Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020
The last Terrace House we watched, and the last one ever made. We loved this cast, including Hana Kimura, and what happened to her is impossible to write around.
This is the last Terrace House Mary and I watched, and it is the last one the show ever made, and it is the hardest of these to write.
Tokyo 2019-2020 was, for most of its run, the same gentle show we had come to love. We watched it after the first three, and we loved this cast as much as any of them, including a housemate named Hana Kimura, a young professional wrestler with a big, warm presence.
What happened to Hana is a wound on the whole show, and I am not going to skate past it. Late in the season there was an on-camera conflict with another housemate over a wrestling costume of hers that had gotten damaged. After that episode aired, Hana was hit with a flood of cruel, often racist abuse online, hundreds of hateful messages from strangers she had never met. In May of 2020, she died by suicide. She was 22. The show was cancelled days later, and it has never come back.
It is hard to hold both things at once: that this was a sweet, comforting show that helped get us through a frightening year, and that being on it, plus the cruelty of strangers on the internet, cost a young woman her life. Her death set off a real reckoning in Japan about online harassment, and eventually a change in the law to treat it more seriously. I hope that counts for something.
The thing I keep coming back to, and the thing that still makes me angry, is how senseless it was. These were people who signed up to live quietly in a house and show the rest of us an ordinary, friendly slice of life. Some of the conflict may well have been nudged along by producers, that is part of how these shows get made, and her family said afterward that it was. But even granting all of that, none of it, not one second of a reality show, was worth what people did to her over it. You do not get to treat a real person that way because a TV edit told you to.
So this is where our Terrace House run ends: on a show we genuinely loved, and a person we wish the world had been kinder to. Rest easy, Hana.
Image credits
The photo above is of Hana herself, in the ring, not a still from the show, shared under a Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons:
- Hana Kimura, by Yoccy441, CC BY-SA 4.0.
