Johnny and Associates President Julie Fujishima Quits Over Japan Talent Agency Sex Abuse Scandal

A pervert was caught with a sick haul of child sex abuse images after a police raid on his home.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji, the husband and wife, Japanese-Chinese directing duo behind “Stonewalling” and “Egg and Stone” have secured multi-national backing for their upcoming fourth film project “A Woman Builds.” The film will depict a Chinese woman forced to live apart from her Japanese husband and their daughter during the pandemic and learning to enjoy the newfound freedom of a pseudo single life. She finds a unique massage parlor to satisfy her sexual needs and decides to build a house back in her home village, despite her husband’s disapproval.

Strictly Come Dancing celeb Amanda Abbington has hit out at claims that she nearly quit the BBC show after alleged rows with her professional dancing partner Giovanni Pernice. It had been reported that Amanda, who will be taking to the dance floor for the first time on Saturday, 23 September, threatened to quit before the first live show of the new series.Taking to Instagram to put the claims to bed, Amanda insisted things were “all good” between the pair and that she was “very excited and very, very nervous, but it’s all fun”.

For the first time since his pre-emptive video posted before multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him were published in the British media, Russell Brand has reacted to those reports.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Studio Ghibli, the iconic Japanese cartoon firm behind Miyazaki Hayao’s recent “The Boy and the Heron” is selling a controlling stake to Japanese broadcaster NTV.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Director Clara Law (“The Goddess of 1967”) has been set as president of the jury which will discern this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards. She will be joined by Malaysia’s Yeo Yann Yann (“Ilo Ilo,” “Wet Season,” American Born Chinese”), German producer Anna Katchko (“Stepne,” “Happiness”), and Faisal Baltyuor, producer and CEO of Muvi Studios in Saudi Arabia. A separate jury for documentaries and animation will be headed by Taiwan-based Myanmar director Midi Z, India’s Rima Das and Japanese documentary maker Toda Hikaru. The APSAs will be presented at a ceremony in Gold Coast, Queensland on Nov.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Disney has given a green light to a second season of Japanese drama -horror series “Gannibal.” Set in a fictional Japanese village, season one of Gannibal saw recently relocated police officer Agawa Daigo arrive in his new home a broken man. Wrestling with his guilt over an event that traumatized his daughter, things started off promisingly for the new arrival before a series of alarming events quickly led Agawa to the horrifying realization that something was deeply wrong with the villagers and the mysterious Goto family.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute. But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career. Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/NFAJ Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29. Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement brought. While Ozu is best known for his stripped-down dramas, often centered on family relationships, sometimes troubled or contentious, involving parents and young or grown-up children, many hinging on questions of marriage, generational misunderstandings or the loneliness of the elderly, the director’s register may not entirely have been of his own choosing. “The apparent consistency of the post-war films surely owes as much to this production situation as to Ozu’s aesthetic choices,” wrote critic Tony Rayns in a recent Sight & Sound portrait.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Paramount+ streaming service will launch in Japan in December as a free-of-charge addition to cable and internet provider J:COM’s platform and to pay-TV service Wowow. Paramount+ originals including “Tulsa King,” “Mayor of Kingstown” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” will be available at the launch of the service and for the first time in Japan. Japan will be the second country in East Asia where the service becomes available, following a launch in South Korea in June last year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japanese comedian Shinagawa Hiroshi has been set as the director of “Among the Dead,” the first project flowing from the co-production and co-financing venture between U.S.-based People of Culture Studios and Japan’s Yoshimoto Kogyo. The previously-announced project is an English-language, found footage zombie movie in which, following an apocalypse of the undead, one emotionally unstable man abandons friends and family to go live among the few remaining zombies before they’re all gone. The screenplay was written by father/daughter duo, Andy Cosby (“Hellboy,” “2 Guns” “Eureka”) and Charlie Danger Cosby, collectively known as Midnight Pizza. Other writing credits go to Brian Caldirola, Patrick Hasson and Juan Carlos Saizarbitoria. Shinagawa is one-half of the comedy duo Shinagawa Shoji, alongside Tomoharu Shoji, and has a considerable acting filmography in his own right including “Kantoku Kansen,” “Deadman Inferno,” “One Third,” and “Drop.” Shinagawa additionally served as director, writer, and starred in the 2011 comedy-drama “Slapstick Brothers,” which won a Citizen’s Choice Award for feature film and an award from the Japanese Academy for rookie of the year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japan’s Dean Fujioka (“Fullmetal Alchemist,” “The Man From The Sea”) and the U.K.’s Callum Woodhouse (“All Creatures Great and Small,” “The Durrells”) are set to star in “Orang Ikan,” a WWII-set creature horror film. The picture is scripted by Singapore and Indonesia-based Mike Wiluan (“Buffalo Boys,” HBO series “Grisse”) who will also direct the picture from next month. International rights to “Orang Ikan” have been picked up by London-based SC Films International, which will give the project its sales launch at the Busan festival and accompanying market next month. Set in the Pacific, 1942, a Japanese ship transports prisoners of war to occupied territories as slave labor.

