22-year-old livestreamer Mogami Ai, real name Sato Airi, was murdered last week in cold blood by 42-year-old Takano Kenichi. The backdrop of the murder, which stemmed from money that Sato borrowed from Takano without ever paying back, has led many online to claim Sato had what was coming to her. Not content to let her rest in peace, some are even going so far as to pay their final disrespects at the scene where she died.
A brutal murder over money
As we previously wrote, police arrested Takano after he stabbed Sato multiple times in the upper body and face. She died shortly thereafter.
Takano was angry because he’d lent Sato some 2.5 million yen (around USD $16K) despite having little money himself. He had a court judgment against Sato but didn’t pursue collecting the money through legal means, with some saying he felt he couldn’t afford it. (Takano apparently had never heard of crowdfunding, I guess.)
Information remains scant on the exact nature of the relationship between Takano and Sato. What we do know is that he started visiting her at bars and clubs where she worked when she was 18 and he was 38.
A man claiming to have been Sato’s fiancé posted on X recently. The man, Yui Daiken, claims Sato lived with him, first in a tower apartment in downtown and then in an apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo. Web manga artist Yashiro Azuki re-posted one of Yui’s posts to his over 550,000 followers showing the man and Sato together, claiming it’s authentic and that he knew Sato.
The man’s statement is partially favorable to Sato. It claims (among other things) that Takano wanted more than to be paid back – he was angry that he and Sato never started a proper relationship, despite what he’d done for her.
However, despite Yashiro’s endorsement, there’s little public information available on this individual, despite his claims to have been a business owner. “Yui Daiken” could be a pseudonym, of course. Currently, however, no reputable local news orgs are running with this.
I’ll be waiting until we have further confirmation on his identity before repeating any more of what he wrote. Many of these details will likely shake out – and become much more reliable – as prosecutors build their case against Takano.
A hard life
Details about Sato’s life are steadily emerging. They’re not pretty – but they do paint a vivid picture of how she ended up in her situation.
Sato had a rough upbringing in Yamagata City, according to a friend who spoke to Shueisha Online. Her mother spent most of her days drunk and wandering around the city, leaving Sato to fend for herself. Even after Sato became an adult and started working at cabaret clubs as a hostess in Yamagata, her mother would reportedly show up, drink, and then tell staff that “Airi will pay.”
With this upbringing, it’s not surprising that Sato picked up her mother’s bad habits. The friend reports she also had a nasty drinking problem. She would leave her 1-year-old at daycare until the wee hours of the evening, leading the friend and even the cabaret club management to scold her.
Eventually, the friend says, the state took custody of her child, which led Airi to break down in tears behind the cabaret club. She eventually quit due to increasing absences and spent much of her time drinking around the city, getting into even worse financial trouble.
Sato eventually made her way to Tokyo, where she focused on being a streamer.
While one friend described her as an incredibly hard worker – which served her well as a streamer – she was also prone to lying to puff herself up. Early reports claimed that Sato had saved a ton of money. However, the friend says Sato’s claims to have “saved 20 million yen” (USD $134K) that she made on livestream were likely fabrications. (It’s common in Japan for hosts, hostesses, and others to brag about how much they earn as a signal of their popularity.)
The friend says this tendency to lie also got her into trouble at work. For example, she would reportedly take pictures of expensive champagne bottles that customers had bought for other hostesses. Likely, the friend says, she posted these to her own social media account, pretending they were her own.
What should have been a memorial
Sato Airi was a mess. Her personal failings warranted an intervention, assistance, and seizure of the money she owed. They didn’t warrant the death penalty.
However, some online don’t see it that way.
People have been putting flowers and other goods at the spot in Takadanobaba where Sato was slain. Two people, however, decided to show their anger at the murder victim by filming one of them stomping on the flowers.
“This looks like where people have been putting flowers where Mogami Ai died,” writes X user @ambxandrite. “Some people will go to embarrassing lengths if it means they can step on women. Japan’s contempt for women is out of control.”
Instead of outright violence, others have been leaving disparaging gifts. These include sponges (to indicate Sato lived off of men) and alcohol (an apparent swipe at her dependency issues).
When I visited the scene, I discovered a bag of ice, which one X user argues references True Land Buddhism, with ice representing one’s worldly thoughts and the water from the melting representing enlightenment. It’s a message to the deceased, they said, to reflect on their actions in the afterlife. Someone else argued it references the English expression “on the rocks,” i.e., being bankrupt.
What’s clear is that a lot of men are angrier over a man “being used” by a woman than they are with that man taking the life of a 22-year-old woman over money.
I’ve written a lot about women who get ensnared in similar fashion by hosts as Takano was by Sato. Every time I publish such stories, I get comments from men who say the solution is simple – the women simply shouldn’t give these guys anything! Simple!
That “solution” doesn’t seem to apply to Takano, for whom some online are expressing unbounded sympathy for being “defrauded” by a cruel livestreamer half his age. (Sato was never charged or convicted of fraud.) Even despite their age discrepancy, I might have a measure of sympathy for Takano if he hadn’t brutally slain Sato in cold blood on the street. It speaks to the actions of a man who seemed angry, not just that a woman owed him money, but that she chose someone else over him.
One has to question why men online seem so viscerally angry at Sato and so invested in smearing her name. The answer seems pretty clear: some men get off on hating women – even after they’re dead.
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