Shogakukan to Probe Hiring of Manga Artists Convicted of Sex Crimes

Tokyo, March 3 (Jiji Press)–Japanese publisher Shogakukan Inc. has said it will establish a third-party committee to investigate the company’s decisions to publish works by two manga artists on its manga app despite knowing of their past sexual crimes. Shogakukan was found to have hired a manga artist convicted of sexually assaulting a woman aged under 20 under a new pseudonym, Hajime Ichiro, to work on the manga series “Jojin Kamen.” The series has since been taken off the publisher’s Manga One platform. The publisher said Monday that the manga artist for the series “Seiso no Shinrishi” had also been found guilty of indecent assault before the company hired him under his new pen name, Itsuki Yatsunami. Ichiro was ordered by Sapporo District Court on Feb. 20 to pay 11 million yen in damages to the victim of his sexual assault. According to the verdict, in 2020, Ichiro, who was then a teacher at a private high school in the northernmost Japan prefecture of Hokkaido, was summarily indicted and fined for violating the child prostitution and child pornography prohibition law. The victim was his student. Following this, Shogakukan stopped publishing another manga series, “Daten Sakusen,” penned by the artist under a different name. But it began publishing “Jojin Kamen” in 2022 after changing the artist’s pen name to Hajime Ichiro. The editor in charge of Ichiro was involved in settlement talks between the artist and the victim in 2021, and had proposed to the victim the creation of a notarial deed that included a gag on speaking about the assault. The publisher said that Yatsunami’s previous work published on the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine was canceled after he was found guilty in 2020 of touching the chest of a junior high school girl on the street. While being aware of this fact, the Manga One editorial team decided in 2024 to hire him under the pseudonym Itsuki Yatsunami to publish “Seiso no Shinrishi” on the platform. The company said that the primary reason for giving the artist a new pen name was consideration for the groping victim. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]