Preface: RIP.

On May 23, 2020, Japanese professional wrestler Hana Kimura died at her home in Tokyo. She was 22.

Kimura was born in Yokohama in 1997. Her mother, Kyoko Kimura, was also a professional wrestler; her father is Indonesian. At school, classmates told her to “go back to Indonesia.” She cried over it, though she had never been there. Others sneered, “Your mom’s a wrestler. What a barbaric job.” Her mother says that because Hana knew what it was to be shut out, she especially wanted to lift up people who were vulnerable, and she especially loved children. She first wanted to be a dancer, then an action star; her mother suggested she train in wrestling first to build a foundation. In the promotion STARDOM, she played a heel, the villain: fierce in the ring, in a role that was part of the job.

In September 2019, she moved into the house on the reality show Terrace House, co-produced by Fuji TV and Netflix. The premise was simple: six young men and women who have never met move into a beautiful house, and cameras record their everyday lives. The show always billed itself as unscripted. As each episode played, a panel of celebrity commentators in a studio watched along and weighed in: who was cute, who was annoying, who was in the wrong. The show found a following well beyond Japan, and many viewers discovered it on Netflix.

On March 31, 2020, Netflix released an episode titled simply “Costume Incident.” A male housemate, Kai Kobayashi, had tossed Kimura’s wrestling costume into the washing machine with other clothes and ruined it. For a wrestler, a ring costume is a tool of the trade, and an image built one match at a time. In a confrontation inside the house, she shouted at Kobayashi, knocked the cap off his head, and said, “Why are you wearing that stupid hat?” The show cut the conflict together in full: on camera, she looked ferocious, and he looked wronged. Kobayashi moved out afterward. In later footage, Kimura cries to the women in the house that he had promised to save up and pay her back, then never got in touch, leaving her messages on read and ignoring her calls. She said she was “still angry, and really sad.”

Accounts differ on whether the confrontation was pushed along. According to her mother, Hana told her afterward, in tears, that staff had egged her on from the sidelines: “A guy like that, why not just slap him?” Fuji TV’s internal investigation interviewed ten people and concluded there was no evidence that staff instructed or forced her to hit him; one staff member testified that Kimura herself had said, “I might not be able to stop myself.” Yet the same report acknowledged that staff “should not merely have agreed with her, but should have shown an attitude of trying to calm her down.” In other words, at the very least, no one on set stopped her. All cast members had also signed a “Consent Form and Pledge” that set out penalties for breach. In its complaint to Japan’s Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization (BPO), her family called it “grossly one-sided.” The BPO stopped short of finding that it forced her to play someone she wasn’t, but concluded that such a pledge “could cause performers excessive tension and mental constraint, and cannot be called appropriate.” Her mother put it this way: “Hana was staged and edited into a violent woman.”

Doubts about how the show was made had been voiced more than two years earlier. Lauren Tsai, an American, appeared in 17 episodes of the Hawaii season, Terrace House: Aloha State, in 2016 and 2017. In late 2017, she spoke about the show’s authenticity in an interview with Metropolis, a Japanese English-language magazine. Those passages were cut from the published article, but not before the gossip community ONTD saved them; Jezebel quoted them again in 2019, and they spread from there. She said:

“It’s probably the least real reality show.”

“It is non scripted but at the same [time] extremely scripted.”

“They don’t tell us exactly what to say. Though they know what kind of story they want to edit in their minds, so they force that content to be created.”

She described other details, too. The show wasn’t filmed around the clock: the crew came by for an hour or so during the day and filmed for a few hours at night, in a structure “like a Japanese drama.” When the cameras were off, production discouraged cast members from talking to one another, so tensions had to be saved up for the camera. Editing, she said, gave producers wide latitude to shape the drama, to the point that cast members could hardly bear to watch themselves on air. In a 2018 interview with SSENSE, she said, “I felt everything curl up inside of me when the cameras were on,” adding that by now people had seen her “cry, be very immature, be stressed.” In 2021, she told Office Magazine, “For most of my time on that show, I was preoccupied with the ideas of what other people thought of me, so I wasn’t fully being myself.” After leaving, she felt she had to remain the person viewers knew, “because if people knew the real me maybe people wouldn’t like me anymore.” In an interview with WWD, she also acknowledged receiving her share of online hate.

