Photo/Illutration Kauan Okamoto says he still experiences flashbacks about the sexual abuse he suffered around a decade ago. (Yosuke Fukudome)

A former teen idol who says he was sexually abused by a talent industry mogul kept quiet about the activity so as not to alarm his parents, who were struggling to make a go of things in Japan.

Kauan Okamoto, 26, held a news conference in April in which he revealed he had been sexually abused by the late Johnny Kitagawa, the entrepreneur behind Johnny & Associates Inc., one of Japan’s largest and most influential talent agencies.

In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Okamoto outlined the complicated feelings he held toward Kitagawa as well as the positive aspects that emerged after he became an idol with “Johnny’s Jr.,” an umbrella term referring to pre-debut idols in the making.

Okamoto is a fourth-generation Japanese of Brazilian descent born in Aichi Prefecture. After quitting Johnny & Associates in 2016, he moved to Brazil and debuted as a musician in 2020. It was just as the novel coronavirus pandemic was surfacing, which threw his career off-track.

While Okamoto did not confide to close friends about the sexual abuse, a turning point arrived in the form of a British Broadcasting Corp. one-hour documentary in March titled “Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop,” detailing Kitagawa’s suspected sexual assaults against minors and the Japanese media’s decades-long silence on the issue.

That led Okamoto to hold a news conference in Tokyo in April in which he described the abuse Kitagawa inflicted.

In February 2012, when Okamoto was still 15 and a member of a modeling agency, he went to Tokyo after he was contacted out of the blue by Kitagawa. He met Kitagawa at a concert venue and was told to go on stage and sing before about 5,000 people.

He then began working as a member of Johnny’s Jr.

Reflecting on that time, Okamoto said, “After becoming a star in one day, I could not tell what was real and what was not.”

The reality he knew until then was the difficult life his parents experienced, due in part to their lack of fluency in Japanese.

Okamoto was sexually abused on 15 to 20 occasions by Kitagawa at his condominium.

“I hated it, but I felt I had to just endure it,” Okamoto said. “I didn’t want to lose my tie to Johnny. For the sake of my parents, I wanted to escape (from a difficult life). I was determined to become a success.”

Okamoto also believed that if he had revealed the abuse, only he, not Kitagawa, would have suffered.

“Even if I had provided evidence, I would have died in the entertainment world,” Okamoto said. “I was afraid because I had no idea what my future would be like.”

At the same time, Okamoto expressed gratitude to Kitagawa for changing his life.

“I could not talk about (the abuse) because I felt gratitude,” Okamoto said. “If your parents hit you, you don’t tell others about that, do you? I think that was the same thing I was going through.”

He went on to say that the abuse would not erase all the gratitude he felt for being given the chance to make a name for himself in show business.

“If I hated everything about him, I felt I would also turn into a piece of garbage that had been dirtied,” Okamoto said. “I separated my feelings also for my own sake.”

Confronting criticism that he came out with the abuse claims only to heighten his name recognition, Okamoto said, “I want people to think of this as something that could happen to them, not as someone else’s problem. Most people will not understand until they also become a victim. It is a problem if we cannot talk about difficulties that we face. I wanted to change that.”

Johnny & Associates has submitted documents to companies it has business dealings with as part of its own investigation into the number of employees and entertainers who were sexually abused.

Kitagawa died in July 2019 at the age of 87.

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