YouTuber with Three Wives is Losing Everything: Polygamy in Japan

The history of polygamy in Japan includes emperors with concubines, shoguns with sprawling households and enough heirs to start countless wars of succession. Emperor Meiji had one official empress but fathered 15 children with five concubines. Tokugawa Ienari reportedly fathered more than 50 children with numerous women. And then there’s Ryuta Watanabe, a 38-year-old YouTuber behind ippu tasai channeru (literally “one husband, many wives”), who revived polygamy as a modern lifestyle.

Watanabe filmed life under one roof with three “wives” and 11 children. He said he wanted to beat Tokugawa’s numbers and father more children so history would remember his name. The setup fell apart once money became a problem, and the household stopped feeling like Tenchi Muyo! and started feeling like four adults, 11 kids and one income hanging on views.

Watanabe blamed the split on financial strain and fights with two partners, who left with their children. Supporting one spouse in Japan in 2026 already feels impossible. Now try three. Turns out you can’t compare a Tokugawa-era household backed by land, taxes and political power to a YouTuber household backed by cup ramen and a ring light.

The Polygamous YouTuber’s Downfall

Watanabe launched his channel in 2023. He filmed daily life in Hokkaido inside a self-declared polygamous household. At its peak, he lived with three partners under one roof and had 11 children. He never registered legal marriages. That kept him outside Japan’s bigamy rules while he still called the women “wives” on camera.

The content came from childcare, chores and co-living stress. Watanabe also called himself a “kept man” (ひも男, himo otoko). He handled cooking, cleaning and video production. But his partners earned the income.

I feel awful when I can’t afford to take a girl out to TGI Fridays. Now imagine doing that to three women at the same time. That said, at its height, the format drew a lot of attention. The channel allegedly once brought in around ¥1 million per month in YouTube income.

However, real life quickly caught up. As childcare increased and income became less predictable, tensions grew. Japan’s National Center for Child Health and Development estimates the cost of raising a firstborn to age 18 at about ¥21.7 million. Add savings and insurance on top. Then multiply it by 11.

The breaking point came after he floated the idea of expanding the family further by recruiting new partners overseas, framing it as a way to grow both the household and the channel. I picture his partners quickly glancing around the room, mentally counting children, expenses and available chairs, and realizing the math was about to get worse.

By late 2025, two partners had left and returned to their families with their children. Watanabe later posted that the household had collapsed. He also said he had about ¥110,000 left and lived out of a car with the one remaining partner. Which, girl. Blink twice if you need help. Watanabe insists the lifestyle is not over and is planning “auditions” for new partners.

Historical Polygamy in Japan

Japan does have a history of polygamy (複婚, fukukon or 一夫多妻, ipputasai), but it looked very different from anything resembling a modern relationship experiment. For much of pre-modern Japan, it functioned less as romance and more as succession planning.

It was also a luxury. Keeping multiple partners and children was expensive, and the version people imagine is mostly something you see among elites and the wealthy, the people with land, retainers and a household system built to support it. For everyone else, monogamy was often less a moral choice than a budget reality. And you had a lot of kids because winters were brutal, disease was everywhere and your labor force could grow up under your roof.

Before the late 19th century, elite households could maintain concubines (側室, sokushitsu) alongside an official spouse, and there was little formal legal structure preventing it. That changed during the Meiji era, when Japan began modernizing its legal system and adopting Western-style family law. The Civil Code, introduced in 1898, formalized marriage as a single, legally recognized union tied to inheritance, property rights and family registration.

The modern koseki family registry system makes legal monogamy the default because you can only be registered as married to one person at a time. You can try to live “polygamously” in practice. But only one spouse can be officially recognized for inheritance, taxes, parental authority and services, so everyone else exists in a legal grey zone.

Polygamy in Modern Japan

Modern polygamy in Japan rarely resembles historical precedent. It usually makes headlines because it’s weird to Japanese people, too. So don’t come out of this with a “wacky Japan” take.

In 2024, Takashi Fujita, a businessman in Takamatsu, described himself as living with multiple “wives.” Because Japanese law only allows one legal marriage, he married one partner (after multiple divorces caused by his infidelity) while using Japan’s adult adoption system to place additional partners into his household registry.

He argued that the idea of staying with one person for life is basically a “Christian” concept. He also insisted that his wives could not have other partners because “women get serious,” while casting himself as their protector and benefactor, and claiming he would set aside ¥100 million for each partner if they stayed.

In early 2026, Japanese police arrested people connected to a man promoting a polygamy-style household after allegations surfaced that women were persuaded to hand over large amounts of money as part of the relationship. Investigators found documents on his computer analyzing his partner’s personality and upbringing—like real super-villain-type brainwashing.

Japan has seen this kind of manipulation before. The most infamous example is Aum Shinrikyo, whose founder, Shoko Asahara, maintained sexual relationships with multiple female followers, often framed as spiritual training or religious duty. The group controlled members’ marriages, finances and daily lives before carrying out the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, which shaped how Japan views cults.

Modern polygamy cases obviously operate on a much smaller and less violent scale, but they occasionally tap into a similar cultural discomfort around charismatic authority figures building communities where one person holds unusual emotional, financial or romantic power over several partners.

The ‘Harem Anime’

The idea of one person surrounded by multiple romantic partners is far more common in Japanese fiction than in real life. The “harem” genre (ハーレム) became especially popular in the late 1980s and 1990s, appearing across anime, manga and light novels.

These stories usually follow a single central character, often an ordinary or socially awkward protagonist, who unexpectedly attracts several romantic interests at once. The format blends romantic comedy, slice-of-life storytelling and exaggerated character drama rather than exploring realistic family or relationship structures.

One of the genre’s defining early hits was Tenchi Muyo!, which debuted in 1992 and helped establish many of the tropes that still define harem storytelling today. The series revolves around a teenage boy living with multiple alien, supernatural and interdimensional women, each with their own personality and romantic interest in him. But Ryoko is the best girl and is the actual one he should love the most (note: I may be a Ryoko fan).

Some other popular examples are:

• Love Hina (ラブひな, 2000): A struggling student accidentally becomes manager of an all-female dormitory.
• The Quintessential Quintuplets (五等分の花嫁, 2019): A tutor becomes romantically entangled with five sisters he is hired to teach.
• Rent-A-Girlfriend (彼女、お借りします, 2020): A college student becomes involved with multiple women through Japan’s rental-dating culture.
• Nisekoi (ニセコイ, 2014): A fake relationship between two high school students spirals into multiple competing romantic interests.
• Date A Live (デート・ア・ライブ, 2013): A sci-fi variation where the protagonist dates supernatural beings to prevent global disasters.
• To Love-Ru (To LOVEる, 2008): A chaotic romantic comedy involving aliens, misunderstandings and multiple love interests.
• High School DxD (ハイスクールD×D, 2012): A supernatural action series built around a protagonist surrounded by demon and angel partners.

Final Thoughts

Harem anime reflects fantasy rather than social reality, and audiences generally understand it that way. The joke is that it’s weird. The main dude is losing his mind over girls fighting over him, and nobody is trying to register a cat girl to the koseki (that I know of).

Anime can juggle jealousy with slapstick. Real people get exhausted. They leave. And unless you have serious money, time and emotional discipline, I’m going to assume it’s chaos. I’m also going to assume these people are not-so-great people because bringing a life into this world for clout feels pretty selfish.

Fujita couldn’t stop cheating. Watanabe couldn’t build a stable life for eleven kids without treating his household and children like a content farm. Elon Musk has 14 kids with multiple women, yet he still can’t buy friends.

How about you? Do you want to live in your own personal anime harem? Let us know in the comments below.