Koizumi Kyoko announces her departure from her agency & admits to being in a relationship with the still-married Toyohara Kousuke

Koizumi Kyoko announced on 1 February that she has left her agency Burning Production which she had been with for the past 36 years and that the establishment of her production company's website Asatte (meaning day after tomorrow) which was set up in 2015. In addition, she dropped a bombshell by admitting that she is in a relationship with Toyohara Kousuke who is still married although he has been living separately from his family for the past 3 years. The two of them had been rumoured to be dating in recent years but Toyohara was said to be divorced in various media reports even though the truth is the exact opposite.

In her statement, Koizumi said that her last day with her old agency was on 31 January and expressed her thanks to it for raising and nurturing her all this while. However, when she entered her 50s, she started to realise that she wanted to do more with the rest of her life and seek new heights and produce more advanced entertainment works. As such, she decided to seek new possibilities in terms of the management of a production company and her own career as an artiste. At the time when her company Asatte was established in 2015, she had gotten a lot of assistance from Toyohara who she described as her comrade in pursuing the same dream. Koizumi then revealed that as reported in some publications, she and Toyohara are indeed in a romantic relationship. Due to the articles reporting a lot of untruths and causing inconveniences to the people related to him especially his family, she had instructed her staff to adopt a stance where she could protect him from further controversy as much as possible. Things did not go as they expected though and it has since been a few years since those articles surfaced. Wrong information such as articles saying that Toyohara is already divorced caused the need to keep the presence of his family members under wraps. Koizumi admitted that her decision then had contributed partly to this state of things and robbed Toyohara of the opportunity to clear the air and speak for himself. With regard to this, she expressed regret and that she was at a loss for words to apologise to his family. Now that she is on her own, she is prepared for whatever may come. Although her relationship is a private matter after all, she hoped that this statement would allow her to take responsibility for her own actions.

On the same day, Toyohara released his statement through his official website where he also spoke about his relationship with Koizumi. He described her as partners with the same goal at work and that they have a romantic relationship. Toyohara also spoke about how some media outlets spoke as if he was already divorced when the rumours about Koizumi and him first came out when he is actually still married. He stated that he has a wife and child and apologised to them and all related parties for the worry and inconvenience caused to them due to such reports. He is filled with self-reproach and cannot find words to describe the guilt he feels towards his family. It will be up to him to think about and decide on how to resolve the problems between him and his family going forward. Toyohara stated that he also was to be blamed for staying silent for the past few years and allowed the untrue reports to circulate without taking the effort to clarify things. At the end of his statement, Toyohara called upon the media not to disturb his family members as they are not industry insiders and have nothing to do with his work and sought their understanding in this regard.

Sources: Sponichi Annex / Sports Hochi / Modelpress / Oricon

From the statements released by Koizumi and Toyohara, it's clear that there are three main points:
- Koizumi has left her agency
- Koizumi and Toyohara are in a romantic relationship or as some media reports put it bluntly, having an affair.
- The fake news about Toyohara's marital status was circulated against their own will i.e. insinuating that it was Burning Production which did that to salvage Koizumi's reputation

Regardless of what the two of them say, an affair is still an affair. Unless he gets his divorce finalised, people are still going to look at them in an unfavourable light. It's just my personal view though but why can't those married get divorced first before starting another relationship? Having two simultaneous relationships is just not right and unfair both to the spouse and the new lover.

I like Koizumi as an actress but sad to say, this is probably going to be hurting her career to a certain extent at least until Toyohara's situation gets resolved. The saving grace is that, they finally have the guts to own up to their actions.