The Fall of ‘Terrace House’

According to her mother, Kimura had been thinking about leaving the show for several months. Then, an explosive outbreak of cruel online comments following “The Costume Incident” episode, which premiered on March 31 on Netflix and May 18 on Fuji TV, significantly contributed to Kimura’s emotional decline. At the time, her mother said, Kimura was living alone in a rented apartment after the pandemic brought a halt to filming, and was unable to meet with her family often as cyberbullying turned from a steady stream into a full-blown onslaught.

In an interview, Kai Kobayashi, the co-star of the costume scene, said that Kimura called him in May, a month and a half after the episode premiered on Netflix, to apologize and tell him that the producers told her to act that way. “I was glad to hear that from her because I didn’t think she was the type of person to react like that,” Kobayashi said.

Kobayashi said the production staff could be coercive. When he declined to go on a trip to Kyoto with some of the other housemates, he said that first one production staff member, then two, and eventually more than four all met with him to convince him to go.

“Under that sort of pressure, it’s hard to say what you want to say, especially if you’re a pure girl like Hana,” he said. “I think they talked her into creating something that didn’t reflect what she was feeling or wanted to do.”

“I think that the only effort the staff made to support Hana was to try to keep her on the show,” he said.

Kyoko Kimura said Fuji TV, East Entertainment and Hana’s agencies, World Wonder Ring Stardom and WALK, deflected responsibility and treated her like a nuisance when she reached out after Hana’s death. “They told me that Hana had never said she wanted to leave the show, but Hana had been talking about wanting to leave since late November,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/arts/television/terrace-house-suicide.html