Comedy Legend Yokoyama Yasushi’s Son Kimura Kazuya Splits From Wife After 2.5 Years — Drunken Meltdown at Grandma’s Celebration

Background and Key Points

Yokoyama Yasushi was one half of Yasushi-Kiyoshi, the manzai duo that anchored Yoshimoto Kogyo’s variety-show dominance from the 1970s through the 90s; Yoshimoto is Japan’s oldest and largest comedy agency, tracing back to 1912, and Yasushi’s “don’t get me started” catchphrase and boorish, tough-guy stage persona made him a defining figure of the era’s rough-and-tumble comedy style. He died in 1996 at 52, a detail that resonates in Japan because two other mid-century entertainment giants, actor Yujiro Ishihara and singer Hibari Misora, also died at exactly 52, both with drinking tied to their decline — a coincidence Japanese audiences of a certain age reflexively recall. Kimura Kazuya, his eldest son from his first marriage, had a minor career of his own as a child of a famous comedian, appearing in commercials and films, but never approached his father’s stardom.

The thread’s actual disagreement wasn’t really about the divorce itself — almost nothing concrete about the wife or the split’s specifics surfaces — but about lineage and inheritance: commenters debated whether Kimura even looks like his father, whether his volatile, drink-fueled behavior is a genetically “inherited” trait or simply the result of being raised undisciplined by a famous, indulgent parent whose real off-stage personality (quiet, hobbyist, compliant toward his own mentor) reportedly differed sharply from his public image.

What outside readers likely miss is that this speculation about biological paternity is a stock rhetorical device in Japanese online reactions to celebrity-offspring scandals, not evidence of any actual paternity dispute — Kimura’s parentage is not seriously contested, just mocked.