Remembering Kimura Hana (Audio w/ Transcript)

Remembering Kimura Hana (Audio w/ Transcript)

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Kimura Hana
Picture: Etsuo Hara/Getty Images
We talk with guest Farrah Hasnain about the life and career of wrestler and Terrace House star Kimura Hana, the factors behind her death, and the future of the series.

The death of Kimura Hana sent shockwaves, not just through Japan, but through the world. The 22-year-old pro wrestler and star on the Fuji Television series Terrace House is thought to have taken her own life after a torrent of online bullying. The incident has led many celebrities and politicians in the country to call for toughening the country’s laws against online slander.

One of the English commenters who’s spoken out a lot about Hana’s death on Twitter is Farrah Hasnain. Farrah is a researcher who specializes in the study of mixed-race and immigrant communities and K-12 education in Osaka, Japan. And she’s also a dedicated TH fan! Farrah was swift to point out early on how Hana’s mixed race (her mother is Japanese and her father is Indonesian) played a role in the online hate campaign against her.

Farrah graciously agreed to join me for a discussion recently in which she gave a full accounting of Hana’s career as a professional wrestler. We also talked about the factors that contributed to her death, online harassment, and whether Terrace House will ever make a comeback.

Listen to the full episode below. A full transcript appears below the video. And remember, if you like this content, please subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Remembering Kimura Hana: Her Life, Her Death, and What Comes Next (w/ Transcript)

The death of Kimura Hana sent shockwaves, not just through Japan, but through the world. The 22-year-old pro wrestler and star on the Fuji Television series Terrace House is thought to have taken her own life after a torrent of online bullying.

Hana’s Career

So she said she was dating this guy and he said that he was very against her pursuing pro wrestling at all. So he said it’s either pro wrestling or me and she’s like, pro wrestling.

Jay: All right. So here we go. Impromptu livestream, impromptu Crowdcast. Farrah and I’ve been doing these very off the cuff, really off the cuff a couple of times on Instagram. We decided, well, let’s do something a little, a bit more formal to talk about Terrace House. And so we moved it over to the Crowdcast so we could have recorded for posterity and also uploaded to the YouTube later. So thanks for people who are in attendance. And Farrah, you want to introduce yourself really quickly?

Farrah: Yeah, sure. So my name is Farrah. I’m from Washington DC, I lived in Japan for over six years. So before I moved to Osaka, I lived in Shizuoka in Hamamatsu for five years. Yes, and soon I will move to Tokyo for graduate school in the fall. So I am a huge Terrace House fan. Yeah.

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Jay: Yes, yes. Huge Terrace House fans.

Farrah: I’m a Hana Kimura fan. I dyed my hair pink because of Hana like, you know, yeah, I’m hardcore fan.

Jay: Excellent. Maybe let’s dive into it and usual protocol for folks who are watching here. So if you have any questions or comments, you can just leave them in the side scroll over here and we will, well Farrah’s on her phone because her computer is old, so she’s not going to look at the comments. I’ll look at the comments and we will incorporate whatever you have to say, whatever questions you might have. So I think Farrah, you wanted to start off by just giving a little bit of a biography on Kimura Hana. So why don’t you take it away?

Farrah: Yeah, sure. So Hana Kimura was born on September 3rd, 1997 in Yokohama, Japan. Her mother Kyoka Kimura paved the way for a lot of female fighters in Japan especially. So her mother Kyoko Kimura is a renowned MMA fighter and a female wrestler, and she only retired I believe three or four years ago.

And Hana is half Indonesian. So her mother, when she was doing like FMA fighting and competing, she traveled all over the world. So I believe Kyoko Kimura lived in Mexico for some time and then she went to Indonesia. She met an Indonesian man, married him, and had Hana in 1997 and within the same year, she got a divorce in 1987. And so growing up as a mixed-race person in Japan, Hana was half Indonesian, but she didn’t really have a clear connection with her Indonesian roots. She didn’t know her father. She didn’t know the language, and she’d be constantly asked if she did.

And actually, throughout Hana’s life, she didn’t want to be a wrestler, like she constantly said she didn’t want to be a wrestler. So on YouTube, I found this interesting like interview she did when she was six years old. She, it’s really, really cute. I think I sent you the link.

🌼ギャツビ🌺 on Twitter: “小さい頃の木村花ちゃんがめちゃくちゃ可愛いから見てほしい。彼女には、このまま大人になって成長して恋をして結婚して…って言う幸せがあったはず。悲しいね。#木村花 pic.twitter.com/94EfXHe9z3 / Twitter”

小さい頃の木村花ちゃんがめちゃくちゃ可愛いから見てほしい。彼女には、このまま大人になって成長して恋をして結婚して…って言う幸せがあったはず。悲しいね。#木村花 pic.twitter.com/94EfXHe9z3

Jay: Yeah. Okay.

Farrah: Yeah, it has the timestamp on it. Are you able to pull it up here or should I just summarize it?

Farrah: Just summarize it. Oh, okay. So there’s a really adorable interview on YouTube and Hana appears on TV at six years old with Kyoko Kimura and it’s mainly an interview between Kyoko Kimura and ISAO. ISAO is another famous wrestler who Kyoko Kimura ends up marrying like in a separate marriage when Hana is like a teenager. So yeah, that’s an interesting part. And so when Hana’s six years old, the interviewer asked her lots of questions. So they’re like, Oh, you’re going to be a wrestler, right? She’s like, no, I’m going to be a marathon runner. I can run fast, you know, and Kyoko like she emphasized that Hana is more interested in dancing, gymnastics, jumping things that are more artistic, well not artistic, but like more had to take more action compared to like fighting.

