In recent years, there have been several cases where Japanese media icons, especially those who shine across national and language borders, have been accused of falsifying their personal histories, and they have consequently lost whatever popularity they had gained through the mass media and/or books.
The most public example of this recently was Hisashi Moriguchi, a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo who was reported by the Yomuri Shimbun on Oct. 11 to have made significant medical breakthroughs at Harvard University using pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. This was soon proven to be false when the Harvard University-affiliated hospital where he claimed to have done the procedure denied the claim.
After several media outlets reported on the controversy, Moriguchi was forced to admit that he had lied, including when he said he was a "physician assistant" licensed by the state of Massachusetts.
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