Updates and new information from the Nakai Masahiro & FujiTV incident - 7 Feb 2025

- While "Shuukan Bunshun" is also under criticism for its correction and timing of this announcement to its original article about A-san's involvement in the Nakai incident, some FujiTV insiders have also expressed dismay and disbelief at seeing how some people in the TV station interpret this as "vindication" and are on the offensive to attack the tabloid. However, the correction was not a total reversal of the facts reported so far. Unless FujiTV is cleared of the suspicion of having infringed on human rights and violated compliance and governance rules, the current fire raging in its backyard is unlikely to be put out anytime soon.

- Given FujiTV's history of not doing proper internal investigations or not even setting up a third party investigation committee, whether it will do what it promised this time for the Nakai incident is still viewed with sceptism:

• In 1999, a cast member of its variety show "Aisuru futari wakareru futari" committed suicide. This led to the discovery that the programme was faked when the police investigated the case. The show initially started off as featuring ordinary couples who had to decide whether to continue with their marriages or get divorced due to issues like infidelity but gradually became one that featured the couples largely headed for the divorce path since this provided more compelling narratives for TV and attracted higher ratings. Since the show started, it had been flooded with comments that the content seemed faked and some programming department employees had even written complaints about it to the management. However, Ohta Tooru, the then-assistant director of the department still decided to continue with the programme that was made by an external company Japan Produce. When the suicide of the female cast member came to light, it was found in her suicide note that the woman was in fact not married to the guy she was featured together with in the show. The programme ended when sponsors threatened to end their collaboration with FujiTV and due to internal feedback that the show had too many issues for it to continue. After the show ended, the production company denied that it had deliberately created fake content and that it had believed that those who appeared in the show were indeed married couples.
• It did not set up a third party investigation committee despite the public outcry when a cast member of "Terrace House" committed suicide in 2020 due to skewed editing that portrayed her in a negative light and subjected her to online bullying.

- FujiTV's OB-kai i.e. alumni gathering for former employees, an important event for the year, has been cancelled. The chairman of the alumni association is a former president of FujiTV. It has been said that only those close to the advisor Hieda Hisashi can take up this post and those who had opposed Hieda were not even allowed to join the association. It is not known why the event was cancelled this year.

- Former FujiTV commentator Abe Hiroyuki and FujiTV insiders commented on the Hieda management structure and its impact on the TV station over the years:

• FujiTV's ratings and sales are the lowest among the key stations (excluding TV Tokyo) and its bonus is said to be even lower than TV Tokyo's. *Note that some media reports claim that base salaries are comparatively higher though.
• Hieda holds the right to decide on key personnel appointments. The newly appointed president Shimizu Kenji is the 8th person in this post since Hieda left in 2001. All of the presidents were appointed by Hieda.
• Since Hieda became FujiTV's president in 1988, he has also been the one to decide on positions at director-level and above for the past 36 years.
• Due to Hieda holding actual power rather than the president, the environment within the FujiTV has evolved to become that of pandering to Hieda's preferences and going along with his opinions.
• Those who held different views from Hieda were forced out of the organisation. For example, there was S-san who used to be the programming director and seen as a potential president candidate and he had pushed strongly for other media delivery forms such as CS broadcasting. However, Hieda objected to it because he didn't think that there was a future in CS broadcasting nor online/on-demand video viewing. As such, FujiTV was noticeably late to the game when its competitors NTV and TBS already made inroads into this market with Hulu and U-NEXT. In a constantly evolving TV industry, new views and different perspectives are essential to stay ahead of the competition but deviating from Hieda's preferences is said to be a big no-no in FujiTV.
• Hieda is widely viewed to be unlikely to step away from FujiTV voluntarily for two reasons. First of all, the government cannot interfere in the personnel matters of media reporting outlets and can only "recommend" certain actions. Secondly, Hieda has strong connections and influence in the political arena. 
• However, pressure from major shareholders might be the key to resolve this situation. As it is, US investment management firm Dalton Investments has already expressed its displeasure about the Hieda management structure since late last year when the scandal first broke. It owns about 7% of FujiTV's parent company i.e. Fuji Media Holdings. 
• Bunka Housou which owns 3%, may be part of the Sankei Group but is seen as pursuing its own independent path and its president had openly called for swift investigations into FujiTV. Toho which owns 8% and NTT DoCoMo which owns 3%, are also unlikely to sit around and see further damage to its shareholder value if the scandal goes on for a long time.

