J-pop star Masahiro Nakai announces retirement after sexual misconduct allegations

One of Japan’s best-known pop stars and TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, announced his retirement Thursday after sexual misconduct allegations, in the latest scandal to rock the country’s entertainment industry.

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Masahiro Nakai’s move comes after the now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder Johnny Kitagawa for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men.

Nakai, 52, was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP – part of Johnny & Associates’s stable – that swept the charts across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame.

Reports emerged last month that Nakai, a successful television host, had paid an unnamed woman a lump sum of 90 million yen ($570,000).

This followed what tabloid magazine Shukan Bunshun called a ‘sexual act against her will’ in 2023.

This month, Fuji Television suspended a weekly show hosted by Nakai, while other major networks also dropped the presenter.

On Thursday Nakai released a statement saying he was stepping back from show business altogether.

“I will continue to face up to all problems sincerely and respond in a wholehearted manner. I alone am responsible for everything,” Nakai said.

“I sincerely apologise” to the woman, he wrote, before concluding: “Thank you for these past 37 years. Goodbye”.

‘Outraged’

Masahiro Nakai issued a statement published in local media earlier this month saying some of what had been reported was ‘different from the facts’.

His retirement stunned Japan, with three other former SMAP members telling local media they were ‘speechless’.

“I was shocked at the news, but I guess this (his retirement) is inevitable, from what we have seen in media,” said Naoko Mizui, 51, a shopper in Tokyo.

“I feel it would be difficult for him to continue working in the entertainment industry. It is sad, but we have to accept it,” she told AFP.

Fellow shopper Kaoru Kuno, 54, said she was “sad” but added: “As a woman, I feel bad. I have to say he treated women without respect.”

Fuji Television has also come under fire over its handling of the affair, with dozens of top brands pulling adverts from the broadcaster.

On Thursday its shares were down 7.8 percent.

Shukan Bunshun and other outlets have alleged a Fuji TV executive was involved in organising Nakai’s meeting with the woman.

Fuji TV has denied those claims but said last week it was probing the matter after a US activist investor said it was ‘outraged’ by the company’s lack of transparency.

The broadcaster’s parent company Fuji Media Holdings decided Thursday to establish a third-party enquiry as per the Japanese bar association’s guidelines.

The announcement came after it convened an emergency board meeting where participants voiced ‘harsh criticism’ over the broadcaster’s handling of the matter, president Osamu Kanemitsu told reporters.

Drinking parties

The case also shone the spotlight on other TV channels, with local media reporting that dinners and drinking parties involving celebrities and young women were common practice.

Other TV channels including Nippon TV have announced their own investigations into whether similar events between celebrities and women had been organised.

The incident will ‘hopefully serve as an opportunity for TV stations to rethink how they make shows’, Takahiko Kageyama, a media studies professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, told AFP.

“If women were being treated not as equal human beings but as some kind of lubricant to facilitate the making of TV programmes, it’s time they stopped this kind of practice,” he said.

Denunciations

Music mogul Kitagawa, who died aged 87 in 2019, had for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men seeking stardom, his agency finally acknowledged in 2023.

Allegations about him swirled for decades but it was not until that year that they ignited calls for compensation following a BBC documentary and denunciations by victims.

Japan’s showbiz industry was then rocked by another bombshell sexual assault scandal involving Hitoshi Matsumoto, one of the country’s most popular comedians.

In November, Matsumoto said he was withdrawing a libel case against the Shukan Bunshun magazine that published the allegations, including that he forced oral sex on one woman, and forcibly kissed another.

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