Unlike its neighbour South Korea, Japan has not had a vociferous #MeToo movement. Is that now changing? Last year a newspaper reported that Nakai Masahiro, a boy-band star turned television presenter, had sexually assaulted a female newsreader. Mr Nakai, who reached an out-of-court settlement with the unnamed victim of ¥90m ($590,000), resigned from all his shows. Even so, outrage mounted. Fuji Television, the victim’s employer, became a target of ire. Over 70 sponsors yanked their commercials, forcing two executives to step down.
The fiasco follows a string of revelations rocking Japan’s showbusiness. In 2023 Johnny & Associates, renowned for churning out boy-bands, admitted its late founder had sexually abused hundreds of teenage boys over decades. Last year, Matsumoto Hitoshi, a popular comedian, vanished from TV screens following sexual-abuse allegations (which he denies).
It is not just pop culture that is facing a reckoning. Last year a female prosecutor in Osaka, in west of Japan, accused a former chief prosecutor of rape. (At first he admitted to it, but now says he is innocent.) A petition demanding his punishment has gathered over 60,000 signatures.
Japan’s #MeToo movement has been “building up slowly”, says Miura Mari of Sophia University in Tokyo. In 2017 Ito Shiori, a freelance journalist, accused a reporter and the biographer of then-prime minister Abe Shinzo, of rape. Her criminal case was dismissed, but she won damages in a civil lawsuit. “Black Box Diaries”, her film chronicling the episode, became the first Japanese documentary to be nominated for an Oscar last month (though there is no release date for it in Japan). Her case proved controversial and sparked nationwide conversations. According to surveys, only 5-10% of people report assaults to the police in Japan, compared with 23% in America. Demonstrations also started in 2019 after four rape acquittals were handed down by the courts in quick succession.
A few changes have occurred. In 2023 parliament raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. Lawmakers also expanded the definition of rape to encompass “non-consensual” sex, rather than requiring that physical force was involved.
But many of the problems in the TV industry run deep, including its culture of trivialising women on screen. Female news presenters are called joshi-ana (or “girl announcers”), a label that prizes their youth and looks. Many of them are plucked from college beauty pageants. They are treated as “commodities”, says Tanaka Toko at the University of Tokyo. And at a gruelling ten-hour press conference last month, Fuji Television’s executives offered few signs of major reform. One employee suggested sending “a man or an older woman” to dining parties instead of “offering a young woman”. Sponsors have yet to return, while public outrage remains high. “We wouldn’t have seen the kind of response we see today a few years back,” notes Ms Miura. Tolerance for terrible behaviour may be eroding among the population at large, but change at the top still takes time. ■