Japan’s justice ministry said Friday it will cancel a collaboration with a controversial Netflix dating show featuring ex-juvenile delinquents, following backlash against what some called the glorification of crimes.
Earlier this month, the ministry launched an unusual partnership with the streaming giant’s “Badly in Love,” releasing a poster starring its Season 2 cast members, including heavily tattooed men and women.
“Badly in Love” spotlights Japan’s so-called “yankii” (delinquent) subculture by lodging together young men and women with wild and often criminal pasts, including former yakuza gangsters and motorcycle gang members.
“In Japan’s first dating show for rebellious yankiis, 11 singles butt heads, forge bonds and live together for 14 days as they go all out to find the one,” the show’s description reads on its website.
Since its release in December, the show has proven an unexpected global hit, with Netflix saying its Season 1 maintained a weeks-long top-10 presence in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The show’s Season 2 is currently the top-ranked program in Japan, Netflix said.
Yuichi YAMAZAKI/AFP via Getty Images
“At times, it feels like Japan’s answer to MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore,’ another series that centered a maligned subculture and dared viewers to look closer,” according to a 2025 review of the series in the Japan Times.
The ministry’s rehabilitation bureau had justified the campaign on grounds that the show’s depictions of participants’ harsh upbringing, atonement and personal growth jibe with its belief that “a person can change.”
The ministry promoted the program – which says it aims to showcase “people who are unapologetically themselves” — as part of the campaign, and the show will continue to air without the government’s support.
“It was never the intention of this collaboration to endorse crime or delinquency, nor to glorify or trivialize these acts from someone’s past,” the ministry said in a statement on Friday.
“But we have received a lot of concerns and criticism that it can cause discomfort among people victimized by crimes,” it said, adding that the partnership will be terminated.
“Badly in Love” Season 2 came under fire after an episode aired in which one cast member confessed that, as a teen, he had been arrested for setting someone on fire to prove he was “not chickening out.”
The cancellation of the campaign, however, “isn’t meant to deny efforts to help rehabilitate people who committed crimes in the past,” the ministry said.
Yuichi YAMAZAKI/AFP via Getty Images
“Badly in Love” executive producer Dai Ota told AFP in April that prior to running Season 1, the production team had “extensive internal discussions” to ensure the show would not be perceived as “condoning the violence.”
“Our hope was to show that these young people — who have often been marginalized or labeled as ‘social outcasts’ — are simply youths who worry, struggle and genuinely grow,” he said.