Simon Jakops wrote, produced, and directed nearly everything XG has ever released. Five months after his arrest and resignation, the group played Wembley for the first time. The commercial machine he built has not slowed down once.
On February 22, XG closed out a tour stop in Nagoya. Hours later, police raided a hotel room in the same city and arrested four people, among them Simon Jakops — the founder, CEO, and sole credited architect of nearly everything XG has ever been. By late March, he had been indicted, had apologized publicly, and had resigned. By June, the group was on the Wembley Stadium stage for the first time in its history. The two timelines run through the same five months without ever visibly touching.
It’s hard to overstate how singular Jakops’ role inside XG actually was. Under the name Jakops — born Junho Park, also referred to in Japanese reporting as Sakai Junho — he personally wrote, composed, and produced XG’s music from debut single “Tippy Toes” through 2026’s full-length album THE CORE. He also directed the group’s visuals and choreography concepts and ran training, management, and marketing out of XGALX, the label he founded in 2017 as an independent joint venture tied to Avex. There was no writers’ room, no rotating cast of producers to fall back on. There was Jakops, and then everyone else executing his vision.
His own history in the industry adds an uncomfortable layer to what followed. Before founding XGALX, Jakops was a member of the Korean boy group DMTN (formerly Dalmatian), which went on hiatus in 2013 after a member’s marijuana scandal. He later wrote Japanese-language lyrics for TWICE hits including “TT” and “Like OOH-AHH” before building XG from the ground up over roughly five years of training. It was also Jakops who supplied the language that came to define the group’s public identity — that XG’s music wasn’t K-pop, but something built specifically to sit outside any single national category, a positioning some coverage has shorthanded as “X-POP.”
According to Japanese police, the investigation that led to Jakops’ arrest began with an anonymous tip received roughly a year earlier, alleging drug use among people connected to the group’s management. On the night of February 22, hours after XG’s Nagoya show, officers searched a hotel room in Aichi Prefecture and found what were described as multiple bags of cocaine and dried cannabis. Jakops was taken into custody along with three others, including two Avex staff members and fellow producer Chancellor (Kim Jung-seung).
By late March, prosecutors had indicted Jakops specifically for cocaine use — he was cleared of the possession charge — and released him on bail. He posted an apology on Instagram in Japanese, Korean, and English, taking responsibility and resigning as CEO of the company he’d founded. In the weeks that followed, separate and largely unverified allegations began circulating regarding workplace treatment of staff and opaque handling of songwriting credits and revenue inside XGALX — claims that, as of this writing, remain allegations rather than settled findings, and have received far less English-language press attention than the arrest itself.
The Trajectory That Didn’t Bend
What’s striking isn’t that XG survived the scandal — plenty of acts survive a producer’s legal trouble. It’s how little the group’s forward momentum in Western markets appears to have registered it at all. The Asia leg of “XG World Tour: The Core” continued on its original schedule, including this month’s stops in Bangkok and Manila. Pre-release single “GALA” became XG’s third song to crack the Top 40 on U.S. radio, following “Left Right,” which spent 13 consecutive weeks on the chart. On June 6, roughly ten weeks after Jakops’ resignation, XG became the first Japanese act to perform at Capital’s Summertime Ball, sharing the Wembley Stadium stage with Niall Horan, Calvin Harris, RAYE, and Take That. A dedicated Wembley Arena headline date followed for September, alongside a Paris show and a seven-date North American arena run booked for November. In July, the group landed its first cover of Dork, the UK music magazine, framed as a group that had “built a genre of their own from scratch.”
A few explanations sit alongside each other, and none of them require the others to be false.
- Separate media ecosystems. The arrest was reported extensively in Japanese and Korean entertainment press, and picked up by regional English outlets covering K-pop and J-pop specifically. The Western pop press covering Wembley, Coachella, and Billboard largely operates in a different lane, with different editors and different assumed context — coverage of the Summertime Ball rarely mentioned the arrest at all.
- The machine already had its own momentum. Tour dates, chart runs, and festival bookings are locked in months ahead of time by promoters, radio programmers, and venues — institutions with their own incentives to follow through regardless of what’s happening at the label. A scandal has to be severe enough to make a promoter eat a cancellation fee, and this one, so far, hasn’t cleared that bar.
- Nobody’s auditing backstage as long as tickets sell. The workplace and crediting allegations that surfaced after Jakops’ resignation have had real difficulty finding an audience outside of dedicated K-pop and J-pop fan and trade press — precisely because they don’t come with a single dramatic event, like an arrest, attached to a date and a headline.
The least comfortable version of this reading is the third one: that a fanbase and a touring industry, once locked into a trajectory, will keep buying tickets and playing songs on the radio largely independent of what’s being reported about the people who built the thing they’re consuming.
The open question isn’t really about ticket sales — it’s about authorship. XG’s entire catalog to date was written, produced, and visually directed by one person who no longer holds a formal role at the company. No permanent successor has been publicly named as of this writing. Whatever XGALX releases next will be the first real test of whether “X-POP” was a genre built to outlast its founder, or a genre that was, in practice, just one producer’s singular aesthetic wearing a bigger name.
I want to be careful here: an indictment is not a conviction, and the workplace and crediting allegations that followed Jakops’ resignation are, as far as public reporting shows, unresolved and unverified. None of that is the point of this piece.
The point is the gap between two facts that are both true at once: the man who single-handedly built XG’s music, image, and business is gone from the company under genuinely serious circumstances, and the commercial trajectory he built has not paused for a single scheduled date since. That’s not necessarily evidence of anything sinister — plenty of institutions outlive the people who founded them. But it’s worth naming plainly, especially for readers encountering XG primarily through Wembley headlines and Billboard charts: the version of this story you’re seeing and the version being reported in Japan and Korea are, right now, two different stories about the same group.
— KpopWave Editorial
Reporting cross-verified across Malay Mail, Yahoo News Malaysia, Rolling Stone Philippines, Asian Junkie, KCL (K-pop Company League), Namuwiki, AEG Presents, and Sports Khan, citing original reporting by Yomiuri Shimbun and Tokyo Metropolitan Police statements (Feb–Jul 2026). The case remains an active legal matter; workplace and financial allegations referenced are attributed to subsequent reporting and have not been independently confirmed by KpopWave. Quoted material is limited and independently confirmed across multiple outlets.