Matsumoto Hitoshi Gets Second Helpings of Curry at Yoshimoto’s Staff Cafeteria — 5ch: ‘This Is the Guy Who Thinks Instant Noodles Are a Feast’

Background and Key Points

Yoshimoto Kogyo is Japan’s dominant talent agency, home to most of the country’s comedians, and its Tokyo staff cafeteria — nicknamed for its curry — has long been an insider perk talked up on comedians’ own social media, not a place the public can walk into. Matsumoto Hitoshi is one half of Downtown, the duo who reshaped Japanese TV comedy from the late 1980s onward and became one of the most powerful figures in the industry. In December 2023, a Bunshun exposé alleged sexual misconduct at parties he hosted; he denied it, went on indefinite hiatus from terrestrial broadcasting, and sued for defamation — a suit that has gone badly for him in court, a point posters raise directly. Since then his public presence has shifted to subscription platforms like “DOWNTOWN+,” where this cafeteria segment aired.

The thread doesn’t really argue about the curry — it’s split on what this format means. One camp reads the cheerful, low-stakes livestream as evidence he’s found a workable post-scandal niche and hopes it’s a step back toward wider exposure; another reads the same footage as proof of how far he’s fallen, mocking him as reduced to home-shopping- and food-review-style content unbecoming of someone who once dominated primetime.

What outside readers likely miss is the scale of the fall implied here: this isn’t a minor personality doing a cafeteria bit, but arguably the single most influential figure in modern Japanese comedy, now paywalled off mainstream TV entirely, with his legal effort to clear his name having failed rather than vindicated him.