So for a long time and Hana briefly mentioned this on Terrace House, but she did dancing for a long time. She did hip hop dancing. Like her life. Like her entire life she did dancing. Yeah. And she mentioned this on Terrace’s house. I think some wrestling fans know that. So when she was in high school I believe there’s a Wikipedia article of Hana Kimura in English, but I think that some of the facts are wrong. So it says that she went to a college, but actually Hana Kimura dropped out of high school when she was a teenager.

And this was, I’m not saying like this was the reason, I don’t know the reason, but this was around the same time that her mother had married ISAO in the second marriage and got divorced I think two years later. So it was around that time that she was in high school and then dropped out. And so she mentioned this on Terrace House briefly too, that she never finished high school, but she was deciding what career she wanted to pursue. So even though dancing was a hobby for her, to find a stable, productive career that was not at a company, she outwardly said that she would hate working at a company because she’s too unique and she wants to be creative. Like she wants to have creative control over her work. So she decided to pursue wrestling. And so when she was around 18, she enrolled in a wrestling-like dojo and started with competitive wrestling there. And then when she graduated, she had to decide what her persona was. So when you’re a wrestler, it’s similar to acting, in a way. You’re portraying a character on the stage and in the ring. And so there are babyfaces and heels and, Oh, and this magazine I’m going to show later, it talks more about how her character change. So originally Hana was a babyface and this magazine shows old photos of her, so it shows her throughout time. So this was when she won a very significant match.

Jay: Unfortunately, your camera’s a little spotty, so it’s a little hard to say.

Farrah: Oh no. Okay. But basically, so imagine so when Hana started, she had a baby face personality, so she was more coy and shy on the stage and her outfit was totally different. She had black hair, not her natural hair. And she wear a kinoychi Ninja outfit that’s red and black. So when you Google images of her, like in a red and black coat kinoychi outfit, that’s more her debut of what she looked like. Yeah. And later on she changed her character. So she briefly went to Mexico and she decided to switch to cyber goth, which was very different. And this is the kind of the image that she ends up being later on. Yeah, with the fluffy leggings and why she looks like a raver. It’s because she totally changed her style and she became a heel. So when you’re a heel you’re more aggressive and vicious in the ring. And when she debuted on her 19th, like a little bit after her 19th birthday, she was known as the mysterious ex. And she debuted under this promotion, which is I guess the team or the company representing you. It was called Wrestle One. And it’s significant because there’s not that many women in Wrestle One or even in wrestling in general.

Hana’s Army

And the reason why she created the International Army, it was because she wanted to unite the misfits, like the whole image of Tokyo Cyber Squad and the international army was that we will take the misfits, we will take the foreigners who are not accepted.

So because of the promotion she was under, did not have enough women’s matches, she had to go to matches outside of her own, like promotion to compete. And she also joined the Oo-Edotai (大江戸隊). So Oo-Edotai is a organization, her mom founded or co-founded and she won Artists of Stardom, which is a very prestigious award. And this was only within her first year of winning. But in January, 2017, she got an injury around her hand and she couldn’t fight anymore. So her promotion did this rule, special rule in wrestling called the Freebird rule and in WWE is called the Freebird rule. And basically when you compete for a title, someone in your team or promotion can take your place because of the injury or something. So a wrestler named Viper stood in for her, but she still lost the title. So as soon as she got the title, she easily lost it. And because of her losing her title, she changed a lot. So some people in the wrestling community had mixed feelings about her. They thought she was hyped up because she was actually very attractive and very young, but actually she was a really good wrestler and a lot of wrestling fans can confirm this.

And she obviously like acted cute and friendly on stage, but it was to play up was she already had, it wasn’t to hide any weakness that she had. But yeah, in late 2018, she went on a tour in Mexico and she switched to cyber, sorry, to cyber girl. But she had a lot of problems when she changed her image. She wasn’t able to sell merch. She started acting more cocky in her persona on stage and she got a lot of negative feedback, but she didn’t complain at all. She listened and she changed her persona again. So then she changed into a more like sexy vicious, like kowai personality, and her wrestling and her performance in wrestling was more like a comedic one. And her identity as a haafu connects to what she did for wrestling by far. So she started and joined the Tokyo Cyber squad. But the original name for Tokyo Cyber Squad was the International Army. And yeah.

And the reason why she created the International Army, it was because she wanted to unite the misfits, like the whole image of Tokyo Cyber Squad and the international army was that we will take the misfits, we will take the foreigners who are not accepted. We will take fighters no matter what part of life or what country they are from. So she wanted to make a safe Haven for foreign wrestlers in Japan. That was her goal. And so there were two foreign wrestlers. I believe their names are Bobby Tyler, Sadie Gibbs and Jamie Haters. They are one of the originals who joined her squad. And in 2019, so very recently, she defeated Jungle Keyona who was part of another faction. And when she created the International Army she had Jungle Keyona join right after she defeated that person. She likes, she defended her and she had Jungle Keyona joined her team or her faction. Sorry, I missed, sorry for the wrestlers. I’m just using terms probably, but she joined her faction, which is, you know, a little like a mini team behind it. And later on, because it grew in grew it actually became a majority of Japanese female wrestlers. So that’s why they decided to change the name to Tokyo Cyber Squad. The image behind Tokyo Cyber Squad is that they’re silly and fun and original and they’re entertaining at the same time.

