Publisher Shogakukan said Monday that it has apologized to a sex crime victim for continuing to use an author under a pseudonym despite knowing about his history of sexual assault.
According to Shogakukan, an executive of the company visited the office of the victim's lawyer on Thursday and apologized to her by phone.
Following the author's arrest, Shogakukan's manga app department stopped publishing a manga series by the man, before rehiring him as the writer of a new manga series, "Jojin Kamen," in 2022 after changing his pen name to Hajime Ichiro.
In a statement released Monday, the publisher said, "the decision to rehire the manga artist under a different pen name constitutes an act that disregarded (the victim's) human rights, and we deeply regret this failure in our corporate oversight responsibilities."
In a statement released through her lawyer, the victim said she had thought the company should give the real reason for suspending a past manga series. "I sincerely hope that the reality of the harm caused by the crime will be widely known and that society as a whole will establish a system to protect children from becoming victims of sexual crimes," the statement said.
The lawyer said, "we have received information indicating there were multiple (child) victims."
The man, who was a teacher at a private high school in Hokkaido, was arrested in 2020 in violation of the child prostitution and child pornography prohibition law for assaulting the woman, who was his student in her teens at the school. The Sapporo District Court ordered him to pay ?11 million ($69,400) in damages to her on Feb. 20 this year.
Both the plaintiff and the defendant have challenged the court ruling.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.