Former J-pop idol alleges sexual abuse by late music mogul Johnny Kitagawa
Justin McCurry
Kauan Okamoto, a former member of Johnny’s Jr, said the alleged abuse began when he was 15. Photograph: Rodrigo Reyes Marin/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Johnny Kitagawa, one of the most powerful figures in Japanese entertainment, sexually abused multiple boys but evaded justice because his victims knew speaking out would end their pop careers, according to a former protege who has decided to go public with his allegations.
Kauan Okamoto, a Japanese-Brazilian singer-songwriter, said Kitagawa had sexually abused him at least 15 times over a four-year period from 2012, when the pop hopeful was aged 15.
Okamoto was part of Johnny’s Jr, a group of trainees who also worked as a talent pool for Johnny & Associates, an agency managing male idol actors and singers.
He said the abuse began at Kitagawa’s penthouse apartment in Tokyo, where large numbers of boys were invited to spend the night.
“I believe that almost all of the boys who went to stay at Johnny’s place were victims,” Okamoto told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on Wednesday. “If you stayed there, you were unlikely to evade him. I would say 100 to 200 boys stayed there on a rotation basis during my four years at the agency.”
One night Kitagawa, whose life and career were celebrated in Japan when he died in 2019 aged 87, allegedly approached Okamoto’s bed, removed his outer clothing and laid down next to him.
“He began massaging my feet, and his hands came up and touched my genitals through my underwear,” Okamoto, 26, said of the first time he was allegedly abused. “He then removed my underwear and performed oral sex on me. I pretended to be asleep. The next day, when we were in the elevator together, he gave me ¥10,000 [£60].”
Okamoto, one of only a handful of former Johnny & Associates performers who have spoken publicly, said he had stayed at Kitagawa’s apartment about 100 times and had experienced abuse of a similar nature on 15 to 20 occasions by the time he left the agency in 2016.
Rumours surrounding Kitagawa had been circulating for years when, in 1999, the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun ran a series of articles based on interviews with teenage boys who claimed he had sexually abused them.
Kitagawa sued Bunshun for libel and was awarded damages, but the judgment was partially overturned on appeal, with the Tokyo high court ruling in 2004 that the magazine had sufficient reason to publish the allegations against him. Kitagawa’s appeal was rejected by the supreme court. He was never charged with a crime.
Japan’s mainstream media ignored the revelations, inviting accusations that they failed to investigate sexual abuse at the apex of the country’s entertainment industry because they depended on Kitagawa to supply talent to TV networks with organisational ties to the big newspapers.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan invited Johnny & Associates to address the allegations but received no response.
Kitagawa launched the careers of a string of wildly popular, and lucrative, boybands over a career spanning more than half a century. He once held three Guinness World Records for the most No 1 artists, the most No 1 singles and the most concerts produced by an individual.
At its peak, Johnny & Associates managed clients who appeared in dozens of TV programmes and commercials. Before they disbanded at the end of 2016, the five members of Smap – then one of Japan’s biggest pop groups – had about 15 regular TV shows between them.
Okamoto said he hoped his recent interview with Bunshun and a BBC documentary about Kitagawa, Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop, which was broadcast last month, would help break the media silence and encourage other survivors to come forward.
“I couldn’t talk about my experiences for a long time,” he said. “I decided to show my face, but other victims have decided to stay anonymous. That might change … that’s my hope. We’re talking about an incredible number of victims.”
“I can say for sure that I saw three other victims because I was in the same room at the time,” he said, adding that none of the boys had ever discussed going to the police.
“[Kitagawa] never explicitly said that if you don’t put up with [the abuse] you won’t be a success,” Okamato said. “But Johnny’s favourite first picks would make it … and have an opportunity to make their debut, and to act in a TV show or join a boy band. He would make that decision and we were all aware of that.
“Some even said that you had to be invited to his place to succeed, and that you should do what you needed to do to get invited. That’s how it was.”
