Star's death spells the end of reality show Terrace House

TOKYO • Hana Kimura, a professional wrestler in Japan, joined the cast of the hit reality show Terrace House in September last year because, she said, she wanted "to find a wonderful romance".

It was a common enough goal on Terrace House, which follows six young men and women living together in a gorgeous house as they navigate love, life and careers.

Over five seasons on Japan's Fuji TV and Netflix - which carries it in about 190 countries - the series became a global phenomenon, beloved by fans and critics around the world for its gentle spin on the "strangers sharing a posh residence" genre, one of the oldest reality-television formats.

Nine months later, Kimura was dead. She was found at her home in Tokyo on May 23, along with several suicide notes. A series of foreboding tweets and Instagram stories preceded her death. She was 22 years old.

It is impossible to know why someone would take her own life. But in the weeks leading up to her death, Kimura had become the target of hatred on social media - much of it inspired by behaviour on Terrace House which, she told a friend, the show's producers had instructed her to perform.

Hours before Kimura died, she tweeted: "Every day, I receive nearly 100 honest opinions and I cannot deny that I get hurt."

Her death sparked a national reckoning with cyber bullying in Japan and brought a sudden, tragic end to Terrace House.

Fuji TV quickly cancelled the remainder of the current season and has not said whether the show will ever return.

Netflix - which continues to carry existing episodes, including those featuring Kimura - declined to comment for this article.

But those close to Kimura, such as her mother, Kyoko Kimura, continue to wonder to what extent the gentle reality show set Hana up for a fatal emotional decline.

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This week she filed a complaint with a Japanese broadcasting ethics watchdog, the Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization, implicating the show in her daughter's death and alleging that the show had depicted Hana as an aggressive and violent person, infringing on her personal rights.

She said she remains deeply disappointed with the response to the tragedy - or lack thereof - by Fuji TV, East Entertainment (the production company that works on Terrace House) and Netflix.

It is common knowledge that reality shows are heavily produced and edited to create narratives and drama, but many fans believed the artfully banal Terrace House was more real than most.

The interactions between roommates could be endearingly halting and clumsy, and long stretches of time might pass in which hardly anything happened.

Both Fuji TV and the show's "gossip panel" of celebrities, who provided running commentary on the action in the house from a separate studio, repeatedly said there was "no script at all".

While some former cast members stand behind Terrace House as an honest, transparent look into their time and experience in the house, others say the show was just as manipulated as its crasser reality-TV cousins.

In interviews, they said Fuji TV staff members had extensively consulted participants about their feelings and told them to have certain conversations or take certain actions.

They said staff interventions had resulted in dates, arguments and some of the show's most iconic scenes. This intervention included the event that turned Kimura into a pariah.

One episode, in which she reacted angrily to a roommate for accidentally ruining one of her prized wrestling costumes, led to a barrage of insults on Twitter and Instagram, including some telling Kimura to "die" and "disappear".

Because cast members tended to have a less confrontational approach to conflict resolution, as is common in Japan, the outburst likely seemed like climactic drama to many viewers.

A series of messages on Line - a popular Japanese messaging app - from Kimura to a friend, originally posted by Japanese magazine Bunshun Online and shared with The Times by Kyoko Kimura, indicate the scene was staged by producers.

According to the texts, the staff had instructed Kimura to slap the roommate, Kai Kobayashi, and lose her temper.

"It's not real," she wrote. "I really feel terrible about it."

Ms Reiko Hara, a spokesman for Fuji TV, said, "there was no improper staging or instruction given" and added "we are in the middle of investigating the situation".

Some former participants dispute claims that the action was engineered by producers.

But even those who enjoyed their time on the show acknowledged that the passionate fan base can be cruel.

The more troublesome aspects of Terrace House also shed light on pressing social issues in Japan.

The government authorities have wrestled for years with how to balance online abuse with freedom of expression. After Kimura's suicide, they renewed the push to punish cyber bullying.

Current education on cyber bullying in Japan is not sufficient to deal with the breadth of the problem, said Mr Michal Ptaszynski, a computer science professor at the Kitami Institute of Technology in Hokkaido, who researches cyber bullying.

"Kids learn briefly about harassment in classes on society," he said. "It still does not give them any means of defence in actual cyber-bullying situations."

NY TIMES