Despite a lingering scandal, an adoring packed crowd at Kyocera Dome Osaka cheered on future stars from the Johnny & Associates Inc. entertainment agency in July.
Members of "Johnny’s Jr." from both east and west Japan, who can be considered interns, danced behind singers of Johnny & Associates who had already debuted.
Fans applauded and got into the action for all the participants.
The entertainment empire built by the late Johnny Kitagawa clearly still has both its glittery as well as shady sides.
Kitagawa, who died in 2019 at age 87, can be credited for forming the boy idol culture in Japan that is still widely popular today.
But his legacy has been tainted by multitudes of sexual abuse allegations against the former idols he cultivated over the years.
The founder of Johnny & Associates, Kitagawa not only produced a number of groups and singers who became top artists, but he was also in charge of Johnny’s Jr., an umbrella term for pre-debut idols.
At one time, Kitagawa had put such a stamp on Japanese entertainment that Guinness World Records in 2012 recognized him as the individual who had produced the most No. 1 singles.
EARLY START WITH FAMED ENKA SINGER
Kitagawa was born in 1931 in the United States.
According to the report released by the special investigative team set up by Johnny & Associates to look into the sexual abuse allegations directed at Kitagawa, he moved to Japan as an infant, but his mother died when he was only 2.
His older sister, Mary, took care of him as a mother figure.
Kitagawa learned the workings of the entertainment industry after returning to the United States. During that period, he served as an interpreter for the late enka singer Hibari Misora when she visited the United States.
After returning to Japan, Kitagawa established his talent agency in 1962 to manage a group known as Johnny’s.
Johnny’s Jr. served to bring together young boys dreaming of a life in show business. Some entered idol groups that debuted and became hugely popular in Japan.
An executive with a commercial TV broadcaster who knew Kitagawa well said, “He had excellent ability in discovering a diamond in the rough as well as directing them toward stardom. His genius for choosing future stars was always one step ahead of the fans.”
WORKAHOLIC AND PERFECTIONIST
Kitagawa had three or four cardboard boxes in his home study filled with resumes sent in by young boys. He is said to have gone through all the documents himself and separating them according to his assessment.
One man who witnessed Kitagawa at work said, “The speed at which he looked at the documents was incredible.”
While not reading the resumes, Kitagawa took about a second on each photo to decide on who had the potential to become a star.
Another man who was among those in the first cohort of Johnny’s Jr. moved into the “training camp” Kitagawa had set up at his home.
The man remembers waking to a mechanical sound at between 3 and 4 a.m. When he went to the room where the sound came from, he found Kitagawa repeatedly rewinding video of Johnny’s Jr. members. The sound the man heard was the video equipment Kitagawa was operating.
The man still considers Kitagawa a “workaholic who was also a perfectionist.”
According to the report by the investigative team, in the 1980s there were between 10 to 20 members in Johnny’s Jr. But after 2000, the number ballooned to between 200 and 300.
But the team could not find any specific standards in deciding who would be chosen or any contract signed with the young boys. All decisions on how each member would be promoted in the entertainment world were made by Kitagawa.
He, in effect, had control over whether agency members would appear on TV shows or grace the covers and pages of magazines.
HUNDREDS OF POSSIBLE VICTIMS
Kitagawa also invited those who wanted to stay at his home.
Yukihiro Oshima, 38, was one such individual. He said Kitagawa fondled his genitals in the bath and performed oral sex on him in bed. Oshima said he was sexually abused by Kitagawa on more than 200 occasions.
Oshima said Kitagawa once told him that before the end of World War II when he was living in Wakayama Prefecture he was a victim of daily sexual abuse by a man he met there.
The special investigative team’s report said Kitagawa’s sexual abuse extended from the 1950s until the mid-2010s and that various accounts left open the possibility that his victims numbered in the hundreds.
On Sept. 6, Guinness World Records deleted Kitagawa’s record from its website.
(This article was written by Bunna Takizawa, Rina Horikoshi, Amane Shimazaki and Senior Staff Writer Maki Okubo.)
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