And it’s quite different from other factions in Japanese pro wrestling, especially because when you’re in a faction, you’re kind of like a, like a army troop or a team. So you have the same kind of personality or appearance and you try to be very uniform even in terms of your persona. But with Tokyo Cyber Squad, the whole thing was that everyone is an individual and everyone’s a unique person and we’re trying to promote diversity and trying to promote acceptance for being different. That was the whole mission of the faction Hana Kimura led, she was the leader of this. And the slogan for Tokyo Cyber Squad is everybody is different. Everyone is good. That’s Tokyo Cyber Squad. Yes sir. And they do this pose before they start fighting and that’s their philosophy. So in the first episode of Terrace House, she kind of has a lot of Easter eggs. So if you’re a fan of Hana Kimura already, you would have already known this. I didn’t know this until like later on when I was trying to read up stuff about her. So in the first episode she was asked why she joined the show and she said that she was looking for someone to join her mission or her mission was to have someone come with her and be her partner or something. But it’s not a very like, like a military person. And she was like, I’m looking for someone and this is the pose they do when they start like Tokyo Cyber Squad. She was like, yes sir. Searching.

So she kept doing that. And then there’s this a member named Yolo and she developed this really adorable crush on this basketball player named Yal. He plays for this Yokohama basketball team. She sees him and when she was like trying to hide that she like has any infection for him. She’s very like cute and shy in Terrace House. And when she joined Terrace House in September, 2019 she explained that she wanted to introduce a whole different kind of audience to women’s pro wrestling and she also wanted to find love. She actually doesn’t have that much experience with love before she came on Terrace House. So she revealed the fact that she only dated one guy officially before coming on the show. And this was when she was in her late teens before she debuted as a wrestler, or started wrestling anyway. So she said she was dating this guy and he said that he was very against her pursuing pro wrestling at all. So he said it’s either pro wrestling or me and she’s like, pro wrestling.

Jay: Easy decision. Thank you. Bye bye.

Farrah: Bye. Thank you. Next. Yeah, that’s the only relationship, at least that’s what she said on the show, that was the only relationship she had. And constantly on the show, you see conversations between her Jungle Keyona, and Konami, the famous wrestlers that she’s teammates with and you see them on the ring, but you also see them outside of the ring as women. And they’re talking about this dynamic of how they struggle to find love and acceptance and dating outside of the ring because people like feel emasculated when they’re with them and they hide their profession when they go to goukon (合コン; dating parties) and stuff because that’s not accepted in Japan in their opinion. So. Yeah. Yeah. I went, I went pretty long.

Being Different in Japan

Jay: That’s good. Thank you. Thank you for the very thorough summary. So maybe we’ll jump into a few things. I think I might bounce around a little bit here. So, and if you don’t want to talk about this, it’s fine, but you took a lot of flack online because you came out of the, you basically said, you know, Hana being half Indonesian was definitely a factor in all this. And I was wondering if you could just like talk about your thoughts around that and why you posted that.

The [minority students] were the ones who are mostly targeted for bullying and had the highest dropout rate….They would drop out within their first year or two at my high school [in Japan].

Farrah: So when I posted this, I was very upset about what happened with Hana obviously. I stand by what I said and what I said in this tweet was that Hana was definitely targeted for bullying in general because she was half Indonesian. And it was because of several reasons. So some I noticed that the people arguing with me, they’d never watched Terrace House and they never knew about Hana as a wrestler anyway. So I’ve gotten several responses saying that, Oh, like nobody knew that she was haafu. Nobody knew there’s nobody. No. Like that’s the thing about cyberbullies. They’re very calculative and they pay attention to every move you make. And yes. So in the very first episode Terrace House, like Hana is, I think Hana asks a foreign member or a household member of the house, like their ethnic origin or their hometown or something. And then she says, Oh, I’m half Indonesian, my father’s Indonesian. She doesn’t real, she doesn’t talk, go on about like her mom being a single mom. She doesn’t go on about any other things. She just simply says, I’m half Indonesian. That’s it. And so if you’re a Terrace House fan or if you’re just a viewer of Terrace House, of course you’re going to know that she’s half Indonesian to begin with.

And also in her wrestling interviews in the past, especially when she created or when she started to lead for Tokyo Cyber Squad, she brought up how she was treated really horribly as a child and growing up in Yokohama as a hafu, and how she felt different from other people because she was a havu, and how being half Indonesian really made her feel like an outsider and a misfit. And she wanted permission with Tokyo Cyber Squad essentially was to not feel like a misfit anymore and to feel loved. Right. And because, you know, she talked about her identity and how it affected her growing up in Japan. That’s especially why I said what I said and like but I do kind of understand why people went off, especially cause they didn’t read the thread. They just read the one, the first tweet. But I don’t know. Sorry. What was I saying, yeah, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. But yeah, as in like having the issue, she did bring up her race before and yeah, like I meant to say that, you know, constantly like if you’re a minority in Japan, you’re going to be targeted for bullying a lot more. And I used to work at a high school in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, and it was a public high school. There were over a thousand students and a huge percentage of them were Filipino, Brazilian, like a Nikkei or mixed race, Japanese kids.

They were the ones who are mostly targeted for bullying and they had the highest dropout rate at my high school. They would drop out within their first year or two at my high school. You know, and knowing the fact that Hannah is one of those kids that she represented that part of Japan that you don’t see in mainstream media says a lot. You know, so Hannah like in a way like, yes, she is unique but she’s also representative of a serious problem in Japanese society. Cause I’ve seen cases like hers before. I see my former students have self harm, scars. I’ve seen my former students pass away. I’ve seen my students have bullying issues that she didn’t explicitly disclose, but I’m pretty sure happened to her when she grew up in Japan, especially in 1997. So to say that racism is not a motivator for calling a woman a gorilla, to say that racism is not a motivator to, you know, exclude a mixed race, Japanese person in a Japanese majority state. Is it, it means like that person doesn’t understand how, especially children interact with each other or how people interact with minority groups here in Japan. You don’t see people like Hana or Tofas or other members of Terrace House on TV.

