It doesn’t take much for a celebrity drug scandal to be picked up by domestic news outlets in Japan, so when TV personality Pierre Taki was arrested on suspicion of cocaine use on March 12, it’s perhaps not surprising that TV and print media jumped on the story. Segments featured on morning shows in the wake of the news included an analyst using a bank note to demonstrate how to consume the drug and an awkward attempt at explaining what “acid house” was.
The story also dominated social media conversations in Japan, partially because all celebrity scandals generate chat online. However, whereas television grappled with the notion of trying to explain a decades-old music genre, netizens used Taki’s case as a jumping off point to talk about the sillier aspects of such cases, as well as Japan’s place in the world.
Once the initial surprise of Taki’s arrest wore off and people dug out CDs from their collections, attention turned to a familiar ritual in the nation’s entertainment industry in such cases. As has been the case with other artists and celebrities arrested for various crimes, the body of work that Taki is associated with has been pulled from stores and upcoming shows by Denki Groove were canceled. Disney even stopped producing new copies of “Frozen,” in which Taki had been the voice of the fictional snowman Olaf.