Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.), has announced that it will resume hiring talent from the entertainment agency formerly known as Johnny & Associates, whose late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, had been accused of sexually abusing more than a hundred boys who worked for the company as idols since it was established in the 1960s. Last year, the company’s management acknowledged the abuse following the broadcast of a BBC documentary that covered the matter in detail. Subsequently, Johnny & Associates changed its name to Smile-Up Inc., which took on the task of compensating the victims of the abuse, while a brand new company, Starto Entertainment, took over management of the idols that formerly had toiled for Johnny’s. Like all broadcasters in Japan, NHK relied heavily on Johnny’s for on-air talent and stopped using the agency after the scandal broke. At the press conference on Oct. 16 where the announcement was made, NHK President Nobuo Inaba said that his company was satisfied that the two companies had clearly separated their business tasks, thus paving the way for NHK to resume using Starto’s actors and singers, a move the Asahi Shimbun said would “likely lead to other major networks again signing up those affiliated with the new talent agency.”

One of the core aspects of the scandal is that Kitagawa’s abuse of the boys in his charge continued for years despite being exposed fairly early on by some media outlets. The reason such exposure was muted and not covered by other media outlets was due to the company’s power within the entertainment industry, especially among broadcasters, which in Japan are invariably part of larger media companies. Because Johnny’s male idols were so popular, broadcasters and others who hired them felt they couldn’t compete without them and thus ignored Kitagawa’s crimes. That included NHK, despite the fact that, as a public broadcaster, theoretically NHK doesn’t rely on ratings for its financial solvency because it receives funding from mandatory subscriptions. But NHK has always paid close attention to ratings, especially since the turn of the millennium when the internet started eroding viewership for TV broadcasts in general. Since then, NHK has increasingly mimicked commercial TV programming, which depends greatly on popular talent, and so NHK also hired Johnny’s idols for dramas, so-called variety programs, and talk shows. Thus NHK was also indirectly complicit in Kitagawa’s crimes, since it kept using the company in full knowledge of those crimes. 

Coincidentally or not, four days after its announcement, NHK broadcast its own documentary about the Kitagawa scandal. Though in many ways redundant, given that the BBC’s documentary was originally aired in March 2023 (though its content had already been revealed two months earlier) and Japan’s mainstream media had subsequently covered every aspect of Kitagawa’s crimes, due to its unique standing in Japan as a media outlet NHK was able to put together a more incisive report about those crimes and how Johnny & Associates kept a lid on them for so many years. The program even addressed NHK’s responsibility, though not necessarily to the satisfaction of some viewers. Following the broadcast, many people complained online about some of the documentary’s content and even accused NHK of producing and airing it so as to let itself off the hook for its failure to acknowledge Kitagawa’s sins earlier and resume hiring former Johnny’s talent. The timing was a bit too conspicuous. 

Much of the documentary does come across as a cautious rationalization of Kitagawa’s actions. Through interviews with former Johnny’s employees and idols and media industry insiders, the program suggests that Kitagawa’s sexual proclivity for adolescent boys was inseparable from his ability to cultivate stars that would appeal to a wide cross-section of Japanese people. Often the interviewees will say that Johnny’s male idols were somehow “unique” or that Kitagawa could see a budding talent’s future clearly just by looking at him. Broadcasters recognized this ability and appreciated it. 

But the program went a bit deeper in terms of associating this skill with Kitagawa’s sexual pathology. It’s clear from the testimony of the victims that they were in their low teens or even younger when they became the objects of Kitagawa’s sexual attentions, and once his appetites were sated he would essentially pass them on to his older sister, Mary, who would do the actual work of developing them into stars. Though the program doesn’t elaborate on this point, in a way it negates the whole concept of Kitagawa’s formidable nose for talent, since it is also clear that boys who resisted his overtures were invariably shunned. Of course, those victims who have come forward with stories of abuse explained that they didn’t resist because they wanted to be stars and thought that letting Kitagawa touch them at night was the only way of achieving their dreams. But it was Mary who did the actual heavy lifting of training these boys and getting them jobs. 

