Issue:
May 2024 | Cover story
Claims of sexual assault against comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto have reignited controversy over the use of anonymous sources
A woman says she was raped. She did not immediately go to the police and there is no physical evidence to support her claim. Her alleged rapist is a major public figure. After much agonizing the woman says she wants to talk to the media but will not use her real name.
The use of anonymous sources in journalism is controversial, a stress test of its most vital currency: trust. The New York Times warns that “Reporters and editors have to be relentless and skeptical in handling anonymous sourcing. It should never be routine or casual.”
Yet, the paper adds, anonymous sources are sometimes crucial to its journalistic mission. “In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable. Sources sometimes risk their careers, their freedom and even their lives by talking to us.”
Anonymous women were cited repeatedly against Harvey Weinstein. Responding to claims by “Jane Doe” that the Hollywood producer had raped her in 2016 in a Beverly Hills hotel room, his lawyers told Reuters: “Mr. Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations.”
This was the dilemma faced by journalists when Shiori Ito first aired claims in 2017 that she had been sexually assaulted by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the biographer of the then prime minister, Shinzo Abe. When Ito first came forward in the media, she did so anonymously.
Ito’s long legal battle ended in 2022, when Japan’s Supreme Court ordered Yamaguchi to pay Ito about ¥3.32 million in damages. The Tokyo district and high courts had both earlier acknowledged that Yamaguchi had sexual intercourse with Ito without her consent.
A similar issue has emerged over claims that Japanese A-lister Hitoshi Matsumoto sexually assaulted two women at the Roppongi Grand Hyatt Hotel in 2015. The women’s claims were published in December 2023 by weekly tabloid Shukan Bunshun. Neither used their real names.
That has inevitably led to criticism that the magazine (or the women) made up their accounts. Since I interviewed one of the women, my Twitter account has been flooded by criticism that the women’s account was “one-sided”. “There is no evidence at all in this article. And there isn’t a single Japanese person who believes it,” was one of the milder comments.
Matsumoto, however, has never given an interview or hosted a press conference to discuss the alleged assaults. He has instead restricted his public utterances to an occasional tweet proclaiming his innocence and his determination to return to TV. On March 25th he tweeted that he was “confused, frustrated and sad” by the women’s claims and said his voice was being drowned out. “I want to tell the world the truth and do comedy as soon as possible,” he wrote.
Despite initially and reflexively defending its biggest star, Yoshimoto Kogyo Co., the Kansai-based talent agency that manages Matsumoto and hundreds of other entertainers, has since launched an internal probe into the claims. The company’s governors are surely mindful of the false tone set by another Japanese entertainment industry giant, Johnny & Associates Inc., after its founder, Johnny Kitagawa, was posthumously accused of multiple historical sexual assaults in 2023.
Johnny’s then president, Julie Fujishima, initially attempted to cast doubt on allegations made by Kitagawa’s victims before public pressure forced her to launch an independent inquiry, which confirmed that her uncle had sexually abused children going back decades. Roughly 1,000 of Kitagawa’s now adult victims have since come forward to demand compensation. Johnny & Associates has been dismantled and a new company, Smile-Up, is attempting to put the scandal to rest, with mixed results.
Kitagawa’s prolific abuse was enabled by the mainstream media, which ignored decades of red flags and survivors’ testimonies because of its deep commercial interdependence with Japan’s most powerful talent agency. Matsumoto has been less fortunate. Most of the media has reported the Bunshun story, albeit with little detail. In January, Matsumoto announced he was suspending his career and suing the magazine’s publisher.
Matsumoto demanded ¥550 million yen in damages from Bungei Shunju, the magazine’s publisher, at the start of the defamation trial on March 28th. Bungei’s lawyer Yoichi Kitamura, rejected demands to reveal the identities of the two women, “including their names, addresses, birth dates, cell phone numbers, as well as their Line messaging app accounts and pictures”. A statement by one of the alleged victims said she had already been harassed and threatened for coming forward.
Journalists have handled the accusations carefully, however, declining to publish interviews with any of the women. Only The Asahi Shimbun has published a follow-up story. Bunshun, which had to legally defend its reporting of Kitagawa after being sued for libel by Johnny & Associates two decades ago, again feels isolated. The Tokyo High Court concluded in 2003 that claims of assault by several of Kitagawa’s victims were true. Kitagawa’s final appeal was dismissed in 2005, yet he continued to abuse children for years afterwards.
Such potentially ruinous claims against a major star might have prompted a flurry of follow-up stories in mainstream media outlets, but many depend on contract entertainers from Yoshimoto Kogyo to fill their schedules. The century-old company is Japan’s biggest employer of comedic talent and is involved in the making of about 5,000 TV programs annually. Yoshimoto also works with the government on initiatives such as Cool Japan, which promotes Japan’s cultural industries. Television news, meanwhile, considers the story an “entertainment scandal”, difficult to verify and therefore not worth spending the resources it would cost to do so, said one producer.
The demands of anonymity have also reportedly deterred reporters from some of the major foreign news outlets from following up the story. Ito’s claims were thrust into the public domain by the publication of her bestselling book, Black Box, and her civil suit against Yamamoto, which made her story easier to cover.
Bringing powerful men to book for sexual assaults is notoriously difficult. Yet, over the last decade, the American legal system has succeeded in mauling or toppling titanic figures such as Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Weinstein and Donald Trump, often after their victims spoke to journalists.
The women faced a very familiar gauntlet of scrutiny and secondary abuse; of private self-doubt and public questions, notably: why did they take so long to come forward, and why were they doing so now?
Matsumoto’s accuser says she tried to put the night in 2015 behind her, blaming herself for her own naivety. Yoshimoto Kogyo seemed so powerful, she said, going to the police meant “I’d have been wiped out.” But given Matsumoto’s fame and media ubiquity, forgetting proved impossible. “I didn’t even have a TV because I didn’t want to see him.” One day, she says she was walking through Roppongi and saw him looking down on her from a giant billboard poster. “It was like a ghost haunting me,” she told me in an interview.
The New York Times says it considers four factors when using anonymous sources: How did the source know the information; what’s their motivation for speaking; are they reliable and can they corroborate the information? The source in the Matsumoto case has submitted emails and other evidence to the court backing her claim that she was at the Roppongi Grand Hyatt hotel. But establishing beyond doubt what occurred in the room will be trickier.
As for motivation, she believes there are many more victims and feels compelled to speak out on their behalf. “I don’t want to live in the kind of society where such things can happen”, she said. “All we can do is fight.”
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
