Japan's Idol Machine and the Staff Who Enabled Abuse

The Second Layer of Abuse

The first wave of the Johnny’s scandal broke in August 2023, when an external expert panel confirmed that founder Johnny Kitagawa had systematically abused boys under his management. The second wave came quietly, nearly two years later, in September 2025, when the Asahi Shimbun reported that a former事务所 manager testified he had sexually abused approximately eight underage talents in the back seats of cars over three decades.

That the second wave arrived so much later says something about the architecture of silence inside Japan’s entertainment industry — and about the media’s willingness to look where it is most uncomfortable.

The Asahi editorial accompanying this reporting made an observation worth lingering on: the special panel’s 2023 report mentioned staff perpetration in exactly three lines. Smile-Up, the successor company, acknowledged two staff perpetrators in 2024 and then went quiet. Meanwhile, 1,047 people have now filed claims through the victims’ relief committee. Of those, 580 accepted compensation terms and 231 were told they did not qualify. Some have sued. Some have been sued.

What emerges is not just a scandal about one man, but about a system that trained complicity into an entire ecosystem of staff — drivers, managers, producers — and then protected that complicity through the same machinery that protected Kitagawa himself.

Who Knew

The manager’s testimony is specific: car rides, eight or so victims, a thirty-year span. That detail matters because it points to a pattern that went beyond the iconic figure at the top. These were people whose job descriptions included transporting minors alone, in enclosed spaces, with no oversight. They were embedded in the daily infrastructure of the agency.

Japanese media has spent three years scrutinizing Kitagawa’s personal actions and the corporate structures that enabled him. It has yet to do the harder work of examining why so many people in his orbit participated, stayed silent, or continued working after evidence accumulated.

The editorial frame from the Asahi is telling. It does not ask whether staff abuse happened. It asks who will verify it, how it will be compensated, and what transparency the company owes. That framing reflects a journalism that knows the facts exist but is still negotiating with an institution that has every reason to control the narrative around them.

The Numbers That Matter

The relief committee’s own figures are instructive. Over a thousand claimants. A little over half accepted compensation. Nearly a quarter were told they fell outside the framework. Those rejected claimants are now a pool of people who may take their cases to court — and in at least one direction, the company has already sued.

This is not just a legal question. It is an organizational one. When a company can reject more than a fifth of abuse claims and still call the process complete, it signals that the framework was designed to close cases, not to uncover truth. The committee was tasked with evaluating Kitagawa-era claims. Staff perpetration falls in a gray zone: acknowledged in principle, unexamined in practice.

The editorial’s demand that Smile-Up produce a full picture of the events — not just the 2023 panel’s three-line mention, but a comprehensive timeline of when and how staff abuse occurred — is reasonable. So is its suggestion that an external body re-verify the findings. Without that, the company controls both the investigation and the narrative.

The Regional Echo

Japan’s media has framed this scandal as a uniquely Japanese crisis of institutional silence. That framing is incomplete.

The mechanics are strikingly familiar in other East Asian idol markets. In South Korea, trainee systems have faced repeated scandals involving abuse of power, coercion, and sexual exploitation — most recently in the K-pop industry’s reckoning with agencies that treated minors as assets. The structure is the same: young people, isolated from family, dependent on a single company for income and career survival, told that suffering is part of the profession.

In J-pop, the difference has been that Johnny’s operated for fifty years without serious public scrutiny, protected by the cultural authority of its stars and the media’s reluctance to antagonize a cash cow. The silence was not accidental. It was structural.

What Japan’s media is only now beginning to articulate — and what Korean outlets have been forced into after smaller scandals forced internal reviews — is that abuse in idol systems is not primarily about predators at the top. It is about the people who surround those predators: drivers, assistants, middle managers who enforce the culture of compliance.

Who Wins, Who Loses

The victims win nothing yet. Compensation is being distributed, but the terms are set by the company that employed the abusers. The legal framework leaves room for the company to fight claims, and it has used that room. The manager who testified may face prosecution, but the structural question — why was he hired, promoted, and protected for thirty years? — remains unanswered.

Smile-Up loses credibility. It has survived on the brand equity of Johnny’s, and that equity is now toxic. The company’s response so far has been reactive: acknowledge, compensate, move on. That strategy worked for the Kitagawa claims. It will not work for the staff abuse dimension, which requires admitting something the company has spent three years avoiding: the abuse was not the act of one rogue founder, but the product of an organization that normalized it.

The Japanese media loses an opportunity it will not get again. The Asahi editorial got the question right — transparency, verification, accountability — but the broader industry has spent years soft-pedaling the story. Now that the story is finally expanding, the question is whether journalists will follow the staff perpetrators or retreat to the safer terrain of Kitagawa’s biography.

What Comes Next

Three things are likely. First, more staff accusations will emerge as claimants realize the relief framework does not fully cover their cases. Second, lawsuits will multiply, and the courts will become the primary venue for establishing facts — not the committee. Third, the idol industry across East Asia will feel pressure to reform, not because of moral awakening, but because the financial risk of covering up abuse has shifted dramatically.

The Asahi editorial closes by saying society must keep watching. That is correct, but passive watching is no longer enough. The scandal revealed a system. Systems require structural dismantling, not editorial vigilance. The next chapter depends on whether investigators — journalistic, legal, and institutional — dig into the staff layer with the same urgency they have shown for the founder.