Is Nagisa Watanabe the woman at the heart of the Masahiro Nakai scandal?
It’s almost the New Year holidays here in Japan, a time when everyone gathers with their family, eats nice food, and watches a lot of bad TV.
Likely to feature on one or more of those shows was former SMAP singer Masahiro Nakai, among the most famous male celebrities in the country but whose career is now in jeopardy after a scandal and serious allegations emerged this week.
In a scoop broken by the tabloid Bunshun, the 52-year-old is accused of paying a massive fee of ¥90 million to a woman as compensation, after a possible sexual assault in June 2023.
Nakai was in a relationship for about ten years in 2019 with a dancer and choreographer, but it’s not her.
The victim is described in the article only as a woman in her twenties working in the entertainment industry. Many are trying to identify the woman and there is now intense speculation that it was TV announcer Nagisa Watanabe.
As previously reported here, 27-year-old Watanabe is a graduate of the prestigious Keio University and made her (modest) gravure debut in November, marking a comeback after a mysterious period of absence from TV screens from last July. She formally left her job this August to go solo and has announced publicly that she was suffering from PTSD.
Her period of absence would correspond with the timeline in the scandal.
Watanabe herself has maintained silence so far, which might have been one of the conditions for the compensation (making it effectively hush money).
To make things more complicated and more difficult for Nakai, past voice recordings supposedly between Nakai and another woman have leaked online. This is allegedly someone he was seeing in the late 1990s and who possibly had an abortion in the year 2000 at his behest. It was reported in a monthly magazine at the time, though this was the period when SMAP’s agency Johnny’s was at the peak of its influence on the Japanese media, and such scandals did not receive wide coverage.
There’s still a lot of question marks about this story but one thing’s for sure: Masahiro Nakai is almost certainly not going to appear on TV screens this New Year.
