Today, August 10, if you have gone to the section of the program Terrace House Tokyo 2019-2020 on Netflix you will see something curious: episodes have disappeared.
Putting us in the picture: Fuji TV's television series Terrace House Tokyo 2019-2020 is a program of reality television Japanese series that shows six young strangers living together in a luxury house. The series has been airing since 2012 in Japan and has become a worldwide hit thanks to its distribution through Netflix.
In Japan, the series airs weekly, while Netflix, outside of Japan, airs it in batches of 12 episodes, called "parts".
The most recent batch (third part) of the series hit Netflix internationally outside of Japan in April 2020, the last episode of which "Angel" aired in Japan on March 10. As of yesterday, this was the last episode available on the streaming platform. But today, August 10, Netflix has removed the entire third batch.and it is deductible that it will not issue the fourth.
After March 10, only 6 more episodes were aired in Japan (which would be half of the planned fourth batch). First the production was stopped due to COVID-19. But when it was resumed, it had to be stopped and ended 4 episodes into the reboot because one of the participants committed suicide. And this suicide is what we are going to.
The 22-year-old professional wrestler Hana Kimura would end up taking her own life in May after the cyberbullying she was exposed to. Her mother, Kyoko Kimuraformer professional wrestler, has revealed the reason for the online harassment to which Hana was exposed.
According to Kyoko's version, the program's producers pressured Hana to act in a more violent and aggressive manner in the reality show.
Hana Kimura hit the hat on Kai Kobayashi's head.Kimura, another contestant in the show, after he ruined the costume Kimura wore for his wrestling show. The producers seem, according to this version, to have wanted Kimura to slap Kobayashi in the face. as part of a new personality "aggressive" they wanted to show on the show, but she opted to hit the hat as something in between.
This scene would be shown in the episode Case of the Costume Incident March 31. The scene would see Kimura lose his temper with Kai Kobayashi, a housemate with whom there had been tensions for weeks, when he accidentally shrunk Kimura's expensive wrestling suit in the washing machine.
"On May 15, Hana celebrated her grandmother's birthday with her grandmother and her mother. When her mother, Kyoko Kimura, drove her home, she burst into tears. She told her mother that Terrace House was forcing her to behave more unpleasantly in front of the cameras to get ratings."
Farrah Hasnainjournalist of the Japan Timesin Twitter
Hasnain, who interviewed the mother, wrote in her article that Hana Kimura told her mother that she wanted to perform professionally in front of the cameras. However, the producers were pressuring her to behave violently. She added that Kimura did not want to get violent or slap anyone for being negative and unprofessional.
Fuji TV would air the hat episode again on May 18. From then on Hana would receive a high level of harassment on the networks because of what the series showed. Five days later, Hana would end up committing suicide at the age of 22.
To complicate matters further, Kai Kobayashithe other participant in the hat affair, has disclosed how he program producers manipulate participants to create prefabricated scenes and not natural. The statement was made in the weekly magazine Shuukan Bunshunwhere Kobayashi discussed a scene from episode 33, which aired on February 18, showing Kimura and Kobayashi, 25, on a date together at an indoor trampoline park.
"The assistant program director came up to me and whispered:"Just jumping on the trampoline is not interesting.". I was then prompted to "touch her breasts or something.". I refused, but these kinds of extreme requests were a daily occurrence. What the staff wants is love and incidents, and they were looking for things to blow up and go viral on social media."
Kai Kobayashi, in the magazine Shuukan Bunshun
Kobayashi also backed up Hana's mother's claims that the issue of the suit incident was prefabricated, commenting that Hana told her that the staff had encouraged her to ratchet up the tension at the scene. Hana's leaked messages to her friends posted on Shuukan Bunshun also attest to this.
The journalist Hasnain asked Fuji TV for his side of the story. about the hat incident and the alleged pressure on Kimura to act violently. The company would comment that they had investigated the matter and had found no evidence to support the assertions that Hana was encouraged to slap her co-star. They also commented that there is nothing to indicate that any expression of feelings in the program was falsely portrayed.
When news of Kimura's death originally surfaced in May, Japan's wrestling community responded by condemning bullying in all its forms.
Against this backdrop, it is clear why Netflix has made the decision to remove from its catalog part 3 of Terrace House Tokyo 2019-2020in which both Kimura and Kobayashi appear.
The reallity show are, we all know, bullshit. But that the manipulation in these leads to cyberbullying and cyberbullying leads to suicide is something we have to take to a new level of hijoputism.
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