“Predator: The Secret Scandal of Jpop” (2023)

BBC Journalist Mobeen Azhar went to Japan intending to tell a specific story. He was going to elevate the voices of the victims of the late Johnny Kitagawa, former president and founder of the Johnny’s & Associates talent agency, and shed some light on a story that has been ignored for decades.

That was the plan anyway.

I can only assume Mobeen thought he’d stumbled across the next Larry Nassar (USA Gymnastics, Athlete A, At the Heart of Gold) or Jimmy Savile (BBC, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story) and was hoping for his own Boston Globe “Spotlight” story. I’m not saying Mobeen had already been daydreaming about who would be playing him in the biopic version of this epic story of Groundbreaking Journalism but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had.

However, what separates Mobeen from the hard working and diligent journalists of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team--and, indeed, from the wonderful documentarians behind the excellent four part series on Menudo that documented their abuse by manager Edgardo Diaz--is that Mobeen does not understand his subject nor does he have any respect for the victims. He has no grounding in Japanese culture let alone any understanding of the Japanese entertainment industry. He wanders into this story as an outsider, with a narrative already in place, and edits the facts to suit the story he wants to tell.

Mobeen sets up Johnny’s & Associates as a shadowy and all powerful agency, whose Stepford Wives-esque idols appear all over Tokyo advertising products like contact lenses and hamburgers. “You’d expect them to be in posters for their latest albums,” he says, “but this was bigger.” (Somebody call London, Mobeen here has uncovered the sinister concept of hiring pop singers to advertise products!!) In his telling, Johnny’s & Associates has existed in this form since the 1960s and has just continued on somehow, supported by the entire media and legal establishment, over which Mr. Kitagawa maintains an iron grip from beyond the grave. (Through voodoo, apparently.) Despite an expose was published in a tabloid magazine in 1999 and a libel suit against that magazine that Mr. Kitagawa ultimately lost, he was ultimately never brought to justice.

Truly an evil conspiracy in which the entire country was complicit, if it was as simple as all of this.

The truth, as always, is a lot more complicated.

The allegations against Johnny Kitagawa date back a lot further than the 1999 tabloid article Mobeen is uses as his primary source. When Tokio member Yamaguchi Tatsuya (46 at the time) was caught “kissing a schoolgirl” back in 2018 and forced out of both Johnny’s & Associates and the entertainment industry, at least one outlet took the opportunity to go into detail on the allegations against Johnny that had emerged in a 1964 trial involving unpaid fees that morphed into a trial on “homosexual harassment” by Mr. Kitagawa. The members of Johnny’s & Associates first group (the Johnnys, sometimes referred to as 初ジャニーズ or “the first Johnnys”) were even dragged into the proceedings. They denied the allegations in court at the time but it shows that these rumors had been around since the very beginning. 

In 1988, former Four Leaves member Kita Koji published a tell-all memoir he called To HikaruGenji. The book was written as a warning to the up-and-coming group, with Mr. Kita going into explicit detail of the abuse he suffered. The book made a huge impact and was quickly followed by former “first Johnnys” member Nakatani Ryo’s own tell-all memoir Johnny’s Counterattack in 1989. The public response to these books is credited with halving Johnny’s & Associates record sales and leading to an “idol ice age” in the early 1990s that wouldn’t be broken until the emergence of SMAP. 

All of this would have been common knowledge to anybody paying attention when the tabloid article expose was published in 1999. (And, coincidentally or not, 1999 happens to be exactly around the time that the “dorms” (合宿所) at Johnny’s apartment building were finally shut down.)

Mobeen is convinced the abuse goes back “at least 30 years.” Indicating to me, at least, that he didn’t bother looking deep enough into this story to find the books by Mr. Kita or Mr. Nakatani because that number is probably closer to 60 years. Mr. Kita passed away in 2012 but Mr. Nakatani is still alive as are a number of other talents from those early years. If Mobeen attempted to contact Mr. Nakatani or any of the other remaining Four Leaves and “first Johnnys,” it didn’t make it into the documentary. 

A few former Johnny’s Juniors (the agency’s name for their trainees) agreed to appear on camera in some of the documentary’s most uncomfortable scenes. Rather than give the men space to tell their stories (something the Menudo documentary really handled well), Mobeen gets aggressive with the men. Prodding for details of the abuse and when the men don’t deliver the emotional catharsis stories he’s expecting, he becomes visibly frustrated and raises his voice at them. “Don’t you understand you were abused!”