Back to the spring of 2020. Once the episode went up, the abuse poured in, and it had several defining features. First, volume: nearly 100 messages a day. Second, reach: public replies on Twitter, Instagram DMs, tags in Stories. It was everywhere. Third, monotony: the same few words over and over, “die,” “gross,” “disappear.” Fourth, there was no escape. She would block one account, and the sender would switch to a burner and send the exact same words. “Blocking never ends,” her mother said.

Not long after the episode was released, Kimura harmed herself. The BPO decision records this; the production knew, and afterward provided “a certain degree of care.” Fuji TV’s own report admitted that its approach to online abuse was essentially to “wait for it to die down.” Her mother says Hana wanted to “graduate” from the show and leave, but Fuji wouldn’t let her go. Fuji has never publicly responded to that claim.

Then the pandemic arrived. In April, Japan declared a state of emergency, wrestling shows were halted, and STARDOM switched to daily at-home livestreams on YouTube. It’s hard not to think about what that meant: a woman who lived for the ring and the crowd lost the ring at the very moment she most needed to put down her phone. When her mother saw what she was posting on Instagram, she reached out, worried. Hana replied only, “I’m fine.”

On May 12 and 14, the show released follow-up footage and uncut clips on Netflix and YouTube in which she cries about Kobayashi breaking his promise. Those clips might have shown how wronged she felt, but the fire was already burning, and each new release pushed her in front of the crowd again. On May 19, she still appeared on a STARDOM livestream. At 12:25 a.m. that same day, in the late-night slot of May 18, Fuji TV aired the episode on broadcast television. In Japan, broadcast viewers and Netflix subscribers are largely different audiences. This time, a whole new group of people who had never seen the show met that “violent woman” too.

In the early hours of May 23, five days after the broadcast, she posted her final words on Twitter and Instagram. One passage read: “Nearly 100 frank opinions every day. I can’t deny I was hurt. Die, gross, disappear. The person who has said these things to me most, all along, has been me.” The last line: “Mom, thank you for giving birth to me. It was a life of wanting to be loved.”

The words people hurled at her online were words she had already been saying to herself for years. The mob didn’t create the wound. It found the one that was already there and pressed on it a hundred times a day.

After her death, the show was cancelled, and Netflix pulled every episode she appeared in. Police later identified two of the people who had abused her. Under the law at the time, each was fined 9,000 yen, about US$60 at today’s exchange rate.

The case also laid bare the misogyny and xenophobia of the online mob. A woman got angry, at a man. In that same confrontation, it was Kobayashi who had ruined her costume, yet public opinion cast him as the injured party. The abuse was hardly about anything she had said. It was about what kind of woman she was: her looks, her supposed lack of femininity, her personality being “too much.” The Daily Beast quoted scholar Tohko Tanaka: “There is an underlying belief in Japanese society that a ‘woman should be submissive.’” What provoked the backlash wasn’t a woman saying the wrong thing. It was a woman speaking up at all. Kimura herself had said so publicly: “I don’t want to be defeated by men. I’m not going to flatter guys or suck up to men to get what I want.” Her wrestling persona was built on exactly that. In the ring, it sold tickets. In the living room of a romance reality show, the same personality became her crime.

Her father is Indonesian. The Diplomat and The Daily Beast both documented abuse targeting her “dark skin,” and people called her a gorilla: “After seeing you on Terrace House I knew you were a dumb gorilla. Now I am positive. You’re a gorilla inside and out.” These weren’t merely ugly words; they were racially charged. Together, the two forces didn’t add up, they multiplied. A dark-skinned woman of foreign descent, physically strong and willing to show anger, defied two sets of expectations at once: what Japanese society expects of a “woman,” and what it expects of someone “Japanese.” The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) later featured her case in its campaign on online violence against women and girls.

