Key Points
・On September 2, 2026, the manga artist Masami Kurumada, 72, creator of Saint Seiya, and three affiliated companies filed a damages claim of about 2.886 billion yen at the Tokyo District Court against 11 individuals and corporations, including a former manager. According to the plaintiffs, about 4.686 billion yen left the three companies over roughly six years from around 2018, and about 1.8 billion yen has already been recovered. Jiji Press described the defendants as seven people, and every figure here is a plaintiff allegation that no court has yet tested.
・The alleged losses surfaced in early 2024 through an inquiry from the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau, not through any internal control. According to Ben54 News, the former manager had been Kurumada’s contract editor at the publisher Shueisha, proposed setting up the three companies himself, and was entrusted with accounting, disbursements and outside negotiations for about 25 years.
・A manga franchise of this size is an international asset that no individual author can personally supervise. Japan’s cabinet adopted a target in June 2025 of 20 trillion yen in overseas revenue from Japanese content by 2033, and the question this case raises is whether the ability to track money, contracts and rights can grow at the same speed as the ability to sell them.
Kurumada Alleges 4.686 Billion Yen Left His Companies and Sues His Former Manager
Masami Kurumada, 72, the creator of the manga Saint Seiya, and three affiliated companies filed suit at the Tokyo District Court on September 2, 2026, seeking about 2.886 billion yen in damages from 11 individuals and corporations, including a former manager, his relatives and companies connected to him. Jiji Press reported the number of defendants as seven.
According to the plaintiffs, about 4.686 billion yen left the three companies over roughly six years, from around 2018 to 2024. The complaint describes three methods: setting up a company with a name resembling the intended recipient so that overseas licensing fees were paid into it, transferring money out of the companies’ accounts without authorisation, and moving funds to an overseas entity through insurance arrangements. About 1.8 billion yen has since been recovered, and the claim covers the balance.
The outflows came to light in early 2024 after an inquiry from the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau. According to Sankei Shimbun and other outlets, the former manager admitted the misappropriation when questioned by the plaintiffs’ side and said he had meant well and had been thinking of Kurumada. All of this is the plaintiffs’ account as set out in the complaint and relayed through their lawyers. The defendants have made no public statement of their own, and the court has yet to rule.
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How Manga Money Normally Moves, and Where It Moved Here
In Japanese publishing, the standard book contract drafted by the Japan Book Publishers Association designates the publisher as the window for secondary uses such as film, broadcast and merchandise. Article 16 of the association’s 2015 model contract has the author entrust the handling of those uses to the publisher, with terms decided in consultation. That clause is why most manga franchises reach the world through a publisher rather than through the artist’s own office.
The editor who ended up holding the money, the contracts and the access
The former manager began as a contract employee at Shueisha, working as Kurumada’s editor. According to Ben54 News, he moved to work for Kurumada after the magazine he worked on ceased publication, proposed that Kurumada establish companies, and then ran their accounting, cash handling and outside negotiations. The relationship lasted about 25 years, and he held director posts at the companies.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers say he told people around him that Kurumada was an artist who disliked human contact and could not meet anyone, and that he blocked business partners and associates from reaching Kurumada directly. Kurumada denied the characterisation at his press conference. In an ordinary company, contracting, invoicing, confirmation of incoming payments, bookkeeping and audit involve different people. The plaintiffs describe a structure in which all of it converged on one person.
The three plaintiff companies are NEXT WING, Kurumada Production and K-PROJECT, which handle copyright management among other functions. At the September 2 press conference Kurumada said that he had passed beyond anger into emptiness, and that when the losses were discovered the company’s account balance was so small that it could not pay its taxes. Without a recovery, he said, Kurumada Production might have gone under and he might have been finished as a manga artist.
The damage reached the public side of the work as well. A fiftieth anniversary exhibition of his original art, scheduled for June 2024 at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, was cancelled in an announcement dated March 26, 2024. Kurumada said at the press conference that companies connected to the other side were involved in the project, which left no choice but to cancel, and that he hopes to hold the exhibition in Ikebukuro in spring 2027.
Roughly two and a half years passed between the discovery and the filing, and the 1.8 billion yen appears to have been recovered during that period. Reporting says the money is believed to have gone into cryptocurrency investment among other things. Whether any criminal complaint has been filed, and what the defendants’ own lawyers say, could not be confirmed at the time of writing.
Two models: the publisher as window, the author’s company as window
Saint Seiya does not earn from book royalties alone. According to Toei Animation, the anime has been broadcast in more than 80 countries, and the 2015 series Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold was distributed in 222 countries and territories with subtitles in 13 languages. The franchise is strong in France and across Latin America, and it extends into figures, games, arcade machines and overseas licensing. The number of transactions in that chain, from work to product to territory to local counterparty and back as royalties, has little in common with the number involved in selling volumes of a book.
