Tokyo, Japan:
A Japanese record company is facing a backlash, after announcing that it will release a CD by a dead singer that would include a privately taken nude photos.
The Governor of the Kumamoto region in southern Japan, where singers were from Aki Yashiro, slammed the decision as the “incompetent” act in a blog post published on Wednesday.
The CD record is scheduled to release on Monday by the company, which announced that the product will include two nude photos of Yashiro, who died in 2023 at the age of 73, as “bonus features”.
It said that when she was in the 20s, photographs were taken by her then partner.
“If it has not been changed, what is it?” Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura wrote in a blog post, referred to the task of sharing intimate images without a person’s consent.
Makoto Ono, a representative for the company running Yashiro’s website, has also spoken against the move.
Ono said in a press release this week, “Announcement (nude photo release) is a very unpleasant incident and is absolutely unacceptable.”
The company of Ono sent a letter to the record company in March through legal channels demanding that the release be discontinued, but no response was received, the firm said.
The record company located in Kagoshima region has told the Japanese media that they have ownership rights for naked photographs.
Social media users in Japan condemned the company with the hashtag “Aki Yashiro’s dignity of dignity”.
An online petition has received more than 7,000 signatures for its cancellation.
A user wrote on platform X, “Nude photos are being published without permission after death … it should not be a terrible thing.”
Yashiro, who started in Japan in the 1970s, is a domestic name known as the queen of Enca – a style of Japanese music. She was also a Jazz singer.
In 2018, Yashiro made a guest appearance at a concert in Japan by French pop star Silvi Warton.
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