She is not an isolated case. Mixed-race women in Japan, especially those who aren’t part white, have been treated this way before. In 2015, when Ariana Miyamoto, whose father is African American, was crowned Miss Universe Japan, comments flooded in insisting she “isn’t really Japanese.” In 2019, a Nissin ad rendered Naomi Osaka’s skin several shades lighter in anime form, and that same year a comedy duo joked on stage that she “needs some bleach.”

So what is cyberviolence? Japanese law has no such term. The everyday word is hibō chūshō (誹謗中傷), roughly slander plus abuse. The available legal tools are the Penal Code’s crimes of defamation and insult, both aimed at a single statement directed at a single person. Within Japan’s legal framework, then, online abuse can only be counted one post at a time; the larger picture of a crowd surging toward one person at once is invisible. In schools, the Act for the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Bullying explicitly covers online behavior, but only when the perpetrator and victim share “a certain personal relationship.” By definition, a stranger cannot commit ijime.

Of China, Japan, and South Korea, China is the only one to have given “online violence” a legal definition. Its Provisions on the Governance of Online Violence Information, in effect since 2024, define it as insults, rumors and defamation, privacy violations, and similar content “concentrated on an individual.” The key word is “concentrated”: the swarm itself is written into the definition. In scholarship, a widely used definition of cyberbullying comes from Smith et al. (2008): an aggressive, intentional act carried out repeatedly through electronic means against a victim who cannot easily defend themselves. The broader term “online harassment” requires neither repetition nor any prior relationship.

How common is it in Japan? A 2023 survey of 2,000 people aged 15 to 99 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications found that 18.3% had been slandered or abused online in the past year, rising to 23.9% among people in their twenties; 65% had seen such content. A late-2024 survey of 1,329 people by the Japanese legal site Bengo4.com found that 29.8% had been targeted; of those, 66.9% were attacked over their appearance or personality, 51.3% had false information spread about them, and 28.3% had personal information exposed. In 40.7% of cases the perpetrator was a stranger, and in 26.8% the victim couldn’t tell who it was.

The number of people seeking help keeps climbing. The ministry’s Illegal and Harmful Information Consultation Center received 6,403 inquiries in fiscal 2024, of which 3,989, or 62.3%, involved slander and abuse, a record high. X accounted for the most cases of any platform. The Ministry of Justice’s human rights bodies opened 1,569 cases of online human rights violations in 2025, slightly fewer than the year before, though officials describe the level as “remaining high.” Of those, 494 involved “disclosure of identifying information,” mainly labeling a person or place online as being of buraku origin, a form of discrimination specific to Japan and a separate issue from celebrity abuse.

In the same Bengo4.com survey, among respondents who admitted to attacking others online, 52.7% said they “didn’t realize it counted as abuse” at the time, and the most common motive was “wanting to vent frustration” (36.6%). That profile closely matches the two men fined in Kimura’s case: most perpetrators don’t think of themselves as committing violence, only as “saying something.”

Japan’s legal system has been changing in quick succession. In July 2022, penalties for insult were increased, the first amendment to that provision since the Penal Code was enacted in 1907. That October, the two separate lawsuits once needed to unmask an anonymous poster were merged into a single procedure. In April 2025, the Act on Countermeasures by Large-Scale Information Distribution Platforms took effect, requiring major platforms to set up takedown request channels and, in principle, respond within seven days. On July 24, 2026, the ministry issued its first corrective recommendations under the law, to Google (YouTube), X, Meta, Bakusai, and niconico, for failing to disclose their removal criteria and how they handle requests: Google fell short on 22 of 42 required items, X on 18.

Enforcement, however, still lags far behind. According to figures compiled by law firms (not official statistics), more than half of online insult cases are never prosecuted, most that are end in fines of just 100,000 to 200,000 yen, and a single case often drags on for one to two years. When Kyodo News covered the issue in April 2026, its headline said victims are left to “cry themselves to sleep” (nakineiri), with no real recourse.