Kurumada’s arrangement inverted the standard model. The companies handling copyright management belonged to the author’s side, and overseas licensing fees were paid directly into them. That preserves the author’s control over the work. It also means that everyone who can see the flow of money sits inside the author’s own companies.
Rights can also move far from the author in the opposite direction, as another case at the end of August showed. After reports that a Dragon Ball theme park would be built in France, Toei Animation published a statement on August 31, 2026 saying that it had granted no licence of any kind for the matter and was aware of no such plans. The name of the work had been raised publicly by the president of the Paris regional council, and the rights holders say no approach ever reached them.
The government’s 20 trillion yen target is mostly games
The Japanese cabinet adopted a target in June 2025 of expanding overseas revenue from Japanese content to 20 trillion yen by 2033. According to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Entertainment and Creative Industry Strategy, overseas revenue was about 5.8 trillion yen in 2023 and about 6.1 trillion yen in 2024, which exceeds Japan’s semiconductor exports and trails only the automotive industry.
| Sector | 2024 actual | 2033 target |
|---|---|---|
| Games | ¥3.4 trillion | ¥12 trillion |
| Anime | ¥2.1 trillion | ¥6 trillion |
| Manga | ¥0.3 trillion | ¥1 trillion |
| Music | ¥0.1 trillion | ¥0.5 to 1 trillion |
| Live action | ¥0.1 trillion | ¥0.5 trillion |
Source: Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, draft revision of the Entertainment and Creative Industry Strategy, March 2026.
Games dominate the total, and manga on its own is a small line. The direction of policy, however, is cross-sector: a subsidy programme launched in March 2026 is named IP360, after the idea of taking a single intellectual property 360 degrees from manga into anime, games, live action and merchandise. The strategy document also records what it calls an income gap, noting that slightly under 60 percent of overseas revenue is returned to domestic companies, and proposes shifting from licensing income toward direct business as a remedy.
When One Work Becomes a Global Asset, Who Watches the Money?
The plaintiffs describe a monopoly on information, not just on money
If the plaintiffs’ account is correct, what sustained six years of outflows was not access to bank accounts. It was the ability to control access to Kurumada himself. Once business partners accept that the artist dislikes meeting people, the only person who can confirm who signed a contract or how much arrived is the person delivering that explanation. The plaintiffs describe someone who was both the keeper of the money and the gatekeeper of the information.
The Dragon Ball episode in France is the same problem running in reverse. There the trouble was not that information had concentrated in one person, but that a Saudi state-backed developer, the French state, a regional government and several Japanese rights holders were all involved, and the boundary between what had been agreed and what could be said publicly broke down. With Akira Toriyama’s death in 2024, the question of who is entitled to say that something has been decided is likely to get harder rather than easier for that franchise.
Why did it take a tax inquiry to notice?
The same pattern appears well outside manga. Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for the baseball player Shohei Ohtani, held the single channel between Ohtani and his club, his bank and his agent, and was sentenced in February 2025 to four years and nine months in prison for defrauding him of about 17 million dollars.
In Japan, the singer Eikichi Yazawa was reported to have lost about 3.5 billion yen in 1998 to the former accounting head of his personal office and a former executive of an overseas affiliate, in an arrangement of the same shape: the artist concentrated on the work while people close to him controlled the money.
In the Kurumada case the discovery came from the tax authorities rather than from inside the company. A listed company handling sums of this order operates internal audit and a board whose members check one another. Whether a character franchise worth tens of billions of yen is subject to any comparable inspection is a separate question, and the answer here appears to have been no.
The more a creator focuses on the work, the deeper the dependence on an agent
The obvious question, how anyone fails to notice 4.6 billion yen, has an answer from the artist’s side. Reading contracts, supervising licensees in each country and monitoring bank accounts while drawing a serialised manga is not realistic. So the work is delegated, and the greater the need to delegate, the more authority accumulates in one place.
Economists call this the principal-agent problem, the tension built into any act of delegation. Expecting a small artist’s office to run the internal controls of a listed company is not realistic either, since auditors and outside directors cost money and require people. Running the operation on personal trust was a reasonable choice at the scale the office started from.
The difficulty is that the sums grew to multinational scale while the management structure stayed the size of a workshop. It does not follow that the publisher-as-window model would have prevented this. The question is less which model routes the contracts than who other than the author ever looks at the flow of money. Having the author read the bank statements and the contracts once a year with a second pair of eyes, or confirm directly where overseas payments are sent, sits well below the cost of a formal audit.
Can Japan grow its ability to manage rights as fast as its ability to sell them?