- Yoshino Yoshitaka, a former FujiTV news producer, director and journalist and currently professor at Chikushi Jogakuen University, wrote a book about the decline of his former employer in a 2016 book. He had the following observations and comments about the TV station's various issues in the past:

• Many employees have been putting in effort to identify problem areas and come up with measures to resolve them over the years. As such, it is not true that they have not been doing their best but the reality is, things are simply not looking up for the TV station as seen from the hardly improving ratings and financial performance.
• FujiTV's corporate culture emphasizes a lot on the family atmosphere especially when the cast and staff members buily a strong comradeship bond over the long years that they worked together. For example, some staff members had worked with SMAP way back from 1992 when their first variety show on FujiTV aired in the late night slot until it went through a few renewals and got upgraded to become the primetime ratings hit "SMAPxSMAP" in 1996 before it ended its run in 2016.
• However, this emphasis on the family atmosphere has also attracted cynicism and criticism such as the unusual move of allowing parents to attend the joining ceremony for new hires. As celebrities, the rich and the famous were often spotted in the audience, this led to suspicion over their offspring getting jobs in FujiTV through their parents' or family's connections. Celebrities who appeared in FujiTV's shows regularly were also invited to be surprise guests. When footage of such events were shown on TV, it attracted complaints from viewers about the abuse of public broadcasting to showcase and emphasize the so-called family bonds and working environment in the TV station.
• When FujiTV was attacked for being pro-Korea content and anti-Japan back in 2011 for its significantly higher proportion of Korean shows in its lineup, there were protests that happened outside its Odaiba headquarters on top of the criticism in the media and online. Despite so, the management back then did not take this seriously so didn't bother to address these complaints. 
• To begin with, Korean dramas were relatively cheaper to purchase at that time as compared to producing Japanese dramas from scratch and they also got pretty high ratings. As such, this was a profitable area for FujiTV which they could not let go off easily. The problem was that, the management misread this crisis as something limited to the online domain, it would not spill over to the offline world and thought that addressing the complaints inadequately would just fuel the fire so keeping quiet was preferred. Besides, it thought that this was a business decision after all and that the public should not have a say in influencing their management while overlooking the fact that the TV station had a public and social responsibility with regard to fairness and balance. Moreover, the "happy mood" that still went on in FujiTV's shows despite the stormy external environment showed a clear disconnect with reality and was said to be a key factor that fanned the flames leading to the protests in Odaiba.
• One reason why there were a number of preconceptions and misunderstandings formed about FujiTV with regard to this Korean content saga was how it promoted shows. When it was the PR run for FujiTV's dramas and movies, the leading cast members would appear in various programmes from morning to night. That same method was applied to Korean content thus it further cemented the impression that FujiTV was trying too hard to promote these shows. As a result, it earned FujiTV the label of being a pro-Korean and anti-Japanese TV station and even led to unfounded rumours such as there was a high number of Korean employees working there so there was a push for Korean content. Such untruths when repeated constantly gradually became seemingly-true opinions and misconceptions about FujiTV which are hard to remove.
• In this time and age though, that same approach of ignoring what happens online is not going to work. Besides, by adopting a perspective that looks down on opinions from netizens and the general public is likely to attract worse criticism for FujiTV. While there were indeed valid grounds for FujiTV to be criticised for its lopsided programming, how it handled the situation was probably what led to the situation getting out of hand.

- The FujiTV coup as told by the then-chief editor Kimata Seigo (currently guest professor at Osaka Christian College and chief researcher at OCC Education Tech) who was also involved in it and how he felt about the FujiTV of today:

