Badly in Love

Love Among the Ruins: Romance and Rebellion in MEGUMI’s "Badly in Love"

I’ve watched enough Japanese reality TV to think I know how the first meeting goes. A spotless shared house, careful bows, polite little questions, everyone trying not to step on a social landmine. That’s exactly what I braced for when I hit play on *Badly in Love*. Instead, within two minutes, two guys bump into each other in an empty high school classroom, lock eyes, and immediately start hurling insults. Someone throws a desk. Security rushes in before they even exchange names. It’s an unhinged, genuinely funny opening—like the show is daring itself to torch the *Terrace House* manual.



Created and hosted by actor MEGUMI, who’s upfront about her own delinquent past, this ten-episode Netflix series goes all-in on Japan’s “yankii” subculture—dyed hair, fights, a big middle finger to expectation. The premise sounds like it’s begging to be trash: eleven ex-gangsters, host-club workers, and former yakuza members shoved into a secluded “academy” to find love. And yeah, at first the neon-soaked look and the nonstop peacocking can feel kind of cartoonish. But MEGUMI sets hard rules: no physical violence, no illegal activity. Break them and you’re gone. That turns the whole place into a pressure cooker, forcing people who usually speak through intimidation to actually talk.



You can read the discomfort in their bodies. Isamu Nishizawa—a 30-year-old rapper and former yakuza member who goes by “Yanboh”—moves like a man permanently braced for impact, all tight lines and defensive posture. Then he tries to flirt and the whole persona collapses into awkward fumbling. The show also doesn’t tiptoe around their histories. In Japan, tattoos are still heavily stigmatized and often barred from public baths, yet the series keeps filming the cast in the sauna. The ink on contestants like Oto-san (a 22-year-old student starved for affection) isn’t framed as menace; it’s just skin. For Japanese TV, that’s a quietly progressive choice.



What surprised me most is how fast it stops being a shouting match and starts feeling like a strange little rehab clinic. These are young adults who’ve been pushed to the margins, acting out the tough-guy script because it’s what they think keeps them safe. Underneath, a lot of them are just lonely. Once they’re awkwardly working together to build a children’s cafeteria—a shared project that anchors the back half—the armor starts coming off. Patrick St. Michel wrote in the *Japan Times*, “The show’s biggest twist may be just how earnest it is.” That nails it. Late in the season, Nisei, a former street fighter turned bar owner, uses the academy payphone to call his mother and apologize for all the tears he caused during his rebellious years. It’s quiet and brutal, and it has nothing to do with dating.

I’m not convinced *Badly in Love* fully works as a romance show. The final confessions feel rushed, and the hosts (including rapper AK-69 and comedian Nagano) sometimes look as whiplashed by the mood swings as we are. But as a character-driven series, it got under my skin. Watching these heavily tattooed, supposedly dangerous outcasts fumble toward vulnerability is unexpectedly moving. They show up ready to fight, and leave realizing that letting someone in is scarier than throwing a punch.