That’s why I liked Terrace House so much because they showed all of these mixed race Japanese people and, ethnically non Japanese people like VB in on the main screen interacting with each other in the same house, getting along really well, you know, and you never see it on TV. And that’s what I loved about Terrace House the most. And I do agree with all the criticism Terrace House has gotten, a lot of it, but I think some of it is a bit misguided. Like it wasn’t 100% bad and actually most of Terrace House wasn’t even that dramatic. I think it was just the way it was promoted in Japan and the scenes that, and also another problem is on Netflix. You’re not allowed to take screenshots or share footage.

Jay: Don’t even get me started.

Farrah: You know, so I’m, I couldn’t take screenshots or footage, but there are many heartfelt scenes Hana has to understand her identity more. Like there’s this, there’s an episode. If you don’t want to watch like the whole season of Terrace House, I highly recommend watching Tokyo 2019 to 2020. That’s the season, right? This season episode. Don’t start with the costume episode, so start from the beginning. When Hana came in, start from episode 27 and 28. Those are the best episodes ever. So in episode 27, I believe it was 27 or 28 there’s a member named Topas and he’s full Filipino. He’s actually used to work at a factory in Aichi, in Toyohashi, which is one town. He’s like, he’s a few times over from Hamamatsu. Like we have mutual like family connection, you know, like, you know, and he won this TV competition and he ended up being like the famous like Willie Frankie’s personal assistant before he came on Terrace House.

Yes. He grew up in a very rough household. His father left him and in this one particular scene he’s crying so much and he’s drunk and he talks about how he’s not lovable. He doesn’t feel loved and he doesn’t know how to love other people because he doesn’t know what it’s like to have a father and how Willie Frankie was a father figure to him and Hana, she’s nodding and listening. But when you realize how Hana’s life is so similar to Topas’ and how she was listening to what he was saying, you realize that she was able to have this dialogue with someone who had the same experience with her that she probably couldn’t have had when she needed it before Terrace House. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah. I have not been watching for several years, but I did watch, my wife watched. Yes. or did up until now. But I did watch the first couple of seasons and that was one of the things that always, that always struck me about the show was kind of the, there was always like a kind of an international complexion to the cast. I remember one of the earliest seasons, I think it was an Asian American woman who is on, I completely blanking on her name, but it was really interesting because there’s a few exceptions I think on Japanese TV and then like morning shows and things like that. And you know, you’ve got like Robert Campbell, you’ve got Dave Spector, and you’ve got a few of those folks who are doing more like the serious commentator role over there. But a lot of times foreigners are, let’s be honest, included for the laughs and the giggles. So it was really nice to see the show where, you know, both Japanese and non-Japanese cast members came in. Everyone’s speaking Japanese to each other and just like kind of being ordinary and getting along. And I really take to your point about, you know, not a lot, usually it’s like nothing like really terribly dramatic happened. We did an article about Terrace House like a year ago and you know, we’re like why is everyone watching this boring show because when you compare it seriously, when you compare it to like Survivor, you compare it to Big Brother, you compare it to like American track. It’s not that crazy and it’s, there’s like, really wholesome quality about it or there was to it that I think. And I think that’s the element that really dragged everyone in. It really did get closer to the feeling of, Oh, you’re just, we’re just looking in this living room or that this dining room of six people sitting around the dining table and actually just talking about their lives and figuring stuff out together and occasionally falling in love.

Farrah: Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. Like one of my favorite, well he used to be on Vine, now he’s big on YouTube, his name is Prosey D and he does voice acting and stuff. He’s really cool. He did this one, it’s very like very short, like a few seconds clip. Like that’s a parody of Terrace House. He was like, well Terrace House is actually like, and he basically says, hi, how are you? I’m great. You wanna grab dinner? Okay. Scene. Dramatic music. You know, that like, I’m not trying to stan for Terrace house. I do understand there are some issues behind it, but overall I think they did a lot of progress in mainstream Japanese media in terms of minority representation.

A Perfect Storm

Jay: Yeah. I agree with that. So let’s talk about some of those issues a little bit because honestly, I’ve compiled a couple of links and reading up on some things and the more I like kind of read up on it, the more there’s a sense of like, there’s this like kind of perfect storm of events that just kind of coalesce that led or at least like heavily influenced the events that happened and led to led to us losing Hana. So I know like, I think it was earlier this week or this week, yes, this week. I’m sorry. Time has lost all meaning.

Farrah: It was, yeah, it was like 8 days ago.

