The Japanese media world has been plunged into chaos by the humiliating arrest of Tsuyoshi Kusanagi — a member of SMAP, the biggest, best-loved and most successful boy band in Japanese pop history.

Famed for his boyish good looks, and a repeated winner of the “Mr Jeans Japan” accolade, Kusanagi was bundled into a police car after a night of naked, sake-fuelled mayhem in a central Tokyo park.

“What’s wrong with being naked?” the music and television superstar is said to have screamed as the arresting officers dodged his flailing fists and attempted to wrap him in a plastic tarpaulin.

Such is the 34-year old celebrity’s fame and media profile that his arrest on charges of indecent exposure has already taken on a political dimension. Kunio Hatoyama, the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, was reportedly “furious” at the indiscretion and threatened to drop the singer from one of the biggest public information campaigns that the Government has mounted.

A noted collector of vintage denims, Mr Kusanagi is understood to have stripped completely and strewn his clothes around the park before sitting cross-legged on the grass and, said neighbours, “whooping noisily”. Having allegedly spent most of the night drinking with two friends in a nearby bar, he was reportedly alone when the police arrived on the scene at about 3am.

The bizarre incident — the star said today that he could not remember why he took his clothes off — is expected to have huge repercussions and blows a potentially huge hole in the Japanese prime-time television schedules.

As by far the most popular boy band, the five members of SMAP are also among the busiest of all Japanese media celebrities — a class of entertainer that work freakishly long hours and are contractually obliged to perform in any programme or event that their powerful talent agencies dictate.

In common with the other four members of SMAP, Kusanagi appears on a weekly cookery and variety show and five other regular weekly shows. He also makes numerous non-regular weekly appearances across all six terrestrial channels, most of them in prime-time slots. A punishing schedule of studio recording sessions and other promotional work is fitted around that.

As news of the naked arrest swept across Japan’s evening tabloid press, an army of advertisers and television producers were forced to reconsider their use of a “boy next door” figure who has been an absolutely safe bet for nearly two decades.

Both Toyota and Procter & Gamble immediately cancelled advertising campaigns that used Kusanagi, and television channels said that they were considering their position: a complex tussle between the expected public outrage and the solidity of SMAP’s historic effect on viewer ratings.

Worse still is the damage it has done to the Government’s expensive public information campaign. Selected as a clean-cut poster-boy in mid-2006, Kusanagi was made the centrepiece of a giant government drive to prepare the public for the impending conversion from terrestrial to digital television broadcasting. In the role as “digital ambassador”, he has appeared on more than 50,000 posters and a million pamphlets and appeared in 128,000 television advertising slots.

Visibly enraged, Mr Hatoyama said: “the act is shameful for a person who is asking the public to shoulder a financial burden of buying new televisions to prepare for the shift”.

The effect of the arrest has already been felt in South Korea, where Kusanagi’s fluent Korean has earned him thousands of loyal, passionate fans. News of the arrest was the top item on at least two Korean television news programmes this afternoon.

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