[KineJapan] Straight Dope on Johnny from MS

[matteo boscarol]

and this is an excellent Nèojaponisme’s thread on twitter on how “Johnny Kitagawa of Johnny's Jimusho was incredibly detrimental to quality of music in the Japanese music industry over the last four decades”: 

https://twitter.com/neojaponisme/status/1148766664952934400?s=21

Matteo Boscarol
ボスカロル マッテオ
記憶ただ陽炎のゆらめき
- Documentary in Japan and Asia
http://storiadocgiappone.wordpress.com
- Film writer for Il Manifesto
http://ilmanifesto.it



> On Jul 19, 2019, at 19:02, Markus Nornes via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> Mark Schilling writes the straight dope on notorious Johnny Kitamura, who recently passed away. I didn’t read the papers since the death, but I did see several television tributes to the man and all of them were hagiographic cleansings. 
> 
> Mark’s piece is unflinching. 
> 
> “What the mass media elided, however, were allegations that Kitagawa sexually abused the young male talents in his employ. The first to make such charges, in graphically explicit diaries published in 1988, was a former member of the Four Leaves, a group that Kitagawa launched in 1968 and was his first to achieve chart-topping success. Another former Johnny’s talent made similar claims in a 1996 tell-all book, saying he had witnessed Kitagawa forcing a boy to engage in sex in an agency dormitory.
> The culmination, however, was a 1999 series of articles in the weekly tabloid Shukan Bunshun that described sexual abuse of ten teenaged male talents. A Parliamentary hearing examined the claims, but Kitagawa denied everything and sued the magazine.”
> https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/johnny-kitagawa-power-abuse-japanese-media-omerta-1203271575/
> 
> The other story here is whether Johnny’s death will lead to a loosening of the grip the agencies have over both their talent and the entertainment business itself.
> 
> M
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> -- 
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> 
> Markus Nornes
> Professor of Asian Cinema
> Department of Film, Television and Media, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Penny Stamps School of Art & Design
> 
> Department of Film, Television and Media
> 6348 North Quad
> 105 S. State Street
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
> 
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