Ai Iijima’s Death was Predicted

This is an interesting video that’s been going around. It was aired about three years ago on the popular tv show “Kin Suma” or “Kinyobi SMAP” which is hosted by Masahiro Nakai, leader of the uber-popular and ubiquitous SMAP. The show generally targets women and covers topics such as women with interesting jobs and some information about the biographies and personal lives of popular stars. In the video below, you can see Ai Iijima talk about how a fortune teller in Taiwan had cried while telling her that she’d die in three years. Ms. Iijima even looks into the camera and says, “Maybe you can use this video three years from now!”

You can see in the video how bright and open she was. I know that the news keeps mentioning her career as an AV star in Japan, but that was a short time a long time ago (although she was incredibly popular). It was just how great a person she was that enabled her to transcend all that and become popular with both men and women in mainstream tv.

There are reports that she’d gone to the local police station last January and said she was lonely and afraid of what she might do. She left the entertainment world nine months ago saying that she had kidney problems.

If it was a suicide, it may have been through loneliness, pain, depression, or some side effects from the kidney medicine she was taking. My first reaction was that she had had enough of the pain from the kidney problems, but the fact that she had not been found for a week also suggests that the loneliness was real and she may have been having other personal problems in addition to the sickness.

Shortly before her death she had created a company to sell her own brand of condoms over the internet. This goes along with her dedication to wiping out AIDs in Japan where AIDs is still a big problem (despite almost no media attention to the widespread sexually transmitted diseases here). Her dedication to wiping out AIDs and bringing these societal problems out into the open is yet another reason this death is a tragedy.

The newzjapan family out here is really sad about this. We’d been looking forward to her eventually returning to tv once she felt better. This is all too sad. Another tragedy out here.