• Up till the early 1990s, FujiTV was controlled by the founding Shikanai family for three generations. However, the side effects of this one-man management system were starting to show.
• In order to break this vicious cycle, Hieda who was the president then planned the coup primarily with Hazama Shigeaki who was the president of Sankei Shimbun.
• The coup group was made up of people who worried about the future of FujiTV and the harm brought about by the authoritarian management.
• "Shuukan Bunshun" was roped in to help in publishing a series of damning reports against third-generation leader Shikanai Hiroaki, thanks to leaked secrets from contacts within the TV station.
• On the eve of the coup i.e. before the board of directors' meeting, the group gathered in a hotel room where "Bunshun" reporters were also at. 
• As soon as the coup ended, what went on at that final gathering, who was in the coup group and the process leading to the coup was published in "Bunshun" 2 days later. That was considered very fast in that era where there was no electronic version of printed publications. Thanks to the insider information and the speed at which the report was published, "Bunshun" won hands down over the other media outlets for this coverage.
• Even after the coup, the members got together regularly for a while due to their common affection for FujiTV. As such, he felt frustrated that the very company which they were so fond of back then had evolved to become like this and wondered those who were part of the coup had already forgot their initial intention of doing things in its best interests. 
• In the 2 decades following the coup, FujiTV was able to claim that as the golden period of the TV station and was even the top TV station among the 5 key networks to boast of No.1 ratings for 7 years in a row (2004 to 2010). However, it has now become the "forever No.4" among the 5 with NTV even hogging the top spot for 5 straight years in the past decade or so.
• He felt that the current situation was due to Hieda being even more authoritarian than the Shikanai family, putting only yes-men in the management and maintaining a Showa-era corporate culture till today.
• FujiTV was mockingly known as a TV station which placed a lot of emphasis on its female announcers thanks to the annual New Year parade in the HQ building led by Hieda since it moved to Odaiba in 1997 and choosing at least one female announcer per year as in the new hire exercise based on his preferences.
• The number of people who were hired through connections is also one factor that led to the stiff corporate culture which frowned on change and diversity. Examples quoted in the article include Fujishima Julie Keiko, the daughter of Mary Kitagawa and niece of Johnny Kitagawa who used to work in the directors' secretarial office and Kishi Nobuchiyo who was the late prime minister Abe Shinzo's nephew and son of former defence minister Kishi Nobuo. Besides the offspring and relatives of celebrities, politicians, sponsors and advertising companies, even those who were related to major publishers and tabloids which would write bad things about FujiTV were also hired. While not all these people could be proven to have been hired based on connections, it was true that hiring decisions were indeed influenced by the senior management.
• Usually, when ratings are low, the morale would go down as well in TV stations. However, under the Hieda system, it didn't really affect the employees because there was a lot of revenue outside the TV business, its fundamentals were strong and the salaries were higher compared to the competition. For example, the average annual salary of a FujiTV employee was JPY 16.21 million compared to NTV's JPY 12.96 million even though the latter has higher ratings. With this kind of difference, even if the job is unfulfilling, the employees would be content to remain with this company and not bother joining the union.
• On the other hand, since salaries could not be reduced, money had to be saved through cutting of production budgets. Even if the programmes were no longer as popular, they were still maintained for a long time. This was precisely the situation since 2010. People who didn't go along with Hieda were transferred to subsidiaries while only those who agreed with him got promoted. To make things worse, those who tasted success in the past insisted on doing the same types of shows thus leading to a high repetition of similar content over the years. For example, although the Monday 9pm timeslot used to boast of various "trendy dramas" especially love stories, younger viewers were no longer so keen on this genre since 2010. Even so, the proportion of love stories in this timeslot still remains high to this day.
• Due to FujiTV's strong ties with Yoshimoto Kogyo, some of its shows like "Waratte Iitomo" and "Oretachi hyoukinzoku" had become testing grounds for unknown and new comedians and dragged down the overall quality of the programmes.
• One of those in the coup group who is still an executive in FujiTV and a friend of Kimata revealed that even though Hieda had been persuaded to step down many times in the past, he always insisted that the group would collapse if he leaves. The irony was that, he was the one who led the coup in the 90s but he also became the one to eradicate those who could rise against him now.
• Kimata revealed that he left "Bungei Shunju" as a managing director when the then-president had a love child with an employee and tried to become the chairman of the group. He didn't think that the company would survive under such management and left when his advice fell on deaf years. At that time, FujiTV executives held a farewell party for him and he still remembered what they said to him: "Even though you could have become the president, you gave that up to thwart the current president's rise to become the chairman and this was so gratifying to see. However, we don't have that kind of courage so we can only continue to leech onto the company for survival."
• Kimata expressed understanding at the FujiTV's directors' dilemma then because the difference in salaries between Bunshun and them was very big and choosing to stay for the sake of themselves and their families was natural. However, FujiTV is one of the few companies which has broadcast rights awarded by the country and needs to be impartial in its reporting and transparent in its operations.
• As for the blunder by "Shuukan Bunshun" about A-san and the seemingly played-down correction subsequently, Kimata felt that it should have been done properly and a formal apology should be issued. There was also a need to examine how the error could have arisen.