Mobeen meets with former They武道 member Takahashi Ryu. Mr. Takahashi tells his story about Mr. Kitagawa attempting to give him a “massage” and explains that it wasn’t a huge event in his life and that he has fond feelings for those days at Johnny’s. Mobeen is confident enough after having known Mr. Takahashi for all of 30 minutes to psychoanalyze Mr. Takahashi to his face as being “in denial.” Mobeen even doubles down and narrates this diagnosis via voice over while showing footage of Mr. Takahashi looking uncomfortable. 

Is Mr. Takahashi in denial? Maybe. But isn’t it equally possible that he’s moved past the experience? Or--and hear me out on this because it’s kind of crazy--did he simply not feel comfortable immediately disclosing his innermost secret feelings about sexual abuse to an aggressive foreign journalist that he met 30 seconds ago and who is clearly trawling for the gritty blow-by-blow details? 

When the former Junior going by the pseudonym “Hayashi” finally gives Mobeen what he wants and breaks down while detailing his story, Mobeen appears almost giddy.

And then there was the former Junior, “Ren”, who left the agency and is now working as a host in Osaka. Ren tells Mobeen that Johnny had never touched him but that he would have put up with Johnny’s attentions if it meant he could have debuted in a popular idol group. Mobeen is taken aback by this at first but later says Ren had a “lucky escape.” The fact that Mobeen can say this with a straight face while showing footage of Ren at work as a host in Osaka tells you all you need to know about his level of expertise here. (Watch The Great Happiness Space, a documentary on the lives of hosts in Osaka for more details.)

I wasn’t familiar with the other Juniors who were interviewed but I know that Mr. Takahashi is a talented dancer and performer. I remember him very well from his time at the agency. However, part of Mobeen’s narrative (when he’s not aggressively prodding his interview subjects for first person accounts of handjobs in Johnny’s bathtub) is that Johnny’s & Associates talents rise to the top based solely on some shadowy behind-the-scenes machinations by Mr. Kitagawa. The path to stardom that the documentary lays out is 1. Let Johnny do stuff to you. 2. Profit. Watching this documentary, it’s pretty clear that Mobeen ultimately has no respect for these men, their talents, their art, and the work they do as idols. He talks over their stories, heavily implies the successful ones got where they were via the casting couch alone, and says they’re all pedophilic reflections of Mr. Kitagawa’s desires. “The boys themselves are not the point,” he says while looking at a wall of shop photos of respected newscaster, actor, rapper, and new father, Arashi member Sakurai Sho. 

Did Mr. Kitagawa abuse generations of young men? There is a lot of compelling testimony that says he did. Was it on the level of British boarding schools or the British “grooming gangs” that pushed young women into prostitution? That’s less clear. My personal take, having traveled in these fan circles for almost 20 years now, is that some men were deeply affected by their experiences but many others were not. By the time you get to the 2000s into the 2010s--the era that Mr. Takahashi was part of--my impression is that Mr. Kitagawa was seen as a harmless (albeit perverted) old man by the younger talents. The virile, intimidating, and dark figure that stalks through Mr. Kita’s book was long gone.

Why do the people Mobeen encounters seem so uninterested? Rather than a shadowy and exotic conspiracy, I think the answer is a lot more mundane. This happened a long time ago and Mr. Kitagawa has since passed away. And Johnny’s & Associates, in recent years, has taken great care to indicate they view sexual misconduct very seriously. Would a 46-year old Mr. Yamaguchi have been kicked out of the agency for “kissing” a teenager if the incident had happened in 1998 instead of 2018? Somehow, I don’t think so. “Johnny’s” has become a brand name divorced from its original owner, like “Disney” or “Ford.”

And Johnny’s & Associates is also no longer the massive cultural force that it was a decade ago when SMAP and Arashi were active. Not that Johnny’s is irrelevant or unknown but they are simply one player in a very competitive field. Top Johnny’s groups like SnowMan and SixTones are competing with groups from Japanese entertainment mega-conglomerates like Avex (Be:First has been crushing it recently) as well as Korean entertainment conglomerates like CJ ENM (Jo1 has also been doing very well) and trying to battle smaller memey groups like THE SUPER FRUIT who are popping off on TikTok. It’s a tough world out there for an idol company.

Ultimately, for anybody familiar with this story, the one who comes off looking like a fool is Mobeen. This is a very poor documentary. The idols of Johnny’s & Associates and, most importantly, the men who were victims of Mr. Kitagawa deserve far, far better.