Jay: Yeah, I think there’s a set of Julian articles coming out, a lot of articles coming out and you can kind of like, you can feel like the production team and the various jimusho (talent agencies) are kind of behind this, putting some of this stuff out there. But seven posts came out with that initial article that was pretty explosive, interviewed current and former staff. And they basically said, Oh yeah, there’s no strip, but there’s a story and told tales of things like producers and staff influencing the direction of the events. There was one former staff member who alleged that there actually used to be a kissing bonus, a 50,000 yen at some point which apparently according to that staff member eventually got dropped. But also occasions that people, or staff, basically telling people, you know, do this over again, but be angrier, like come at him harder this next time. And also some talk from the current staff that there was maybe pressure put on Hana because she was in some ways already an actor because she was a pro wrestler. And pro wrestling is, like you said, a lot of it is actually acting. And so there’s probably some pressure on her and probably a lot of pressure that she put on herself as a result of that. But there’s also been dueling pushback against that. So today I tweeted about the article. It’s an interview with John Momo who then Takeuchi Momoko when she appeared on the show. Is now an idol. I think she was in Bando Ja Nai Mon (バンドじゃないもん!) and a couple other groups. [Correction: Chanmomo, as of this writing, is still an active member of Bando Ja Nai Mon!. – Jay] But she basically flatly denied the term of Japanese being used for this. This yarase giwaku (やらせ疑惑), she denied that there was like any kind of forced scenes or forced acting or compelling the show’s cast act one way and another. And she made what I thought was an interesting point. She was asked like, did you and the rest of the cast get, you know, hibouchuushou (誹謗中傷), you get slandered, you get defamed. And she was like, Oh yeah, all the time. But the difference I think we had was that we were together in the house and had each other to lean on. And then Hana got basically she got cut off from the show and the cast and was in her own apartment. She was cut off from her wrestling career because of COVID-19. Right. Circumstances like beyond anybody’s control, but she was basically, you know, the support network that was there for cast members like Chanmomo and others in the past was not there for her.

Problematic Cast Members

Farrah: Yeah. I 100% agree with that. To go off on the how fake Terrace House seemed to be, I agree with it to an extent. When I saw the articles, because later on in this season things became a spectacle. So I don’t know if your wife has told you about Shacho. So in the most recent episodes, so like the latest part of the series, there’s this Japanese guy named Shacho who comes on the show. He replaces Yo when Yo the basketball player leaves the house. And he runs his own company and the company itself is really nice sounding. Basically they intervene and help people leave their jobs and confront their companies when they want to leave the company. Yeah. Sounds good. Right.

Jay: Perfect. That’s probably a needed service.

Farrah: Yes. So at first when Shacho came on, I was like, Oh, he seems cool. Okay. It’s kind of cute. Maybe, you know, but then he starts acting very creepy and aggressive towards one of the female members named Yumai. And she’s a office worker I believe. But she also is a like grab your model and she does car shows and things like that. And there’s this one particular hashtag that he created I think, to make fun of what he did in the beginning of his, when he came on the show is called Being sweet. And basically it was the bottle incident. And when he came on the show, he was talking to Yumai and he gives Yumai his beer bottle and she drinks it. And then in front of her he takes the same bottle and like drinks it, but it looks like he’s making out with a bottle and then puts it back on the table.

Jay: That’s bizarre.

Farrah: Yes. And then it escalates more and more and more. So, spoiler alert, I think everything in the cast will be a spoiler. But yes, but this is important, I think. So there’s a notorious scene where he takes Yumai on a Christmas date in the eliminations and he basically forces her to kiss him, and she keeps pushing him away and refusing. He’s like, no, no, no. I bought you this Lip Cream. And I got, so I got personally offended when I saw the scenes. He took out this brand name like Lip Cream. The brand is Jo Malone. It’s a really nice brand, very fancy. He takes a huge dollop of the lip cream and forcefully like puts it on her lips.

Jay: Wow. And no one ever thought at some point, like in the whole crew and the production, it’s like, Oh, maybe we should stop this.

Farrah: Yeah. And then he continues to kiss her and then the panelists, they kind of make fun of the scene, but they don’t really specify like, Hey, this is sexual assault or sexual harassment. You’re forcing her to kiss you. And this has happened multiple times on Terrace House. This is not the first time. So last, the previous season, opening new doors, there’s a famous Terrace House star named Cena, Cena as actually from the very original, like Terrace house boys and girls. Yeah. So spoiler alert, she continues to be single and she’s actually, she joins the house and opening new doors. So like the season before this one and there’s this member named Shohet, he has very big detective Conan sized ears and he sings in a band. They go on this date and she’s, I think she’s really drunk and he forcefully kisses her and she keeps pushing him away. But he keeps, yeah. In America or anywhere really. This is sexual assault. Right. And yet when that happened on Terrace House, the panelists didn’t really reprimand him for doing what he did. It was considered as a joke, like, Oh ha ha, you’re making a woman uncomfortable, you’re making a woman feel pain, and you’re forcing this physical act on her. Ha ha. You know, it wasn’t, there wasn’t really an open discussion about how gross it was or how demeaning it was. And another thing that I have a problem with Terrace house was the gaps. The time get ups.

So in Japan we get a new episode or we used to I should say, we get a new episode every Tuesday and then there’s a week break. So, and even then the footage that was filmed that would be aired is like what I believe maybe one to, one and a half to three months gap from when it airs in Japan. Outside of Japanese Netflix, if you have a Netflix account outside of Japan and you’re not going to see episodes every week, you’ll get a batch of, I believe, six episodes. So already there’s a huge gap between not only Japanese speaking fans or with English speaking fans, but there’s also a divide between fans in Japan and fans outside of Japan. And Terrace House has a huge international following. And some people, you know, they use VPNs, but majority of them don’t. Like they just watch episodes as they come. So there’s this huge gap of knowledge and there’s not really a proper online discourse to be had when these episodes air. So when I saw this I was so confused and I would go on Japanese Twitter and people are making fun of what happens like as a meme almost. But there wasn’t too much of this direct call out. Like, I didn’t see the same energy about Hana running like with anything else wrong with Terrace House.