What does it do to the people targeted? A 2024 umbrella review in Nature Human Behaviour, pooling 56 meta-analyses, found that cyberbullying victimization is consistently associated with depression, anxiety, loneliness, and stress, and that its links to self-harm and suicidal ideation are among the strongest of any outcome. A 2018 systematic review in JMIR found that young victims of cyberbullying were about 2.35 times as likely as non-victims to self-harm or show suicidal behavior. These studies focus mainly on adolescents, and they establish correlation rather than direct causation.

What the numbers can’t capture is why abuse online feels different from abuse offline. Existing cases point to several mechanisms.

First, it never clocks out. Abuse offline stops when you get home and close the door. Online, the words are in your pocket, still there at 3 a.m. Kimura faced nearly a hundred a day.

Second, blocking doesn’t work. The sender opens a burner account and sends the exact same words. In court, Fuji TV argued that she could simply not look. But the person on the receiving end isn’t choosing whether to look; the abuse comes looking for them.

Third, the people you can’t see are the most frightening. You don’t know whether a thousand people are coming for you or three, or whether they live down the street. Once personal information is posted, the fear spills off the screen and into real life.

Fourth, the voices outside become your own. Kimura’s last words described exactly that: the person who had said those things to her most “has been me.” Online abuse often doesn’t open new wounds; it presses, again and again, on old ones.

Fifth, leaving costs too much. For people whose livelihoods depend on a public image, logging off means losing their work. Sulli, Kim Sae-ron, and Hana Kimura all faced this: to escape the abuse, they would first have had to give up their careers.

Sixth, seeking justice is itself a second injury. In Japan, identifying an anonymous poster takes money and time, and may fail anyway. Throughout the process, the victim has to reread those words over and over.

The damage, then, lies not only in how cruel any single message is, but in its relentlessness, the impossibility of escape, and the way it slowly becomes how a person sees herself.

What do broadcasters owe the people they put on screen? The institution holds the editing rights, the contracts, and the broadcast schedule; the cast holds nothing. Responsibility can’t rest solely on telling internet users to stop being cruel. It has to be allocated in proportion to power. Fuji TV’s argument in court, that “online abuse is a social problem, and she could just not look,” is a textbook example of what not to do.

Britain moved earlier. Love Island saw two former contestants and a host die by suicide, and a guest on The Jeremy Kyle Show died by suicide after filming, after which the show was cancelled and Parliament opened an inquiry. In April 2021, the UK regulator Ofcom amended its Broadcasting Code to require broadcasters to “take due care over the welfare of people who might be at risk of significant harm as a result of taking part in a programme,” and to inform participants in advance of potential welfare risks and the steps the production will take to mitigate them. The rule was written for people like Kimura: someone used to the ring, but not to being scrutinized by hundreds of thousands of strangers.

In practice, three things should happen before anyone signs. First, psychological screening should be carried out by professionals independent of the production team. Second, participants should be told plainly that they may face online abuse after broadcast, on a scale beyond anything they can imagine. Third, the contract should preserve the right to walk away. The BPO found Kimura’s pledge inappropriate; her mother says Hana wanted to “graduate” but couldn’t leave. A person who can’t get out is the most vulnerable person of all.

During filming, there are two bright lines. What Lauren Tsai described, never telling cast members what to say but steering them into a story, is a chronic affliction of the reality TV industry. First, staff must not fan the flames. When someone is losing control, the job is to help them calm down, not to cheer from the sidelines; Fuji’s own report conceded as much. Second, whoever looks after cast members’ mental health must not report to the producers. Otherwise, the worse someone’s state, the better the footage, and the person responsible for care becomes the same person who wants the drama.

The same goes for the edit. Kimura was cut into a “violent woman,” and because she already played a villain in the ring, the two images reinforced each other and made the story easier to believe. At a minimum, a production should ask: after watching this episode, will this person still recognize herself? Is the full context of the conflict clear? What a costume means to a wrestler, whether the other person kept his promise: does that background belong on screen? On Terrace House, the studio panelists commented on cast members as the footage rolled, effectively modeling for viewers how to tear them apart. Commentary has its place, but mockery of the cast shouldn’t be the punchline.

