Hinako (ひなこ), one half of the Japanese YouTube duo Issho Tomoko (一生友子), has announced she broke up with her boyfriend of two years. The 20-year-old shared the news in a video posted to the channel on October 19, 2026.
“I broke up with the boyfriend I’d been dating for two years,” Hinako said at the start of the video. She described him as someone who felt like “the one,” recalling her own surprise at finding someone she got along with so well.
The relationship actually came in two chapters. The couple first dated for about one year and three months before splitting in the summer of 2025. Hinako said she wanted to see him again, reached out through social media, and the two eventually got back together. The second time around, though, “age-appropriate differences in values” started to show, and she admitted she had a feeling the relationship “would end someday.”
Hinako grew emotional describing the immediate aftermath of the breakup, saying she was left “sobbing” and recalling thinking, “I can’t even eat.” “He gave me more than two years of love, and I really liked him,” she said.
She also confessed that her feelings haven’t fully faded. “Even now, I really want to see him,” Hinako said, before adding that meeting up again would likely just repeat the same cycle, so she’s doing her best to resist the urge. On a lighter note, she noted that there are things she can now do that she couldn’t while in the relationship.
Who is Hinako?
Hinako is a member of Issho Tomoko, a two-woman YouTube channel with more than 680,000 subscribers. The channel is known for lifestyle and relationship-focused content from its two members, and Hinako’s personal updates — including past relationship stories — are a recurring draw for the channel’s audience.
Author’s Comment
A 20-year-old crying on camera about a boy who made her forget to eat — I know, I know, it sounds like diary-entry material, not news. But this is exactly the content Japanese YouTube runs on: parasocial intimacy sold as a personal update, and subscribers eating it up because it feels like their friend is confiding in them. What gets me is the honesty in the mess of it — breaking up, getting back together, breaking up again, still wanting to see him. That’s not a tidy narrative, that’s just being twenty. I respect that she didn’t dress it up into some inspirational lesson. Sometimes a breakup is just a breakup, and sometimes the healthiest thing is admitting you still want to text your ex and then not doing it.
