flash estimates that Johnny’s collects some ¥52 billion a year in membership fees—who needs advertisers?) is not going away, because no one seems to be quitting or, for that matter, talking about the scandal to the press on their own. Obviously, there’s loyalty on all sides of the idol-making industry—fans to talent, talent to management—so as Gendai implies, all Johnny’s has to do is wait a while for the scandal to blow over and things go back to normal—or whatever normal means in Japanese show biz.