Issue:
October 2025
A string of celebrity scandals has exposed the misogyny at the heart of Japan’s media and entertainment industries
For three decades, Masahiro Nakai was a ubiquitous figure on Japanese television as a member of pop supergroup SMAP, then as a celebrity gunslinger for hire across a slew of popular programs. But in June 2023, he lit the fuse to the self-destruction of this gilded career when he approached a female announcer for Fuji TV, inviting her to dinner.
The announcer, “Ms. A”, accepted the invitation under what she later called professional pressure from her bosses. But instead of dinner in a public venue, she found herself alone with Nakai, who sexually assaulted her. A few days later, Nakai told a producer he was having “trouble” with the woman, and offered her ¥1 million as “get-well money”. The offer was rebuffed.
Events thereafter followed a now familiar pattern. Fuji TV executives tried to protect their celebrity cash cow. Alerted to the assault claims, the network’s then president, Koichi Minato, and its then director, Toru Ota, concluded that it was “private trouble between a man and a woman”. Ms. A was removed from her job while Nakai was allowed to continue hosting his regular portfolio of shows.
When the story eventually broke, it was in what Igor Prusa calls the “outside media” - weekly tabloids, the most reliable platform for scandal in Japan. Josei Seven published its scoop in December 2024, quickly followed by Shukan Bunshun, including the eye-popping claim that Nakai’s hush-money had inflated to ¥90 million.
Fuji TV reflexively refuted these claims but the damage was done. An exodus of advertisers began, led by blue-chip names like Toyota and Shiseido. Nakai was yanked from the nation’s screens.
All that meets the five basic conditions for a media scandal in Japan, said Prusa, the author of Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual. The starting point is a violation of rules or norms, usually involving an elite figure, he told the FCCJ last month. “Commoners don’t count in scandal; if you do something bad as a scandal it is counted as a crime. Scandals are for the elite.”
This initial transgression is disclosed by whistleblowers or investigative journalists. The transgression must be denounced by the public once it is framed by the media. “If the public doesn’t feel anger, there is no scandal,” Prusa explained. The final act, he said, is sanctions for the transgressor. “Punishment means loss of face, position and status”, which is “very important in Japan”.
This certainly describes Nakai fate. The disgraced star announced his retirement in January, aged just 53, and has since more or less disappeared. Minato and Shuji Kanoh, chairman of Fuji TV’s parent company Fuji Media Holdings, both fell on their swords after several disastrous press conferences. A third-party probe concluded on March 31 that sexual harassment was rampant throughout the company. In June, Shimizu Kenji, Fuji TV’s CEO, apologized directly to Ms. A, effectively tying off the whole sordid episode.
None of this is unique to Japan, Prusa noted. Scandals have tarnished many of the world’s most famous broadcasters, including the BBC, where serial sexual predator Jimmy Savile hosted the corporation’s most popular shows for decades while hiding in plain sight. As with Nakai, the revelation of Savile’s behavior led to a public outcry, his (posthumous) disgrace and promises of industry reform.
But transgressions involving sex and power have come thick and fast in Japan. Prusa counts five types of sex scandal: cheating (uwaki), the charge that forced Minami Minegishi to perform a tear-stained act of contrition after a weekly magazine snapped the AKB48 star emerging from a late-night tryst at her boyfriend’s apartment in 2013. Mixed-race celebrity Becky, meanwhile, was exposed for cheating with married musician Enon Kawatani in 2016, the second type of sex scandal (furin).
Another A-list celebrity, Hitoshi Matsumoto, was guilty of sexual harassment (sekuhara), says Prusa. The comedian sexually assaulted two women at the Roppongi Grand Hyatt Hotel in 2015. The public were not able to judge Matsumoto’s transgression until the women’s claims were published in December 2023 by Shukan Bunshun. Matsumoto came out fighting, but disgrace and loss of status followed, and he too has been banished from network TV.
According to Prusa, the case of Shiori Ito is an example of an abuse (seikagai) scandal. Ito went public in 2017 with claims that she had been raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a former Washington bureau chief for TBS. Yet, while Yamaguchi was disgraced after her claims were reported in the media, he remains a semi-public figure:
Mitsuko Nakanishi was another woman who toppled a powerful man in a now largely forgotten scandal that belongs in the fifth category: prostitution (baishun), according to Prusa. The former geisha torpedoed the political career of Prime Minister Sosuke Uno in 1989, although, as it not uncommon, while she faded from view, he enjoyed a political afterlife in several government posts until retirement in 1996.
Prusa noted that media coverage was all important, noting that the conservative Japanese newspapers framed the Nakai scandal as a “complication with a woman”, implicitly suggesting that “she was at fault”. It’s a particularly noxious device given that Ms. A suffered PTSD and panic attacks, self-harmed and became suicidal before being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. She was subjected to “severe defamation” online throughout her ordeal.
As with the fall of Downtown’s Matsumoto, Nakai’s self-immolation exposed a culture of toxic misogyny in the television industry. Announcers were treated as “high-class hostesses”, Prusa, said, and used as a “bait” at drinking parties, which were followed by private nijikai gatherings where they were picked off by older men. Most women stayed silent.
Prusa admitted he was usually pessimistic, but suggested Nakai’s downfall could be a game changer. “The scandal means the end of unchecked celebrity protection and of corporate silence,” he said, adding that Japan’s “deep-rooted patriarchy may be softening” amid growing gender awareness. After all, he added, “strict gender roles no longer fit the social and economic reality of Japan”. As for Fuji TV, the prognosis is not good. A Mainichi Shimbun poll conducted this April asked if the broadcaster could restore public trust: 15% said yes; 54% said no.
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.
