Remember late 2023, when Japanese media briefly lost its mind over Ryuta Watanabe? The Sapporo househusband who said he had four “wives,” only one of them legal, living with several of them under one roof while they worked and he stayed home with the kids. Three young children at the time. It read like a harem manga that somehow escaped the page.
A magazine follow-up caught up with him. He’s 38 now. The original setup has mostly collapsed.
Late last year two of the women and four of the kids moved out. That left him with his second wife, Ayaka. They officially got married on August 8. He updates his YouTube channel a lot less these days — he still has over 50,000 subscribers who apparently want updates on the polygamous househusband experiment — and he says he’s depressed.
“The sense of loss from the family shrinking was immense,” he told the interviewer. “I have no motivation to do anything. I can’t summon the will to act at all. I’m not living a polygamous life anymore.” He talks about manic-depressive swings: when he’s up he goes full throttle, when he’s down he stops. The kids and the household used to be his reason to keep going.
Things with Ayaka aren’t always smooth either. He says he thought about separating about a month ago. They’re trying for a child through IVF.
The live-in harem is gone. The dating life is not.
He says he currently has seven girlfriends on top of Ayaka, and they all know the situation. Here’s the rundown he gave:
- The one closest to “main wife” status is a nursery school teacher. They’ve been together a year and a half and are actively trying to conceive. If she gets pregnant, he expects they’ll live together.
- A 32-year-old who works at an ice cream shop. Met on Tinder. New, so no baby plans yet.
- A 46-year-old married doctor from a wealthy family. Also Tinder. She doesn’t want to leave her husband; she just wanted a younger boyfriend. She shows up in an expensive foreign car and hands him 30,000 yen each time.
- A 50-year-old single mother who runs several beauty businesses and, according to him, owns an entire building. More casual-sex-partner energy than girlfriend. Also gives him about 30,000 yen a visit.
- A 29-year-old caregiver he met through DMs on X two years ago. Long-distance — she lives in Yokohama — so they see each other roughly once every two months when he goes to Tokyo. Originally from Hokkaido. Plan is to live together if she gets pregnant.
- A 37-year-old single mom from a wealthy family who doesn’t work. Divorced three times, has a 20-year-old child. They’re trying to conceive. He says part of the appeal is the daughter: the woman told him that if they married, the daughter would come too. He said he’d love to marry her and “get involved with the daughter as well.”
- The newest one: 33, works in medical administration, also Tinder. Wants a child. They’re trying. Plan is to live together once a baby arrives. He actually forgot who she was for a second during the interview.
Even he seemed to lose count at one point.
His YouTube channel, separately from the magazine interview, claims the original fourth “wife,” Chihiro, has come back and is heavily pregnant. So the old arrangement might be reconstituting itself while the new girlfriends are still in the picture.
Whether any of this is fully accurate, exaggerated for the camera, or a mix of both is hard to know from the outside. What is clear is that the tidy four-wife household of 2023 is gone, the depression is real enough that he’s talking about it on record, and the guy who used to have women supporting the house now has a rotating cast of girlfriends — some of whom are also giving him money.
Same man. Different roster. Still a lot of kids in the picture, according to him. The harem manga didn’t get a clean ending. It just changed chapters.