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The story
It has emerged that singer Junka Miyo, the common-law wife of the late Kōji Nakamoto, will request witness testimony from Kato Cha and others in her appeal against Weekly Shincho and Josei Jishin.
On 5ch, users raised procedural questions like “Is there a penalty for refusing a witness summons?” and voiced concern about requiring people in their 80s and 90s to appear in court, while plenty of others couldn’t resist jokes riffing on Kato Cha’s old comedy bits.
Nakamoto Kōji’s Common-Law Wife Junka Miyo Requests Kato Cha as Witness in Appeal: “These Are the Only People Who Can Prove the Facts”
It has been revealed that singer Junka Miyo (58), the common-law wife of the late TV personality Kōji Nakamoto, will request witness testimony from TV personality Kato Cha (83) and others in her appeal against Weekly Shincho and Josei Jishin.
Junka’s side revealed this to reporters. If granted, Kato would appear in court to testify.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Is refusing a witness summons actually a crime?
If you refuse without a valid reason, there's a penalty.
So basically they used the law to drag him in against his will, even though he didn't want to?
Whoa, really?
So if I got suddenly named as a witness, I couldn't refuse either?
Aren't you confusing this with being picked for a lay judge trial?
Yeah, probably true when there's no photo or audio to back it up.
Seems like that would reach way more people than saying it in a courtroom in front of a handful of people.
Normally you wouldn't need to drag him into court — a written statement from Kato-chan would do, right? Something feels really off about this.
It has low evidentiary value (as courtroom evidence).
I might have gotten angry, but I don't really remember now" —
and that'll ruin the whole thing lol
If he never actually had any relationship with her, there'd be nothing for him to testify about.
Negative articles about her actually started popping up shortly before Nakamoto's death.
Look at Hitoshi Matsumoto — the court confirmed there was no objective evidence behind the Shukan Bunshun article, and yet look at where things ended up. Even the tabloid shows stopped calling it a "sexual misconduct issue" after that trial and started saying "women issue" instead. Winning over the media matters more than winning in court. Jiro Sato survived too because he fought back on X (Twitter).
Who, for example, lost in court but still came out on top by winning over the media?
To them, it's probably on the level of seeing a halo glowing behind Kato Cha.
Re: #51
lmaooooo
Normally you only file a witness request with the court after you've already made contact and gotten their consent beforehand, so no need to worry. In this case too, I'd guess a lawyer named Kitamura contacted Kato Cha and got his agreement to appear before filing the request.
Isn't this just about intending to file the request — they haven't actually filed it yet, have they?
Honestly, I can't even tell from this write-up what they're actually fighting about.
Well, it's Tokyo Sports, a fifth-rate gossip sports tabloid, so lol.
And then dust puffs up and he goes "Hekkushi!!" — I want the whole bit.
Background and Key Points
This case sits inside Japan’s system of appellate civil litigation (kōso), where a losing party can request the high court re-examine evidence, including calling live witnesses (shōnin). Nakamoto Kōji and Katō Cha (Kato-chan) were both founding members of The Drifters, the comedy group that dominated Japanese television from the late 1960s through the 1980s, which is why his testimony carries weight beyond simply confirming or denying tabloid claims — he is one of the last people alive who shared decades of history with Nakamoto. Junka Miyo, as Nakamoto’s common-law (naien) wife, lacks the legal standing of a registered spouse, which is part of why her reputation became contested terrain for Weekly Shincho and Josei Jishin in the first place, and why she is now suing those outlets over how she was portrayed.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t whether the claims are true, but whether compelling an 83-year-old entertainer into a courtroom is proportionate, with posters weighing the coercive power of Japan’s witness-summons rules against the age and health of the people being called.
What the thread misses is that Japan’s penalty for refusing a witness summons (a fine, under the Code of Civil Procedure) is a completely different mechanism from the lay-judge (saiban-in) system some posters conflated it with — lay judges are laypeople conscripted for criminal trials, not witnesses in a civil defamation suit. It’s also worth noting that contested witnesses are almost always pre-cleared with the individual before a formal request is filed, so appearing “dragged in against his will” is unlikely to reflect the actual process.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Entertainment] Nakamoto Kōji’s Common-Law Wife Junka Miyo Requests Kato Cha as Witness in Appeal: “These Are the Only People Who Can Prove the Facts”“.
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