Who is Junichi Kato? Number 1 Japanese Twitch streamer's career explored

Streaming personality Junichi Kato, also known as Unko-chan, is currently one of the most influential and recognizable livestreamers from Japan. Currently, he holds the number one spot on the list of the top Japanese-speaking Twitch streamers, as per broadcasting statistics and analysis website TwitchTracker.

A livestreaming veteran, Junichi Kato began broadcasting on Niconico, a Japanese video-sharing website, in 2009. He had started his career online under the alias Unko-chan.

Working as a health professional while livestreaming for years, Kato finally retired from his job in 2016 to focus solely on content creation. He also eventually started his own talent management agency called MURASH before uploading videos and going live on YouTube within the same year.

Eventually, in 2020, he joined Twitch and began streaming on the platform regularly. In March 2022, he reached his all-time peak viewer count on his YouTube channel with 463,646 viewers when he livestreamed his wedding reception.

Currently, he has over 1.27 million subscribers on the platform, along with 1.1 million followers on Twitch. Kato is also the owner of a professional gaming team called Murash Gaming and a beauty salon named CUT Jun, which is situated in Tokyo.

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When Junichi Kato broke Twitch's all-time Japanese viewership record

Twitch streamer Junichi Kato is currently the top Japanese-speaking streamer on the Amazon-owned platform (Image via YouTube/jun channel)

Junichi Kato has steadily gained a large audience on Twitch since joining the website. However, after being involved in a controversy in 2022, his max audience on the platform peaked on September 13, 2024, with 292,323 viewers. This was just a day after he was photographed in the front seats of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles with Japanese adult actress Ai Hongo.

This was when Kato was known to have been married. At the time, he claimed that he had his wife's permission to meet with Hongo and that the pair had not been intimately involved. His wife even appeared on his broadcast to corroborate that she was aware of Kato's meeting with Hongo.

On September 15, 2025, Hongo admitted that Kato and she had been dating, and that he had told her he and his wife were divorced. The Japanese streaming star eventually admitted to being in an extramarital affair with Hongo, and on April 24, 2025, announced that he and his wife were officially divorced.

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Also on Twitch, Kai Cenat is currently hosting the third installment of his signature subathon, Mafiathon 3. This iteration, which Cenat has labeled as the last of its kind, has featured celebrities like Ice Spice and Kim Kardashian, with many more celebrities expected to make an appearance through the rest of the subathon in September 2025.