After My Husband Falls Asleep
夫が寝たあとに
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Once the husbands have gone to bed, two mothers and a guest say what they really think about childcare, housework and the men now asleep.
After My Husband Falls Asleep is a late-night talk show on TV Asahi, first broadcast on 5 October 2023 and built on a single premise: the husbands have gone to bed. Its hosts, Miki Fujimoto, a former member of Morning Musume, and the comedian Natsuko Yokosawa, both married mothers of three, sit at the table of a dining-kitchen set and take turns choosing topics from handwritten sticky notes. Then they say what they really think about childcare, housework and the husbands now asleep.
From the second episode a guest joins them, usually a well-known mother of young children, sometimes a father, and together they react to street interviews with parents. Recurring segments watch fathers drinking together one-on-one and fathers left alone in charge of the children, read the messages couples sent each other on the day a baby was born, and gather mothers to write tanka about child-rearing with the poet Machi Tawara. As the episodes accumulated, the show moved from venting about husbands toward couples thinking together about raising and educating children.
It began as a 17-minute programme at half past two in the morning. Its official clips online passed 500 million views by June 2024, and it reached the top of TVer's variety ranking, rare for a late-night show. It moved to a 30-minute slot just after midnight on Saturdays in April 2024, grew to an hour that October, and returned to 30 minutes in October 2025. It continues, with a guest every week since 2026.
Starring
Miki FujimotoHost
A former member of Morning Musume, married to the comedian Tomoharu Shoji, who co-hosts as a mother of three.
Natsuko YokosawaHost
A comedian and mother of three daughters who co-hosts, trading sticky-note topics with Fujimoto across the kitchen table.
Machi TawaraRecurring guest
The poet who keeps returning to lead the show's gatherings of mothers writing tanka about raising children.
Why it matters
After My Husband Falls Asleep is built on a small, familiar fact of family life: many mothers only speak freely once the house is quiet. What it puts on screen is the unpaid, unglamorous work of raising children and running a home, and the frustration that gathers when a husband does not see it. Its segments that follow fathers alone with the children turn the camera the other way. That a 17-minute programme at 2.30 in the morning drew half a billion clip views says something about how many parents were looking for this conversation, and where they went to find it: not in the broadcast but in short clips online. The show's own drift, from complaints about husbands toward couples working out child-rearing together, leaves open the question it began with: whether what gets said after bedtime can be said at the dinner table.