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The story
Nara city councilman Hezuma Ryu posted on X, urging young people who want to become famous by courting online controversy (“enjo,” going viral for bad behavior) to “absolutely stop, because it’ll wreck your life.” The remark came alongside his announcement of passing 1.5 million followers, but since he himself has a past as a nuisance YouTuber, reactions on 5ch were split between “look who’s talking” and sarcastic praise calling him “a genuine success story who landed a council seat and a salary.”
8/26 (Wed) 18:00
Nara city councilman Hezuma Ryu (35) posted on X (formerly Twitter) on the 25th, offering a word of caution to young people eager to become famous even if it means courting controversy.
Hezuma wrote: “I started on social media seven years ago. Today my total follower count passed 1.5 million. I went down a crooked path, but who would’ve thought a nobody from Yamaguchi Prefecture would end up a politician? You really never know what life has in store.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Wasn't the reason he got disowned that the neighbors kept complaining about him?
Lick the soy sauce bottle at Kura Sushi (a chain hit by copycat "sushi terrorism" pranks) and you're famous overnight.
Either you rise to the top or you fall into the abyss.
Doing that in an actual restaurant gets you sued by the company for damages — that's 100% the abyss route.
People in Kumamoto are having an even tougher time right now with the brutal heat, but he completely ignored that.
As long as he gets the attention, that's all that matters to him!
What on earth were the people who voted this guy onto the Nara city council, and the people who support him, thinking?
What a cry from the soul (lol)
chasing after the guy who turned it into the social status of a politician.
You're the textbook case of infamy beating obscurity.
That's probably the part that hits hardest.
You just don't want more competition in your own line of work, do you?
What Hezuma's basically saying is "I'm not a success story — don't end up like me."
For the wannabes hoping to hit it big as a nuisance YouTuber, get famous, and climb out of the underclass, Hezuma — who got famous and even landed a council seat and a salary — is exactly the success story they're aiming for.
If he'd skipped the whole baffling nuisance-YouTuber route and just worked a normal job as a sports-background company employee, he probably would've earned more in the long run.
And even when they do cover it, they leave the person's name out.
Back in the day, Kato from the show Sukkiri said the same thing about the Hezuma incidents: "Honestly, we don't want to report this because it just ends up being free publicity for a criminal."
If you think of it as an advertising cost, a few weeks in detention is cheap.
Hezuma actually got a guilty verdict, you know.
Oh wait, were those guys not exactly "youths" either?
Anyway, those types who post day after day, 365 days a year, insulting people just to get attention —
I really wish their social media accounts would get deleted already.
And what all those idiots have in common is
they're tough on the weak but can't say a word to anyone stronger than them — total cowards.
Deep down, small, timid people.
It was Google, of all things, that made that profitable and popular.
They played their part in the decline of public morals.
Honestly, X should just ban Hezuma's account already.
If he got banned from YouTube and X both, he'd have nowhere left to show off.
X has let him post a ton of photos he took of people without their permission too — I'd think that easily meets the bar for a ban.
Background and Key Points
Nara’s city assembly, like Japan’s roughly 1,700 other municipal councils, has a strikingly low bar to entry: candidates need only a modest registration deposit and no party backing, and turnout in local races is often thin enough that a candidate with strong name recognition — earned any way, including infamy — can win a seat outright. That structural fact matters here, because Hezuma Ryu’s path to the council followed several years as one of Japan’s best-known “meiwaku YouTubers” (nuisance streamers), a genre built on filming oneself trespassing, provoking staff, or vandalizing property to generate “enjō” (flame wars) that drive views. He was convicted on charges stemming from that period, and the “mura-hachibu” reference in the thread points to a real, specific consequence: traditional Japanese village communities have historically cut off all but the most essential dealings with a disgraced household, and posters read his family’s ostracism as the actual rock-bottom his warning is based on, not just career damage.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t over whether his behavior was bad — everyone agrees on that — it’s over what his current life proves. One camp reads his warning as sincere, self-aware regret from someone who has seen the abyss. The other reads his own biography as disproof of his message: a nuisance YouTuber who parlayed notoriety straight into elected office and a public salary is, functionally, the success story that struggling attention-seekers are chasing, whatever he says about his intentions.
What the thread leaves out is that Japanese municipal elections don’t screen for reputation at all — an assembly seat is a low-turnout popularity contest, not a character reference, which is precisely how virality of any kind converts into a council win.
*This article is an excerpt and summary compiled from the 5ch (Sports/Entertainment News+) thread “Hezuma Ryu Warns Young People Who Want to Go Viral for Bad Behavior: ‘Stop, Because It’ll Wreck Your Life’”.
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