The girl was fifteen years old when it all started.
In 2016, she was a student in a drawing class taught by a man named Kazuaki Kurita. Over the years that followed, Kurita groomed and sexually abused her.
The victim, known only as “A,” developed dissociative disorder and PTSD due to the abuse she suffered. On February 2020, Kurita was fined ¥300,000 ($1,901 USD) for creating and possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
However, the part of this story that’s truly disturbing is that during this period, Kurita had serialized his manga Daten Sakusen through Shogakukan’s Manga ONE service under the pen name Shoichi Yamamoto.
Slipping Through the Cracks
When the truth eventually reached the digital platform, a Manga ONE editor didn’t call a lawyer to protect the victim. They joined a group chat with Kurita and the victim and proposed a notarized silence agreement: ¥1.5 million if A stayed quiet.
She refused and filed a civil lawsuit instead. In February 2026, a court ordered Kurita to pay ¥11 million (roughly $70,000 USD) in damages.
And that’s still not the worst part. Shogakukan had already rehired him. In 2022, under the new pen name Ichiro Hajime, Kurita was back on Manga ONE with a new title, Joujin Kamen. The lawsuit was still ongoing. The victim was still waiting for justice. And the same platform that had facilitated the attempted cover-up was giving her abuser a fresh start.
This is not a story about one bad actor. This is a story about a system.
Digital-Only Made It Easy
To understand how this happened, you have to understand what a digital-only manga platform is.
When a manga runs in a physical magazine like Weekly Shonen Jump, it leaves a paper trail. There are ISBN numbers, publisher records, bookstore listings, and industry databases. Editors, printers, and distributors all touch your work. People in the industry know who is publishing what.
Digital platforms like Manga ONE are different. A new title can appear under a new pen name with almost no footprint outside the editorial team that greenlighted it. There’s no printer who handles a physical volume. Or a bookstore buyer who might recognize a name.
Instead, you have a small group of editors. And if those editors choose to look the other way, or choose to give someone a second chance, there is almost nothing to stop them.
The second case is arguably even more disturbing. Tatsuya Matsuki wrote Act-Age, a celebrated manga that ran in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump until he was arrested in 2020 for groping multiple middle school girls on the street. He was convicted and received a suspended sentence.
Years later, representatives from Manga ONE’s editorial department met with Matsuki, heard about his “feelings of atonement,” and greenlit a new series for him on the platform under the pen name Miki Yatsunami. The editorial department reportedly suggested the pen name themselves. They knew exactly who they were hiding.
This Isn’t Negligence; It’s a Culture
For some people, it’s easy to look at both cases and make excuses. Poor vetting, editors who believed in rehabilitation, someone slipping through the cracks. That lets the industry off too easily.
What Shogakukan did with Kurita and Matsuki reveals something about how the manga industry has treated talented creators: they’re assets that need to be protected. The editor who joined that LINE group chat chose to put content over the safety of victims. The editorial team that helped Matsuki pick a new pen name were following an unwritten playbook that has existed in creative industries across the world. Keep the talent, manage the problem, minimize controversy. Japan’s manga industry in particular, is shaped by close, often personal editor-author relationships. Editors’ act as creative partners who are involved in every aspect of the process.
Deeply ingrained beliefs around shame and harmony have made the act of lobbying an accusation against your abuser in public is more upsetting than the abuse itself. When Japan’s own #MeToo moment arrived in 2017-2018, its most prominent case, journalist Shiori Ito’s rape accusation against prominent TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, was met with significant backlash directed at her. Her case took years to reach a resolution.
The Shogakukan scandal didn’t happen in spite of these pressures. It happened because of them.
But Something Is Different This Time
What makes 2026 different from other sex abuse scandals is that fellow manga authors are standing up to Shogakukan and demanding change.
Rumiko Takahashi, one of the most successful manga artists in history and the creator of Inuyasha, Ranma ½, and Urusei Yatsura, pulled her works from Manga ONE. Kanehito Yamada’s Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, a beloved manga series, disappeared from the platform. Zom 100, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, COSMOS, and more than a dozen other titles followed.
ONE, the creator of Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man, posted that he couldn’t work alongside people “who cannot clearly state their strong condemnation of sexual harm against minors.”
Think about what this means for Manga ONE. It doesn’t have physical books to sell, no distribution network, no brand equity outside of the stories it hosts. When your most important creators withdraw from your platform, you don’t just have a PR problem. You have an existential one. The digital model that made it easy to hide abusers also makes platforms vulnerable to creator pressure.
What Has to Happen Next
Shogakukan has announced there will be a third-party investigative committee to look into how Kurita and Matsuki were rehired. This is an important first step. The committee could produce binding reforms: mandatory vetting processes, transparent rehiring rules, clear whistleblower protections. Or it could produce a report that gets filed and forgotten once the news cycle moves on.
The most meaningful signal to watch will not be Shogakukan’s words. It will be the behavior of the creators who left.
If Rumiko Takahashi and the authors of Frieren return to Manga ONE after receiving a vague apology and a committee announcement, Shogakukan wins. They’ll still carry a damaged reputation but they’ll have learned that authors will stand by them in the end. If those creators hold the line until there are binding, transparent rules that make it difficult to rehire known abusers under pseudonyms, the industry changes.
Japan’s legal landscape is slowly shifting in their favor. The country updated its penal code on sexual crimes and raised its age of consent to 16 in 2023, the first major reform in over a century. Public attitudes, particularly among younger Japanese readers, are changing.
The victim in this case spent years fighting for justice after being failed at every turn. She didn’t stay quiet when offered ¥1.5 million to disappear. That refusal to accept how she was being treated set things in motion. Now it’s time to see if the people with the most power in this industry are willing to be as stubborn as she was.
Note: Act-Age was published by Shueisha in Weekly Shonen Jump, not Shogakukan. Shogakukan’s Manga ONE editorial department hired Tatsuya Matsuki after his conviction. The two publishers are distinct.
