This photo illustration taken in Tokyo on July 10, 2019 shows front pages of Japanese daily newspapers publishing pictures of Japan’s leading boyband star-maker Johnny Kitagawa, who died on July 9, 2019. //AFP
Tokyo, Japan – The president of Japan’s biggest boyband agency admitted on Thursday that its late founder sexually abused young aspiring stars, decades after the allegations against him first emerged.
Johnny Kitagawa died of a stroke aged 87 in 2019, having engineered the birth of J-pop mega-groups including SMAP, TOKIO and Arashi that amassed adoring fans across Asia.
Allegations of abuse surfaced in Japanese media in 1999 but it was not until this year that they ignited full-on soul-searching, following a BBC documentary and denunciations by victims.
“Both the agency itself and I myself as a person recognise that sex abuse by Johnny Kitagawa took…