The METI strategy is built around tripling revenue and tripling investment, and the problems it names are limited exposure abroad, distribution networks, piracy and the return of profit to production companies. Improving and clarifying contract terms appears too, but in a single line, and the centre of gravity is clearly on selling overseas. A 2022 study commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs identified a related gap, finding that smaller operators lack the know-how and the staff needed to negotiate contracts with overseas companies.
The question the two episodes raise together is whether the machinery for tracking money and rights generated abroad is being built at the same time as the machinery for selling abroad. Delegating licence management to a specialist firm, having publishers act as agents, outsourcing audit for artists’ offices, or keeping a single ledger of contract expiries and incoming payments are all available. Each carries a cost, whether in fees, in the artist’s freedom to decide, or in further concentration of power at publishers.
There is no evidence that misappropriation is widespread across Japanese intellectual property. What can be established is narrower: global expansion has made the routes for contracts, rights and revenue more complex, and where authority and information concentrate in a few hands, that complexity can delay the discovery of wrongdoing. For an industry aiming at 20 trillion yen, the open question is whether the management side becomes as sophisticated as the sales side.
Related article
Japanese Reactions to the Kurumada Lawsuit
What follows is a sample of widely shared posts on X, not a measure of Japanese public opinion. The posts are in Japanese, and translations are given here in English. Engagement counts were read on September 4, 2026 and change over time.
The most striking feature of the Japanese response is what it did not contain. Almost nobody argued that Kurumada brought this on himself by delegating too much. The dominant note was recognition that a creator cannot also be a finance department, and the post that travelled furthest on that theme reached for a precedent from a different industry.
車田正美と同じように35億円をやられた矢沢永吉の「僕だって社長なんてやりたくないよ、ただ曲を書いて歌っていたいよ、でもお金の管理を僕の代わりにやってくれる人はいないの」という言葉は本当に重たい
— まこ (@mako_0722) September 2, 2026
Eikichi Yazawa, who was reported to have had about 3.5 billion yen taken by people close to him, once said something like this. I do not want to be a company president either. I just want to write songs and sing. But there is nobody who will manage the money in my place.
That is genuinely heavy.
Posted September 3, 2026. About 19,000 likes, 5,247 reposts and 1.22 million views.
The point that pushed the story from a large number into something more serious was the discovery route. The plaintiffs found nothing themselves.
聖闘士星矢を生んだ車田正美さんが、6年かけて約47億円を抜かれ、国税の指摘で初めて気づく。⁰信頼していた元スタッフに、会社そのものを食い潰されていた。
— 山下弘枝 (@chihaya0425) September 2, 2026
「創作に全集中するために、経理も対外も全部任せていた」…
He entrusted the accounting and all the outside dealings to someone else so that he could concentrate completely on creating. And the person he trusted, a former member of his own staff, was eating the company itself from the inside. Six years, and it took the tax bureau to point it out.
Posted September 3, 2026 by a verified account. About 22,000 likes, 5,107 reposts and 2.84 million views.
As the details of the press conference spread, the scale of what had nearly happened became the subject.
件の、車田正美先生の会社での横領事件。
— SOW＠ (@sow_LIBRA11) September 3, 2026
てっきり膨大な収益の中の一部を掠め取ったのだよ思っていたら、「会社の金の大部分」で「このままでは納税も難しく、漫画家廃業の危険すらあった」で、宿主食い殺そうとした寄生虫レベルだったか・・・…
I had assumed this was someone skimming a portion of very large earnings. Then it turns out it was most of the company’s money, that paying tax became impossible, and that there was a real risk of him having to give up being a manga artist altogether.
Posted September 3, 2026. About 4,800 likes, 1,474 reposts and 620,000 views.
One reaction came from inside the industry and pointed at the career path that sits underneath the case, an editor at a publisher moving across to work for the artist he had been assigned to.
車田正美先生の事件。
— たなかじゅん・漫画家【公式】 (@juntnk) September 2, 2026
ボクがスーパージャンプで連載していたとき、当時のボクの担当さんから「編集やってる〇〇君が車田先生の会社に入ることになったんだよ」なんて話を聞いたことがあった。
ひょっとしてその人じゃないだろうか… pic.twitter.com/XAZIcRkyId
Back when I was serialising in Super Jump, I remember my editor telling me that a colleague in the editorial department was going to join Kurumada’s company. I keep wondering whether that was the same person.
Posted September 3, 2026 by the manga artist Jun Tanaka, a verified account. About 1,600 likes, 592 reposts and 89,000 views.
Two things are worth noting about the shape of this response. The first is that the anger aimed at the defendants is strong, while criticism of Kurumada is close to absent, with most posts treating 25 years of family-level trust as something an individual cannot realistically guard against. The second is that the focus moved. On September 2 the reaction was to the size of the number, and from September 3, once the press conference details circulated, the centre of gravity shifted to how six years could pass before a tax inquiry found it. That is the same move from the amount to the governance question that this article follows.