In this regard, NHK does a better job than the BBC of extracting pertinent information from interviewees, because NHK not only knows intimately and instinctively how Japanese show business works, but also how certain behavioral traits will resonate with viewers. For instance, one former employee who worked closely with the novice talent said he came to know of Kitagawa’s actions through the boys’ jokes—an initial midnight visit from Kitagawa under the covers qualified as one’s “debut.” Though on the surface, such banter characterized Kitagawa’s actions as mischief, the objects of those actions were left scarred and angry. Or at least some of them were. The biggest question lingering in the wake of the scandal is why no major Johnny’s star has come forward with his own testimony of being sexually abused. All those who have spoken publicly were relatively minor talent. If the idea is that Kitagawa somehow anointed stars who pleased him sexually, then statistically it would follow that at least some of the biggest names produced by the agency were victims as well. The BBC certainly knew this but couldn’t get close enough to the big names to elicit any definite responses. NHK, on the other hand, could have done so if it really wanted to. 

Instead, the program makes do with a handful of victims who have already come forward, the most damning of which was Ryo Nakatani, a member of the first Johnny’s idol group, The Johnnys. Nakatani died several years ago, after Kitagawa died in 2015 but before the scandal broke. NHK interviews his surviving sister at length and quotes from a book that Nakatani wrote in the late 1980s detailing his abuse. The program dedicates a good portion of time to the sister trying to extract an apology from Smile-Up, even though her brother is dead. In one particularly shocking exchange, the employee she talks to on the phone says that Nakatani doesn’t qualify for an apology because his book “greatly harmed the company.” As it happens, the CEO of Smile-Up, former idol Noriyuki Higashiyama, did meet with the sister after this exchange and apologized in person, but according to Asahi Shimbun the person on the phone, who it turns out was the manager in charge of distributing compensation to victims, has since been removed from that position.

But the real determination of the documentary’s seriousness is its self-examination. It does a fair job of outlining how Johnny & Associates intimidated the media from elaborating on Kitagawa’s crimes, mainly by interviewing the handful of writers who reported those crimes in weekly magazines. It then shows how NHK’s own reliance on Johnny’s talent grew over time, even while articles about Kitagawa’s abuse cropped up on occasion. In order to find out why this was, the producer endeavored to talk to NHK’s former head of drama programming, as well as a former member of the broadcaster’s board, Hisaaki Wakaizumi, who was instrumental in hiring Johnny’s talent during his tenure and who, like a true retired bureaucrat, now works for Starto Entertainment. Requests for interviews were never answered, so a production staff member ambushed Wakaizumi on the street. “Why me?” he asked the staff member, genuinely puzzled. “We belong to the same group,” presumably meaning people in show business—or maybe people in media? The rejoinder goes a long way in explaining the mindset that dominated the coverup of Kitagawa’s crimes that made possible the flourishing of his business, a kind of conspiratorial wink that implies this is how things work and there’s nothing you and I can do about it. 

This knowingness extended to Wakaizumi’s written answers to the program’s queries, which come across as a plea for understanding from people in the same boat. Wakaizumi says that he knew about the series of weekly magazine articles covering Kitagawa’s sexual abuse that came out around the turn of the millennium, but as the head of drama programming his job was to lift ratings, which had been declining for some time. The solution was to appeal to a “wider demographic of viewers,” meaning younger people, and so he actively worked with Johnny’s, whose idols were the most popular talent among that demographic, to get their talent on more NHK shows. 

The fact that Wakaizumi considers this a fair excuse for NHK as a network ignoring Kitagawa’s crimes goes to the heart of the problem, and in a sense the documentary recognizes this truth, but it doesn’t know what to do with it. In one of many social media posts about the NHK Special, Tokyo Shimbum reporter Isoko Mochizuki, who has covered the scandal more diligently than any other mainstream media figure, says that the documentary was the creation of one producer and one director, thus suggesting that NHK as a corporate entity had very little to do with it. It’s as if the executives of the company wanted to wash their hands of the matter, and the decision to welcome back former Johnny’s idols to NHK the same week the program aired would seem to support this hypothesis. And while the criticism leveled at the show isn’t completely warranted, the biggest takeaway from the scandal still hasn’t been addressed, by either NHK or any other entity, and that is the sorry state of Japanese media. Why is Japan’s public broadcaster, which does some very fine work on occasion, still competing with its commercial counterparts? Certainly it was NHK’s duty as the standard bearer for responsible broadcast news in Japan to cover Johnny Kitagawa’s alleged crimes when they were originally reported, but even beyond that responsibility, why did NHK abandon the principles embedded in its charter to serve the public as a prime source of information just so that it could hire people whose only purpose was to boost their ratings a few notches? That should be the end point of the discussion, and as the Oct. 16 announcement attests, nobody has gotten close to it yet.