For sixty years, the building on a quiet street in Harajuku was the most powerful address in Japanese entertainment. Johnny & Associates — the talent agency founded by Johnny Kitagawa and named for him — was not merely a company. It was a system: a vertically integrated machine for producing, training, managing, and monetising male pop groups that had, at its peak, a stranglehold on Japanese television, music charts, and celebrity culture that no comparable entity anywhere in the world could match. SMAP. Arashi. Kinki Kids. NEWS. Sexy Zone. Tens of millions of fans, decades of dominance, and a level of media control that the Japanese press largely declined to scrutinise.
Then, in 2023, the scrutiny arrived. Investigations by the BBC and Reuters, followed by a cascade of survivor testimonies, established what the Japanese entertainment industry had long quietly known: that Kitagawa, who died in 2021, had systematically sexually abused boys and young men in his care over decades. The scale was extraordinary. The official victim count eventually exceeded 800 individuals. No criminal accountability was possible — Kitagawa was dead — but corporate accountability could not be avoided. SMILE-UP, as the agency was renamed, began a compensation process. Its talent agency operations were spun off under a new name: STARTO Entertainment.
The restructuring did not resolve the deeper questions the scandal raised about Japan's entertainment industry. How had abuse of this scale been sustained for so long? The answers are uncomfortable: media complicity, sustained by advertising relationships and access; industry power concentration that made challenging the agency professionally dangerous; and a fan culture that had, in some cases, been weaponised to silence dissent. The reckoning has been slower and less complete than advocates hoped, but it has been real. Television networks that once gave Johnny's artists exclusive access now operate under new disclosure rules. The agency's iron grip on variety programme bookings has relaxed.
What has emerged in the space is genuinely interesting. Male idol groups that once operated within the Johnny's system are rebuilding as independent artists with greater creative freedom. A new generation of acts — formed outside the old training pipelines — is experimenting with sounds, visuals, and marketing strategies that the old system would never have permitted. The global K-pop playbook, long observed from a careful Japanese distance, is now being actively studied and adapted. Several new agencies have emerged specifically to develop male pop acts with an international orientation that was alien to the old Johnny's model.
Artists who survived the system are navigating the transition with varying degrees of success. Some have embraced independence enthusiastically; others have found that the extraordinary promotional machinery they once had access to is harder to replicate than it appeared. The fans — among the most devoted in the world, accustomed to decades of parasocial intimacy with their favourite acts — are themselves processing a complex emotional reckoning about what their loyalty meant and what it should mean now.
Japanese pop has always reinvented itself at moments of pressure. The late 1990s gave birth to the idol system that defined the following two decades. The collapse of that system, in the most painful possible way, may yet give birth to something more interesting, more honest, and more open to the world.