The Next Problem for Japanese IP That Succeeded Too Well
A work drawn at one desk decades ago now appears across the world as games, toys, films and theme park proposals, and moves sums in the billions of yen. That is the measure of how far Japanese manga and anime have travelled.
It also means the work has become an international asset well beyond what one author can personally supervise, and the machinery around it has to change accordingly. In the Kurumada case, as the plaintiffs describe it, money and information concentrated in a single trusted person. In the Dragon Ball case, so many parties were involved that information ran ahead of any decision. The two point in opposite directions and arrive at the same question: who holds the accurate information, who decides, and who is entitled to say so publicly.
Japan is aiming at 20 trillion yen in overseas content revenue by 2033. Whether the ability to see rights, contracts, information and profit clearly can be built at the same pace as the ability to sell is the part of that target nobody has answered yet.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much money does Masami Kurumada say was taken, and who is he suing?
The plaintiffs allege that about 4.686 billion yen, roughly 30 million dollars, left three companies over about six years from around 2018, and they are claiming about 2.886 billion yen after around 1.8 billion yen was recovered. According to Bengo4.com News, the suit was filed at the Tokyo District Court on September 2, 2026 against 11 individuals and corporations including a former manager, while Jiji Press described the defendants as seven people. Every figure is a plaintiff allegation and no court has ruled on it.
How were the alleged losses at Kurumada’s companies discovered?
Through an inquiry from the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau in early 2024, not through any internal check. According to reporting by Bengo4.com News and Ben54 News, the plaintiffs say the former manager had handled accounting, disbursements and outside negotiations for about 25 years after proposing the creation of the three companies himself, having previously worked as Kurumada’s contract editor at Shueisha.
Why do most Japanese manga franchises route rights through a publisher rather than the artist?
Because the standard model contract published by the Japan Book Publishers Association in 2015 makes the publisher the window for secondary uses such as film, broadcast and merchandise, with terms decided in consultation with the author. Kurumada used the other model, holding copyright management companies on the author’s side so that overseas licensing fees were paid directly into them. That keeps control with the author, and it also means the people who can see the money are all inside the author’s own companies.
How did Japanese social media react to the Kurumada lawsuit?
Sympathetically toward Kurumada and with very little argument that he was at fault for delegating. On X the widely shared posts included one quoting the singer Eikichi Yazawa, reported to have lost about 3.5 billion yen to associates in 1998, saying he too would rather just write songs than run a company, which drew about 19,000 likes and 1.22 million views. A verified account focusing on the fact that the tax bureau, rather than anyone inside the companies, found the problem after six years drew about 22,000 likes and 2.84 million views.
Reference Links
Selection notes
Working note for the editor. Not part of the published article.
– mako_0722 (Yazawa Eikichi quote): about 19,000 likes and 1.22 million views. Selected because it is the single most widely shared post that engages the article’s thesis directly, delegation deepening with creative focus. No named individual is attacked. The Yazawa figure is carried as reported, matching the treatment in the Japanese article.
– chihaya0425 (verified): about 22,000 likes and 2.84 million views. The highest reach among posts that centre the discovery route, the tax bureau rather than an internal control. Verified account, low deletion risk.
– sow_LIBRA11: about 4,800 likes and 620,000 views. Selected for the shift in perception from skimming to near-destruction of the business. The stronger imagery in the original post about parasites was not carried into the translation, since it targets conduct that remains untested in court.
– juntnk (manga artist, verified): about 1,600 likes. Lower reach than the others but selected because it comes from inside the industry and evidences the editor-to-artist career path that the Background section describes. Names no individual and makes no accusation.
– Not selected: the highest-reach post overall (SOWIETK, 24.29 million views) is an anonymous aggregator account reposting press conference quotes already covered in the News section. Also excluded were the B’z comparison, which rests on a claim the research could not verify, and any post speculating about the identity of the defendants.
- Saint Seiya creator Masami Kurumada sues his former manager: I could have been finished as a manga artist | Bengo4.com News
- Saint Seiya creator Masami Kurumada alleges 4.6 billion yen in losses and sues a former manager who kept him cut off for 25 years | Ben54 News
- Saint Seiya creator Masami Kurumada alleges 4.6 billion yen embezzlement and sues his former manager at the Tokyo District Court | Jiji Press
- Toei Animation statement on reports of a Dragon Ball theme park in France | Toei Animation
- Entertainment and Creative Industry Strategy, draft revision, March 2026 | Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- Commentary on the 2015 model publishing contract | Japan Book Publishers Association
- Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold begins distribution in 222 countries and territories | Toei Animation
- Ippei Mizuhara sentenced to four years and nine months for bank fraud, ordered to repay Shohei Ohtani | Nikkei
