Mark Schilling Japan: Last News

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Japanese singer and songwriter Okamoto Kauan — a former client of the Johnny & Associates agency — has alleged that agency founder and long-time head Johnny Kitagawa committed numerous acts of sexual abuse against him and others. Kitagawa, who died at 87 in July 2019, trained, launched and promoted many of Japan’s biggest male idol groups, beginning in the 1960s. Some of his main stars include SMAP, Arashi and Kinki Kids. His agency remains one of the country’s most powerful, with the ability to boost ratings and box office takings through its national and international talent roster. Okamoto levelled the allegations during a Tokyo press conference on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, he said that Kitagawa abused him “15 to 20 times” during his four-year stint at the agency, beginning in 2012 when Okamoto was 15. At the time, he was a member of Johnny’s Jr., a group of mainly teenaged trainees who had yet to make their official show business debuts.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Japan is one country in focus at the Venice Production Bridge, with Wallonia-Brussels & Luxembourg also under the spotlight. Projects with Japanese directors, producers and backers, in various combinations, can be found in both, however. These projects will participate in the VPB’s Venice Gap-Financing Market (Aug. 30-Sept.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent “Snow Leopard,” the last film by Tibetan director Pema Tseden prior to his death in May, was awarded the Grand Prix at the closing ceremony of the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival on Wednesday. Premiering out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival and later screening at Toronto, the film depicts the argument between a father and his adult son of how to deal with the title beast, which has descended from the mountains to kill sheep in their village.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Japanese author Oe Kenzaburo, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at age 88. His date of death, ascribed to old age, was March 3. A total of six films have been made from Oe’s work, most recently the 2001 “Gibier d’élevage,” a reworking of “The Catch” by Cambodian director Rithy Panh. Born in 1935 in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Oe began writing while still a student of French literature at the University of Tokyo. Not long after graduating in 1957, he published “The Catch,” a novella about a Black American airman who finds himself captured by rural Japanese villagers in the waning days of the war. It won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and was made into a 1961 film by Japanese Nouvelle Vague auteur Oshima Nagisa.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Japan’s film industry is Asia’s second-largest in terms of box office – revenues totaled $1.14 billion from 115 million admissions at the depths of the pandemic in 2021 – but as insiders have known for decades, it is hardly the healthiest by world or even regional standards. For many in the industry, particularly those in the indie sector, hours are horrendous, contracts are non-existent and sexual and power harassment are facts of professional life. And even directors whose work screens at major festivals abroad often struggle to raise money for their next project or earn a middle-class living from filmmaking alone.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Kadokawa Tsuguhiko, the chair of media conglomerate Kadokawa, has been arrested on bribery charges. Taken into custody on Wednesday, the veteran executive is suspected of bribing Takahashi Haruyuki, a former director of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee and former top executive of the giant Dentsu ad agency, to the amount of JPY69 million ($483,000). Kadokawa, a member of the company’s founding family, is accused of funneling payments to a consulting firm led by Fukami Kazumasa, another former Dentsu executive with connections to Takahashi. The objective, to secure an Olympics sponsorship deal for Kadokawa, was achieved in April of 2019, with Kadokawa publishing the official guidebooks and records for the Games.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent“Underdog,” the two-part boxing film that opens the 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival, is the second movie on the subject by director Take Masaharu. The first, “100 Yen Love” in 2014 won the Japanese Cinema Splash Award at the 27th TIFF and was selected as Japan’s nominee for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.