Like, I didn’t see this kind of call out when a member got sexually assaulted. I didn’t see this call out with, you know, other problematic things that happen on the show, especially in Japanese. And even then, I only saw, I believe two English articles about the sexual assault, like in Opening New Doors. And I think, and again, there’s this time gap and the only English publication saying anything was maybe a staff writer from Japan Times and maybe Reddit. But of course, you know, if you’re behind and you want to get spoilers, you’re not going to read that Reddit thread. Right. You’re not going to read that Reddit thread. You know, as soon as that episode happens. Yeah. Like there was, there’s a lack of an international dialogue because of that time gap. I think. So, I feel like, yeah. And in the most recent episodes, I believe the last episode that aired in Japan was episode 42. And 43 and 44 were supposed to come out, but now we won’t get it. Shacho continues to do creepy things and there’s a scene where Shacho and Yumai get drunk in Hokkaido, and I remember exactly how Terrace House Japan promoted the new episode. So on Twitter I saw this really disgusting image. Of course it’s all erased on Twitter now because Terrace House, Japan deleted everything on the social media, but there was this scene and so it has a Netflix logo and it says airing on Tuesday, blah, blah, blah.

And Shacho was basically putting Yumai in a chokehold and forcing. So Yumai is like this, and Shacho is trying to kiss her and it looks still violent to me. And that’s the picture they use to promote Terrace House on Twitter and on Instagram. And you know, I never see. And see, that I think it just, it’s a slap in the face to the Terrace House fans too because it just makes us look like, you know, we love seeing women get assaulted on TV and we, we stand, you know, when we don’t, you know, we are against that. And this was not majority of the scenes. This is not to say that it wasn’t wrong, but those scenes put me off the most because they seem so different from the flow of conversation happening in the show. So that’s why like with the allegations, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true for those particular scenes because they seem very forced to me. And they were the scenes being promoted, not upon a falling in love, not of Hana’s watching Hana’s match or not of like really positive things. They were focusing on marketing based on trash TV elements that were not present in most of the episodes.

Jay: Right. And I’ve wondered how much, basically the position of Fuji Telavi with respect to other TV stations in Japan has been driving this. So you look into it, you know, Fuji has not had a good string of years these past few years. It basically has, has like two things going for it right now. I has fairly successful Suits, so Japanese adaptation of the NBC drama which is actually pretty darn good. And then it has Terrace House. and Terrace House more than being a hit is like an international sensation. It is. Another thing that I am kind of depressed about with this whole situation is that, you know, I’m a Japanese drama fan because I, because I’m a masochist apparently. But there’s some really good stuff there. And unfortunately because of like combination of production values.

Farrah: It put you off on Japanese media I think too.

Jay: Yeah. Yeah. But basically Japanese drama doesn’t get like the same sort of international attention that, for example, Korean drama gets. And it’s a real shame because really good shows just end up getting like, you know, not knowing it’s like stuff like, you know, DELE and 3-nen A-gumi and things like that recently that have been just like stellar, you know, nobody outside of Japan gets to know about. So here you have this woman show that people outside of Japan are also incredibly interested in. But I think that in the end, you know, you talk about those advertisements and I think a lot of, I think we’ll find out a huge driver of this, which at Fuji as just been seen that’s seeing this income go down kind of year after year. It’s not holding up against Ni-Tere, which is kind of like the dominant power right now. It doesn’t, hasn’t got a lot of hits. It gets a lot of criticism online that they’re very Showa era, that the people in the Fuji TV staff and the upper echelons in particular simply don’t understand what people want to watch today and thus aren’t creating programming that people actually want to watch. So you add that to this equation and you basically have Fuji probably wanted to take its one hit and do whatever it could with it. And you know, particularly from the kind of things you described, it sounds like it was trying to really egg up the drama and turn Terrace House into American reality TV.

Terrace House: They Fixed What Wasn’t Broken

I do understand there are some issues behind it, but overall I think [Terrace House] did a lot of progress in mainstream Japanese media in terms of minority representation.

Farrah: Yes. It’s like, yeah, it’s the same like don’t fix what isn’t broken. Terrace House was fine as it was without the creepy sexual assaults or the creepy fights that happen. Yeah. So yeah, like, and even in the beginning of this year series, I actually didn’t really like it, I almost stopped watching because yeah, I noticed for example, like on the members’ social media, they weren’t posting pictures together. Like it was always that they weren’t really friends with each other, even though they’ve been living together for many months and they didn’t have that chemistry I saw in previous seasons of Terrace House. So I think maybe viewership also went down. And also another thing I saw the Jake Adelstein article on Daily Beast, and I didn’t know this because I, I’m like I usually just watch Terrace House on Netflix, but Fuji TV on May 18th, they re-aired the costume episode.

Jay: Yeah, yeah, they did. Yeah. And that was, that was the major cause of the recent Kick Up. Yeah. And that’s something a lot of people have called Fuji TV out for because it’s like, yeah, it’s new. You know, what happened when this originally aired on Netflix and you know, if you aired it, you know, what kind of, what was going to happen in terms of the social media appearance. That was a totally presentable decision. I think one of the other factors that I actually hadn’t realized, and I had known this news, I’d heard about it like months ago and it kind of fell out of my brain. So the commentators, you know, so the cast who’s sitting in the studio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. So there’s a, you’ve got Tokui Mioshi, you’ve got Yamasato Ryota, You and Torindoru Reina, all sitting in the studio basically acting like us, the viewers and being kind of like our Greek chorus for this whole thing. And there’s like a real equality to that. And one of the commentators, Tokui Miyoshi, was like one of the more particularly when you like contrast it into Yamasato was very much like more kind of equal in his judgment and like kind of like an evenhanded commentator, but he has not been on the show for a while because it came out that he had like something like over 1-oku yen [over USD $1M] like in undeclared income in his business. So he had to kind of step away from the, into the shadows for a while. But there was an article in J Prime where some people were saying, Oh that’s another potential factor here is that, you know, the commentators were out of whack. The balance was, the force was disrupted and because it’s kind of key member wasn’t there to provide that balance he usually provides.

