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One of the most shocking stories in manga recently has been Shogakukan’s baffling decision to knowingly rehire a convicted sex offender as a writer. What was so frustrating is that the manga publisher knew enough to try to hide this author behind a pen name - for readers, and allegedly the publisher's senior management. Now, a third-party investigator has said that the decision by Shogakukan was “complicity in a human rights violation.”

Back in March, news broke that Shogakukan had intentionally rehired a convicted sex offender who had been fined for violating child prostitution and child pornography laws in Japan. The incident happened in 2020, but by 2022, Shoichi Yamamoto was rehired by Shogakukan using the pen name Ichiro Hajime. This revelation caused several prominent mangaka to pull their work off the publisher’s Manga One app.

Since then, an independent investigation has been carried out, and its findings do not paint the company in a positive light. In their eyes, when Yamamoto was rehired by Shogakukan's editors, it could “justifiably be regarded as complicity in a human rights violation.” They also found that the publisher tried to hide the fact that Yamamoto was back on their payroll by hiring him as a writer to make it less likely anyone would recognize his artwork.

Interestingly, it appears that the report places the blame squarely on the editorial department for Shogakukan, as they never informed management of their decision to rehire Yamamoto.

In response, Shogakukan has issued another apology and announced the measures it will take to prevent anything similar from happening in the future. This includes creating a new internal Human Rights Policy and empowering a committee to enforce it. 

How much this translates into real change at Shogakukan remains to be seen. The manga industry has long had issues around sheltering and forgiving sex offenders, so we hope this becomes a turning point for both creators and editors to be more mindful of victims in the future.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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