Third-party Investigation Committee's Report on the Nakai Masahiro sexual violence case & FujiTV's role in it - Part 1: The Committee

The third-party investigation committee tasked with looking into the Nakai Masahiro sexual assault case and FujiTV's handling of the issue released its report during a press conference on 31 March 2025. The reports come in two formats i.e. the full version (291 pages) and the summary (58 pages). There is also an appendix which contains the results from the 2 surveys conducted with FujiTV employees and executives.

Due to the amount of information and extensive media coverage on this topic, I will be only translating and writing about highlights and key information derived from the reports in a series of posts. If you are interested in reading the reports, they can accessed via the links provided above.

While there are also documents about FujiTV's plans to revamp itself in view of what happened and what was pointed out by the committee, I will not be covering these. Frankly speaking, such "promises" ring hollow for now unless concrete and tangible changes are made and the effects can only be seen in time to come. As such, I feel that it is meaningless to talk about these at the moment.

This case may have happened in FujiTV but that's not to say other TV stations and companies may not have similar issues. Given the gravity of the case and the subsequent mishandling of the matter that led to the exodus of sponsors and the adverse impact it had on various FujiTV drama productions, this is why I am spending so much time and effort on covering this. Hopefully, these posts help you to understand what had happened and the lingering effects it will have on subsequent FujiTV dramas and possibly productions from other TV stations as well since it looks likely that things would not be the same for FujiTV at least for the time being.

To be honest, it is sickening to read the full story of what happened. Although Bunshun and other media outlets had already given a more-or-less clear account of the issue (while not verified in some aspects and some parts did sound like rumours and speculation), seeing the strongly-worded report by the committee which did not hold back on its criticism of Nakai, the parties who were involved and FujiTV as a company was indeed surprising and refreshing to say the least. I applaud the committee for its extensive investigation completed in a matter of just two months or so and hope that their work will indeed bring some much-needed vindication and justice for Announcer A in Nakai's case who kept getting criticised for "accepting the settlement money" even though the circumstances leading to that were unclear and other employees who had suffered similar harassment from other people in positions of power. Whether criminal proceedings will take place and whether the guilty parties involved will get punished in one way or another - that's still too early to tell though.

While A's identity was somewhat masked so far until the report's release, it has become very evident who A is given the clear indicators given about her identity. Despite so, I will continue using A to refer to her which is in line with the investigation committee's reports.

Due to the number of parties involved, the committee cited the positions held by the parties back then in brackets and used alphabets to refer to them for the sake of clarity. Note that the alphabets used do not correspond to the initials of these people - just in case the public mistakes this to be clues leading to their real identities and start a witch-hunt. Efforts were made by the committee to avoid mentioning specific names and key indicators of one's identity in most scenarios except for those who were already reported and named in the media for their involvement in this case and were deemed to have the responsibility to answer for their roles in this case.

There is another version of this report which indicates the full names of all parties which is not available for public circulation. This was due to concerns about the leak of personal data and confidential corporate information about CX and FMH.

In Part 1, let's find out more about the committee and how they conducted this investigation:

- At an extraordinary board of directors meeting of FMH held on 23 January 2025, the establishment of the third party investigation committee was decided. The aim of the committee was to provide an independent and unbiased assessment of the Nakai case and FujiTV's alleged involvement in the matter, analyze the causes and come up with suggestions of preventive measures. In particular, these 6 points needed to be addressed:

1. Whether CX and FMH were involved in the case
2. Whether there were similar instances like the case in question
3. The process from when CX and FMH came to be aware of the case and its handling of the matter
4. Measures of internal controls, corporate governance and human rights and their effectiveness
5. Identification of problems, root causes and advice on preventive measures
6. Other matters as identified by the committee

- The committee compromised of 3 leading members who were all lawyers and the chairman Takeuchi Akira is also a certified fraud examiner. The investigation was conducted by 18 lawyers who were supervised by another 5 lawyers. The committee also enlisted the help of 3 CX & FMH employees to facilitate the investigation and ensured that there were information firewalls between them and the executives of both companies as stated in the confidentiality agreements signed with them.

- A total of 16 committee meetings were held in the period from 23 January to 30 March 2025.

- The scope of the investigation was set for the period between 1 April 2016 and 26 March 2025. The reason why 1 April 2016 was set as the cut-off date was that CX and FMH had started using their current information management system since then and obtaining/analyzing data prior to this was deemed to be challenging and likely lower in relevance to the current case in question.

- 222 people including those listed in the table above, executives deemed to be relevant to this investigation as well as those who had already left CX and FMH were interviewed over 294 sessions during the investigation period. There were also 2 surveys conducted on the employees and other interested parties along with the establishment of a designated hotline for people to provide information.

- The committee engaged digital forensics company foxcale to ensure the security of the digital data collected and analyze it. Details of their investigation can be found on pages 287 to 291.

• A portion of the data from Microsoft Outlook and Teams were downloaded by CX and FMH through Microsoft Purview and passed on to foxcale.
• Data automatically saved and synced to One Drive through electronic devices issued by CX and FMH were also secured for the purpose of analysis.
• There was evidence pointing to the partial deletion of digital data deliberately by some of those who were investigated. In the report quoted by the media, Nakai had used mainly SMS as a communication tool while those in CX and FMH had used LINE and Microsoft Teams for external and internal communications. 
• While the foxcale team managed to recover most of the deleted SMS and LINE data, there was unfortunately a portion which couldn't be read. It was determined that 437 SMS items, 86 LINE chat items and 1,427 Microsoft Teams chat items were deleted on purpose. Of the individuals who had done this, B was singled out for having deleted 325 communication data items between him, another talent U, Nakai and Lawyer K between 9 January and 1 February 2025. As such, these actions strongly suggested that there was an intention to hide the facts of the case from this investigation.