Farrah: Yeah, I think Tokui’s departure definitely had a lot to do with it. I noticed the chemistry or just the atmosphere amongst the panel kind of changed when he left because what mostly happened was, and also he would balance off jokes between Yama-chan and You, one of the members named You, and without Tokui being there as like an icebreaker or like having a funny reaction or like a clever insight. It’s like something was missing with the panel in my opinion. I’ve been rewatching this season of Terrace House cause I’m writing some articles about what happened and I noticed that they deleted this one audio segment where you can hear the commentary. So in Netflix, Japan, there are two audio options with the Terrace House episodes. I don’t know if this audio option is available outside of Japan or if it’s true. I don’t think there’s even any subtitles for it. The other audio options

Jay: I think there are the Japanese subtitles in the US version. Yeah, they keep the Japanese. Anything Netflix produced keeps the Japanese subtitles as an option. When it’s on Netflix? I don’t think probably the commentary track is not available. I don’t know. We VPN it, so don’t ask me.

Farrah: Okay. Yeah. So usually when I watched Terrace House there’s one that’s regular Japanese audio, but then there’s another Japanese audio option where you just hear commentary. It’s similar to a DVD commentary and they’re commenting throughout the show, not just in those panelists cut off scenes. And on, I believe on the 28th or around that time, on top of deleting everything on social media, they deleted that audio option from Netflix Japan for only just for the night, 2019 2020 season. They deleted that option.

Jay: The don’t want people going past, going through it doing analysis, being like that’s what did it.

Farrah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’m glad, I’m glad they kept the show on Netflix so I could observe it from a new perspective and see if I missed anything. But yeah, from what I recall, I don’t remember anything that panel is saying being overly attacking Hana or even in the costume final episode. Actually they were justifying that, you know, like this meant to her in the wrestling ring and she’s overly upset and also like, who hasn’t been in a fight with someone they cared about because, or someone they’ve lived with in the same house, you know, like there’s a difference between having a fight or being misspoken or saying something that unintentionally hurt someone and eventually moving on then having it recorded and having it viewable for anybody to see, and being constantly, constantly reminded of it. Like it’s being human times a thousand, right? And the thing about the costume episode was that the person who made, who accidentally messed up her costume was someone Hana dated like on the show. So there’s a lot more friction because of other elements that happened before the costume. So it wasn’t, I don’t think it was merely, her anger didn’t just come from, you know, having her costume ruined. I mean a lot of it was, but it was also because she dated this person and this person wasn’t who she thought he was or they had problems living together.

So again, and when she started dating this person, Kai, she was already heartbroken from being rejected by Yule, like this other male house number. And Kai was the one who made the comfort her and told her that she was lovable and should find someone who would accept her. And it doesn’t matter if she wrestles or not. And that wrestling was cool. And like he made her help, not feel ashamed of it. And having this fallout, and also like in the actual fight, she didn’t just bring up the costume. She brought up how there’s a lot of tension in the house because apparently he wasn’t cleaning enough or he seemed like he wasn’t working when she was working nonstop because especially at that time she was really busy with her wrestling job because she was practicing three times a week. And at Terrace House maybe two or three times a week for filming. So she was overly stressed because of work and when you watch the show or episode, you can see that there’s all this pent up anger she already had and that other people have had. And I remember seeing some comments about it on social media in Japan.

Obviously like these episodes did not air abroad yet, but like even now, like when this happened, like people still hadn’t seen the costume episode. They had no idea about the context behind it. But basically, yeah, people were saying horrible things. They called her a hysterical gorilla. They drew crude comics of her as big, ugly being like beating up Kai when she didn’t beat him up at all. Like what happened was she was overly upset and she cried and she said, why aren’t you saying anything back to me? Why are you just saying sorry? Why didn’t you reply to my chat messages? Dah, dah, dah, dah. And then there’s one scene that all of the cyberbullies attacked her for was when she goes up and like starts talking to him and she’s like, why are you wearing that stupid fucking hat and like, why are you wearing a stupid hat? And she flips it off of his head because she was just angry and maybe she was overly upset about it, but it wasn’t, I don’t think it was like everybody just took that one tiny moment, few seconds of her life or her scenes and they just spent this, honestly attacked her for it.

And it was pretty cruel. And there’s another comment that was on Twitter, I believe it said that she, there’s no wonder she couldn’t find anyone to date on Terrace House because she emasculates men and she’ll probably do domestic violence on her future partner because she’s a wrestler, like very, very horrible things towards Hana. Like they were attacking her femininity. They were attacking her on just because she was an angry woman on TV having a human emotion. If she was a man, she wouldn’t get that much hate. I believe.

Jay: No, not when she just expresses emotion like that.

Farrah: Like I did not see Japanese netizens having the same energy when Shacho did those things to Yumai. I mean, yes. Actually Shacho did get criticized a lot in Japanese, but whatever attacks Hana gotten, it was prevalent. Like if you, you can’t even go at that time, especially, you couldn’t go through her hashtags or username without finding a lot of visible posts against her. Whereas Shacho’s social media, it was more structured. So I, I think he’s in charge of his own social media or something because if there’s a negative comment or something, it would get deleted or it would get taken off very quickly. And that goes into Hana’s agency. Like to what extent Hana’s agency should have been held responsible for making sure she was okay. Because as far as I know, unlike other reality shows in other countries, Terrace House did not provide psychological support for their members. And it seemed like whatever social media support that the members had besides sponsorships, it was all on the member and their own personal agency. So the fact that Hannah’s like tags are visible, the fact that her comments were still visible and the fact that her social media accounts are still active when people are still commenting in this, these accounts post-mortem. This is a lot about, especially when you know that article I translated yesterday about how her agency decided to remove all affiliation with Hana, post-mortem. And removed her from the website and the 27th, four days after she died. And it might explain, I don’t know if it’s true, but it might also explain why her content had been removed on the Terrace House official social media accounts because it was removed on the 28th I remember.

