I’ve closely followed the case of Japanese kabuki actor and tv star Kagawa Teruyuki. Partially because I’ve been a fan. Anyone who watches Japanese TV will recognize Kagawa from his roles in Hanzawa Naoki or 99.9%. (The last episode of the second season of Hanzawa topped 32.7% viewership – galloping numbers by Japan standards.)
But I’ve also been following because the scandal surrounding him didn’t die down. In fact, it only got worse.
As I noted in my article on Pixiv, the scandal broke when the Daily Shincho found that a hostess at a high end cabaret club in Ginza had sued her employer in 2019 for not protecting her from Kagawa. She eventually settled with the club, so the news didn’t make waves until Shincho reporters dug it up.
Writing for Toyo Keizai, writer Kimura Takashi gives a breakdown of what happened next. Kagawa went on a show he hosts, THE TIME, and apologized to his audience for “causing distress.” (Notably, he didn’t apologize to his victim.) His agency admitted that all of the victim’s charges were true.
Kagawa and his agency seemed to think he could brush his hands of the incident with that terse acknowledgement. But then Daily Shincho surfaced new photos of him pulling a woman’s hair and, afterwards, being confronted by the female manager (ใใ) over his behavior. Meanwhile, people in Japan took to social media to fume over Kagawa’s “let bygones be bygones” mentality.
But near the top of this article is also this fairly stunning paragraph. It tells us what people in the industry knew of Kagawa’s habits:
