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The story
Japan’s Ministry of Justice announced it is scrapping a tie-up poster campaign with Netflix’s romance reality show “Ravu Jōtō” (“Bring It On, Love”) after the collaboration drew a wave of criticism. On 5ch, users voiced discomfort at a government agency’s public messaging being tied to a show themed around rehabilitation, along with questions about how the campaign was ever approved in the first place.
Published 8/21 (Fri) 5:00 PM
FNN Prime Online (Fuji TV Group)
The Ministry of Justice announced that it is ending its tie-up with a poster campaign for Netflix’s romance reality show “Ravu Jōtō,” citing a wave of public criticism among other factors.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Public servants really are a bunch of clueless morons.
Mission accomplished — they got to funnel public money to their buddies, that was the whole point.
Should've just used death row inmates. Those guys definitely aren't reoffending, right?
No matter how much you rehabilitate, the people you once hurt never actually forgive you.
Is this it?
Hard to argue with that. Classic Ryo-san.
Wow, what a convenient little connection.
What's "Rehabilitation, Bring It On" even supposed to mean lol.
Is the finale gonna have them slick their hair into a side part, put on black-rimmed glasses and a suit, and do a full dogeza apology to their victims?
They clearly haven't reflected on a single thing…
That camera angle is gross too — like we're crawling on the ground looking up at them from their feet.
That's literally a dogeza (groveling-apology) point of view.
lol
Can't believe this tie-up campaign actually got approved inside a government ministry.
Which one's Gomaki's (idol Maki Goto's) nephew?
The "elites" be like: "Well, it didn't personally bother me, so…"
Watch them lose their jobs, their status, get their engagements called off — basically watch their lives fall apart, right there in everyone's living room.
It'd double as moral education for kids today too.
That wouldn't be realistic at all, and it wouldn't be exciting either.
If you're gonna do it, it'd be way more realistic — and more entertaining — to watch a cocky former bullying victim get beaten right back down.
Probably never experienced a shred of violence in their lives either.
And of course, zero accountability for flushing a huge pile of tax money down the drain!
It was a landmine, so of course it went off.
Why'd you step on it in the first place?
Probably because they think it's the weak one's own fault for being weak.
Seriously, who in the government came up with this plan lol
It's rare for a rigid government agency to actually reverse a decision — that's a nice upside of this SNS-driven democratization.
That said, whoever at the Ministry first greenlit the collab with 'Ravu Jōtō' bears heavy responsibility.
Discipline that staffer properly and make sure it hits their performance review hard.
Don't you dare spend tax money cozying up to criminals, whoever planned this!
A normally serious person happens to forget an event and skips it → "See, deep down So-and-so's actually got a dark side."
It's just not fair, honestly.
That's the gain-loss effect, isn't it.
Even Pol Pot was apparently kind to his own family.
Humans are social animals, so being nice to the people close to you is just baseline stuff — practically on the level of eating and sleeping.
Background and Key Points
The Ministry of Justice’s rehabilitation apparatus rests heavily on hogoshi (保護司), unpaid volunteer probation officers who supervise parolees and ex-offenders in their communities. The system is chronically short-staffed and aging, which is why the ministry regularly runs PR campaigns, often fronted by TV personalities, to humanize offender reintegration (kōsei hogo, 更生保護) and recruit sympathy or new volunteers. That context explains why a government agency would tie its messaging to a Netflix dating show at all: the pitch was presumably not “watch a fun reality show” but “support second chances,” a framing that made sense internally but read very differently once the poster reached the public. MEGUMI, mentioned repeatedly in the thread, has been publicly associated with the ministry’s rehabilitation-support outreach and reportedly met with the prime minister, which is why posters treated her involvement as a red flag rather than a coincidence.
The thread doesn’t really split over whether cancelling the poster was right; almost everyone agrees it was overdue. The actual fault line is between posters angry that public funds went to a poorly vetted collaboration at all (waste, cronyism, no accountability) and the smaller subset engaging with the harder question the ministry’s mission actually raises: whether public sympathy campaigns for rehabilitated offenders implicitly sideline victims and law-abiding citizens who get no comparable spotlight.
What’s likely to be missed by outside readers is that this wasn’t a random corporate tie-in gone wrong; it sits inside a real, ongoing policy problem, a shrinking, unpaid volunteer corps the ministry has struggled for years to replenish, which the thread never engages with directly.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Justice Ministry] “Ravu Jōtō” Tie-In Poster Cancelled — “This Is Not a Denial of the Cast or Their Rehabilitation Efforts” — Criticism Mounts on Social Media.”
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