Japanese publisher Shogakukan said it would establish a third-party committee to investigate the company¡¯s decisions to publish works by two manga authors on its manga app despite knowing of their past sex crime convictions.

Shogakukan was found to have hired a manga writer convicted of sexually assaulting a woman under the age of 20. The author used the pseudonym Hajime Ichiro and worked on the series ¡°Jojin Kamen,¡± which has since been taken off the publisher¡¯s Manga One platform.

Ichiro was ordered by the Sapporo District Court on Feb. 20 to pay ?11 million in damages to the victim of his sexual assault. In 2020, Ichiro, who was then a teacher at a private high school in Hokkaido, was summarily indicted and fined for violating the child prostitution and child pornography prohibition law. The victim was his student.

Following this, Shogakukan stopped publishing another manga series, ¡°Daten Sakusen,¡± penned by Ichiro under a different name. But it began publishing ¡°Jojin Kamen¡± in 2022 after changing the author¡¯s pen name to Hajime Ichiro. The editor in charge of Ichiro was involved in settlement talks between the artist and the victim in 2021 and had proposed to the victim the creation of a notarial deed that included a gag on speaking about the assault.

The publisher said Monday that another author, the writer for the series ¡°Seiso no Shinrishi,¡± had also been found guilty of indecent assault before the company hired him under his new pen name, Itsuki Yatsunami.

The publisher said Yatsunami¡¯s previous work published in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine was canceled after he was found guilty in 2020 of touching the chest of a junior high school girl while on the street. While being aware of this fact, the Manga One editorial team decided in 2024 to hire him under the pseudonym Itsuki Yatsunami to publish ¡°Seiso no Shinrishi¡± on the platform.

The company said the primary reason for giving the author a new pen name was consideration for the groping victim.