So I think they, the show has lost respect and reverence from their own diehard fans. So it’s, I highly doubt the show might even come back….

Jay: So I think a lot of people are going to end up having a lot to answer for and I’m hoping that we get a lot more information over the coming months as people will continue to look deeply into this. I think we will too. So we’re gone almost an hour here, which has been great and it’s been a great discussion. Thank you. But I just want to maybe wrap it up. Your thoughts on the future of the show? Does it come back?

Farrah: I’m really concerned about the show to be honest. There’s a really good podcast called No Script at All. It’s in English. And they officially announced that on their Facebook page a few days ago that even if Terrace House came back that they wouldn’t cover the show again. Yeah. And a lot of Terrace House fans who have been dedicated fans from the beginning, they were like, we’re not going to watch the show again, especially after what happened. So I think they, the show has lost respect and reverence from their own diehard fans. So it’s, I highly doubt the show might even come back, especially cause they’ve already lost their panelists locally. They’ve already had a lot of mishaps because of COVID-19 and everyone being isolated. Like they couldn’t even have proper filming for episodes even before this happened. So I think if they were to come back, they really need to properly apologize and have more support for their cast members and be transparent where the audience about where the support is coming from. Because yeah, besides, you know, having the panelists commentary and saying we have our condolences, they quietly deleted everything without announcing that they deleted things, for example. So if they were to come back, I might watch it to support the members, but I think Terrace House needs to, yeah. Like give more support to their members. Otherwise, if you’re not supporting your members, you can’t really support your audience either. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah. So I think you’re right. I think it’s going to come down to, you know, I also think it’s going to have to be a full accounting, one of the accurate, one of the, not accusation, but I guess one of the things people are getting angry about right now is basically, Oh, you think you can just cancel it and leave it like that. It’s being seen as Fuji kind of like ducking responsibility for not having to answer to anything. So I think if, you know, Fuji and the production company, the agencies, if they don’t come to account to this and something that people feel as approximates the truth doesn’t come out about what actually happened and the failures are properly identified, then I don’t see how it can get public support again.

Farrah: Yeah. I think Fuji TV has a lot to work on and there’s also always that there’s always accusations coming out against like the writers who work for Fuji TV and against the commentators there.

Jay: Yup. Yeah. So time will tell, but it is not looking good.

Farrah: Yeah. Basically. Yeah. But yeah, I hope this opens Japan up to cyber bullying laws in particular. I know in the US people have been charged for murder, for triggering suicides after cyber bullying. So I noticed a few days after Hana passed away. There were actually the Japanese politicians and lawmakers saying that there needs to be a law in Japan to combat cyber bullying because of it also happens to a lot of Japanese teenagers and we do have a high suicide rate where the 14th, number 14 I believe.

Jay: Yeah, I think it was 14 or 15 I think you’re right. Yeah. The US is not too far behind that as I remember like 18. Yeah, 19 or something. Yeah. I hope so. I really hope I’m a little skeptical with anything coming from the [inauidble] right now cause it’s sort of in free fall. So I think it’s like. Burn it down, tear it down. No. I think it’s sort of in free fall right now and it seems to be grasping at anything that it thinks can kind of rescue its image. It’s taken a whole huge beating over the COVID-19 response. It took a huge, massive beating over the public prosecutor scandal, which actually ended up being kind of amusing. So thanks Abe. But you know, they’re in freefall. They’re the down of the twenties in terms of public support, which you are, if you’re in that territory for six months, you reside, the administration ends. That’s the historical pattern in Japanese politics. So I hope it’s more than just talk. I hope something’s done. I think that the American laws could be a lot more strengthened as well. I think basically, I think every country in the world be doing a lot more to address cyberbullying.

Farrah: Definitely. And I’m really happy that a lot of pro wrestlers and celebrities, they’re also coming out and addressing the issues that have led up to Hana’s death and spreading awareness about mental health.

Jay: So and a lot of people seem to be willing to pony up a lot of money as well to find out who are the people who are involved in the worst of the abuse against Hana as well. So I think, I think you’ll, you’ll see some news come out and some people will be held to account, which is a good thing.

Farrah: That’s good. Yeah.

Jay: All right. I think that’s all I had. Yeah, that’s good. We did an hour, wow. And we had a study group of people watching everybody who has been listening. Thank you very much. I will, I’ll leave the Crowdcast open for replay for awhile and then I will get it up on YouTube within the next week or so. So Farrah, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Terrace House and on Hana. So it’s really great to get all that perspective. Thank you so much for sharing it with us today.

Farrah: Yeah. Thank you.

Jay: Awesome. Have a good day. Yes. And I’ll have a good night. Yeah, thank you.

Farrah: Thank you. Bye.

Jay: Bye all. Thank you.

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Jay Allen

Jay is a resident of Tokyo where he works as a reporter for Unseen Japan and as a technial writer. A lifelong geek, wordsmith, and language fanatic, he has level N1 certification in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and is fervently working on his Kanji Kentei Level 2 certification.

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