Channel 4 aired a documentary called Russell Brand: In Plain Sight, a 90-minute catalogue of allegations against the comedian turned influencer, including rape, sexual assault and abusive, controlling and predatory behaviour. 

Russell Brand 's PR agency has removed his profile from their websites after he denied 'serious' allegations put to him.

Róisín Murphy has announced details of a UK and EU tour, set to kick off next year.The singer revealed plans for live shows next year in a new update shared on her Twitter/X page this morning (September 15). “Me and the lads are going ON TOUR,” she wrote in the caption.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Korean crime-action webtoon “Knuckle Girl” is being adapted as an original film production for Amazon’s Prime Video. It is structured as a Korea-Japan co-venture. The narrative revolves around a promising woman boxer, Ran, who takes on school bullies and participates in illegal bouts.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Johnny and Associates, the high-profile Japanese talent agency whose deceased founder and long-time president Johnny Kitagawa has been revealed as a serial sexual abuser, will forgo some of its fee income as a step toward victim compensation. The move appears to be an attempt to lessen the company’s toxic brand following the now-confirmed revelations about the late Kitagawa’s predatory behavior.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japan has unveiled details of a location production incentive scheme that it hopes will attract more film and TV shoots to the island nation. The scheme offers reimbursement of up to 50% of qualifying expenditure in Japan, with an upper limit of JPY1 billion ($6.4 million) on the disbursement. The scheme is the product of the Ministry of Economy, Trade Industry and two agencies, the Visual Industry Promotion Organization, described as the program operator, and the Japan Film Commission, described as the program coordinator. The scheme is open to “large-scale international film and television projects.” These must have either minimum direct production spending in Japan of $3.2 million or, in the case of projects distributed in ten or more countries, have Japanese production spend higher than $1.1 million. Additionally, all projects must fulfil four other criteria: benefit to the Japanese content industry through employment or use of studios; shoot in Japan; promote the location where the filming took place; help the global appeal of Japanese works. Significantly, the guidelines make no reference to the eligibility of post-production or visual effects work conducted in Japan.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Yakusho Koji, the Japanese star who was named best actor at Cannes this year in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days,” is set as the subject of a seven-title showcase at the upcoming Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan. Among the septet are classic erotic film “Lost Paradise” from 1997, this year’s “Perfect Days” and 1996 film “Shall We Dance,” which was later remade in Hollywood. A former civil servant who first ventured into Taiga drama (long-running TV series broadcast by NHK), then played in several films by Kurosawa Akira, Yakusho became a major 1990s star in Asia as a result of “Shall We Dance?,” in which he portrayed a ball room dancer, and “Lost Paradise.” He also starred in Itami Juzo’s “Tampopo.” Directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, “Lost Paradise” is a tale of a man and a woman whose marriages no longer make them happy, but who rediscover desire in each other’s arms. Fatefully, however, their newfound joy means ever greater transgression of Japan’s strict morality laws. At the time of the release of “Lost Paradise,” the producers deliberately darkened the erotic scenes to make them less explicit and to achieve less restrictive release classifications.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Kim Jee-woon’s black comedy “Cobweb,” which debuted this year at Cannes, is set for a U.S. theatrical release in early 2024.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Busan International Film Festival put aside many of its recent internal and local political problems to Tuesday unveil a large selection ranging from bleeding edge art titles to international festival favorites. “The difficult times are not behind us, but hard work has made this year’s festival better than ever,” said programmer and interim festival chief Nam Dong-chul, speaking at an online press conference. International guests expected to attend the festival include Luc Besson, Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, Japanese directors Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Korean Americans Justin Chon (“Gook”) and Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”). Hong Kong-based superstar Chow Yun-fat has been named as Busan’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year and will be in person to receive the award.