EDITORIAL: Talent agency president's news conference was a bad joke

Akihiko Okamoto, president of talent agency Yoshimoto Kogyo Co., held a news conference on July 22 to address a scandal in which 13 Yoshimoto-affiliated comedians had been paid for attending a party hosted by a crime group involved in a massive telephone scam.

But Okamoto remained mum on the source of the problem, including his own responsibility, and did not even discuss any reform plans. Given his status as the head of a mammoth show business empire with 6,000 entertainers under its wing, many people must have been stunned and disgusted by his attitude.

The "shady engagements" were first reported about six weeks ago. Even though Okamoto finally appeared in public to apologize, it was way overdue, and his company's handling of the scandal had also been totally lacking in transparency.

To date, there have been many scandals tying the entertainment industry to "antisocial organizations" or crime syndicates, and attempts were supposedly made each time to clean things up. So, why did this Yoshimoto scandal occur now?

Okamoto promised to ensure compliance, and indicated he would start requiring every entertainer to report their engagement schedule to the company. But surely such "assurances" alone are hardly likely to resolve the problems at hand.

One reason why entertainers accept engagements of dubious legitimacy is said to be that their status is uncertain and their income is hardly stable. Because of this fact, Okamoto said at the news conference that their welfare must come first, but what he really meant by that remains uncertain.

When the scandal first broke, Yoshimoto Kogyo canceled its verbal contracts with the entertainers concerned and issued stern warnings. But when some of them held a news conference and disclosed Okamoto's words and deeds, the company abruptly reinstated their contracts. This came across only as a blatant stopgap ploy to shield the company from public censure.

Yoshimoto Kogyo does not exchange written contracts with entertainers and its remuneration system is said to lack transparency. Unless the company rectifies its own structural flaws--and not just expect the entertainers to live up to higher moral standards--there will never be any fundamental solution to the problem of "shady engagements."

Despite this mess, however, neither the president nor the chairman of Yoshimoto Kogyo is resigning and their only "punishment" is that they will take 50-percent pay cuts for a year.

Obviously, they are unaware of the gravity of the situation. As the leader of the industry in comic act entertainment, Yoshimoto Kogyo has tremendous influence on society and that makes its responsibility all the greater.

To fundamentally reform corporate governance, the company must define exactly where the ultimate responsibility lies, and seriously consider establishing a third-party committee to investigate "shady engagements" and formulate an action plan.

Long gone are the days when showbiz customs were considered different from those of society at large. The Yoshimoto scandal should raise the public's awareness that the entertainment industry as a whole must follow the same standards that apply to society.

In that sense, the problems that surfaced recently at Johnny & Associates are just as grave. The talent agency allegedly pressured TV stations to blackball three former members of popular boy band SMAP, who had gone independent of the agency. The Fair Trade Commission ruled that had such pressure been actually applied, that would have constituted a violation of the anti-monopoly law.

For major commercial broadcasters and media organizations, too, which are shareholders of Yoshimoto Kogyo Holdings, now is the time to seriously think about the "health" of the entertainment industry.

There must not be a gap in morality and accepted behavior between the industry and society at large.

--The Asahi Shimbun, July 24