Distribution and redistribution are where Kimura’s case demands the hardest questions. After the episode went up on March 31, the abuse began, and she soon harmed herself. The production knew. Even so, it released the uncut clips on YouTube on May 14 and put the episode on television late on May 18. That broadcast is precisely what the BPO faulted: with the mental toll on Kimura already obvious, Fuji TV’s decision to air the episode “lacked consideration for the performer’s mental health,” which the BPO ruled a breach of broadcast ethics. Every redistribution is a separate decision and should trigger a fresh risk assessment. In the streaming era, it’s routine for one platform to air something first and others to follow, but the person at the center absorbs wave after wave of new audiences. In August 2020, after her death, Fuji TV set up round-the-clock monitoring for online abuse; in March 2021, it created a social media countermeasures department with fast access to lawyers and psychiatrists. The direction is right, but the logic needs to go one step further: when monitoring shows a cast member is being swarmed, that signal should be able to halt the next broadcast, not just be logged.

Care also can’t end when the show does. After a string of deaths, ITV adopted a duty-of-care protocol for Love Island. Before the series, contestants undergo independent psychological and medical assessments and are trained to handle online abuse and manage sudden income. During filming, their social media accounts are paused, so they never see the outside reaction. Afterward, they are offered at least eight therapy sessions, and the production proactively checks in for 14 months. Japanese productions rarely do two other things. One is covering cast members’ legal costs: unmasking an anonymous poster in Japan takes money and time an individual can barely afford, while a broadcaster has a legal department. The other is speaking up publicly on their behalf, laying out the full context of a conflict or admitting the edit amplified it, rather than posting a single line asking viewers to “please refrain from slander.”

The news media bear responsibility too. Korean experts keep pointing to a cycle: malicious comments get reported as news, commenters feel a sense of accomplishment, and they keep writing. Headlines like “Netizens slam star’s latest post” amplify the abuse themselves. When the person has died, both the World Health Organization’s and South Korea’s suicide reporting guidelines are explicit: don’t describe the method, don’t feature the word “suicide” prominently in headlines, don’t reproduce screenshots of final messages, don’t frame the death as a “response” to or “proof” of the abuse, and include crisis support information at the end.

Platforms can’t stand aside either. Korea’s “cyber wrecker” YouTube channels, which rack up views with negative videos about celebrities, and China’s marketing accounts, which steal images, sell courses, and steer public outrage, are at bottom both in the business of profiting from abuse. The most effective lever platforms have isn’t deleting posts but cutting off revenue: accounts that keep producing attack content aimed at one person shouldn’t earn a share of the ad money. Yet when Japan’s ministry issued its first corrective recommendations to Google, X, Meta, and others in July 2026, the reason was simply that they hadn’t even disclosed their removal criteria.

An institution doesn’t have to answer for the malice of every internet user. But it does have to answer for every decision it made: whom to cast, how to film, how to edit, and whether to keep broadcasting after learning that someone was being hurt. In Hana Kimura’s case, every one of those decisions has a name and a date. No one was ever made to answer for them. 🫂

If you or someone you know is being targeted online or having thoughts of suicide, please don’t carry it alone.

Japan: #いのちSOS 0120-061-338 (24/7); Yorisoi Hotline 0120-279-338 (24/7); Inochi no Denwa 0570-783-556. For online abuse, the Ministry of Justice human rights line is 0570-003-110, and the Illegal and Harmful Information Consultation Center takes reports online.
South Korea: Suicide prevention line 109 (24/7); youth counseling 1388; report online abuse and defamation to the National Police Agency’s ECRM system or call 182.
Mainland China: National psychological support hotline 12356; report online abuse to the Cyberspace Administration’s reporting center at 12377; in an emergency, call 110 or 120.
Taiwan: Mental health line 1925 (24/7); Lifeline 1995; Teacher Chang 1980.
Hong Kong: The Samaritan Befrienders Hong Kong 2389 2222 (24/7); The Samaritans Hong Kong 2896 0000 (24/7).
United States: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, call or text (24/7).
United Kingdom: Samaritans 116 123 (24/7, free).