After declaring open marriage, influencer power couple Hikaru and Shingeki no Noa announce divorce

In September, one of Japan’s most popular YouTubers, Hikaru, experienced a major backlash when he announced that his new marriage with his beautiful 30-year-old wife was an open one in which they would both have other partners.

The 34-year-old faced heavy criticism for declaring so brazenly that he wanted to seek out extramarital partners.

Now comes the quite unsurprising news that Hikaru and Shingeki no Noa (Minori Maeda), a former hostess turned businesswoman and model, have divorced after just seven months of marriage.

Hikaru announced the news on his YouTube channel on December 19.

“To put it bluntly, from start to finish, I kept stirring things up, turning the table upside down, and this is what happened,” he announced. “I had a lot of mixed feelings. Maybe it was just impulse, maybe it was for YouTube, maybe it was because I wanted to get married at the time, but in the end, I said we should get married from the very first day of dating, and I think at the time I was serious about it, so I told Noa that, and she agreed, and so we got married, but my feelings were always wavering, and the way I felt when we got married on day one was completely different from the way I felt a month and two months later.”

Both influencers rely heavily on self-promotion to make their living and tried to turn a legal and romantic partnership into a promotional stunt. They claimed to have married on May 31 after “zero days” of dating. Hikaru now admits the obvious: that such “instant marriages” are “not good.”