Fuminori Tsuchiko: Charity, Celebrity and Controversy in Wartime Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 4 October 2026
War creates unlikely heroes. It also creates arguments about heroes, because humanitarian work conducted in the extraordinary circumstances of a city under bombardment seldom develops according to the rules of a professionally administered international charity. Money arrives from unusual places, volunteers become administrators overnight, friendships become business relationships and people who never expected to become public figures suddenly discover that thousands of strangers are scrutinising their motives. Few stories illustrate these complications better than that of Fuminori Tsuchiko, the elderly Japanese volunteer who came to Kharkiv after Russia’s full-scale invasion and became one of the city’s most recognisable foreign supporters.
Tsuchiko’s contribution to Kharkiv should not be obscured by the controversies that subsequently surrounded him. Having travelled to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion, he eventually made his way to Kharkiv at a time when Russian forces remained dangerously close to the city. He spent months living alongside residents sheltering in the Kharkiv Metro and became involved in distributing food and humanitarian assistance. In 2023 he and Kharkiv resident Nataliia Hrama became associated with perhaps his most celebrated project, FuMi Caffe, a free canteen in Saltivka serving people impoverished or displaced by the war. Contemporary reporting described hundreds of meals being served each day, financed substantially through donations Tsuchiko solicited from supporters in Japan.
This was not theatrical charity conducted from the safety of western Ukraine. Saltivka had suffered catastrophic destruction during the Battle of Kharkiv and remained vulnerable to Russian attack. Tsuchiko was an elderly foreigner who had no obligation to live there. Whatever conclusions one reaches about subsequent disputes concerning money, management and personality, the decision to spend his later years assisting civilians in a Ukrainian frontline city represents an unusual personal commitment. Japanese reporting likewise documented his earlier work distributing humanitarian assistance and his later interest in projects including a mobile library for Ukrainian children.
Yet FuMi Caffe eventually became the centre of a remarkably bitter dispute. By June 2024 Tsuchiko and Hrama, who had once described themselves publicly as friends and partners in the project, were making serious accusations against one another. The essential difficulty in assessing what happened is that the organisational arrangements appear to have been informal, personal and divided across different legal and financial structures. Tsuchiko had the international profile and access to Japanese donors. Hrama managed much of the Ukrainian operation and headed the Ukrainian charitable foundation. An arrangement that functioned while relations were good became extraordinarily difficult once mutual confidence disappeared.
Tsuchiko’s allegations were serious. He accused Hrama of improperly using his name to raise money, questioned expenditure that he said included an expensive telephone and laptop and complained that donations were being collected through accounts outside his control. He also became suspicious about financial documentation, including handwritten receipts. Tsuchiko maintained that he had been providing substantial sums for the café’s food, salaries and other expenses and produced screenshots and bank records which he said demonstrated his financial support. He regarded the establishment of an alternative fundraising operation while he was in Japan as, in his colourful description, something resembling a coup against him.
Hrama’s account was substantially different. She maintained that she and the staff performed the daily work necessary to operate the café while Tsuchiko principally raised funds in Japan and publicised their activities. According to her, the arrangement became increasingly difficult because operational expenses had to be met in Kharkiv while much of the fundraising infrastructure remained effectively controlled by Tsuchiko. She said that his departure for Japan in spring 2024 left the café struggling to pay salaries, rent and food costs and that this was why she began soliciting donations independently. She also argued that the Ukrainian charitable foundation and the café’s legal structure were not Tsuchiko’s personal property.
There were more personal accusations as well. Hrama portrayed Tsuchiko as having become increasingly difficult following his emergence as a public figure and criticised his relationships with staff. Tsuchiko rejected parts of this account, including a story that he had thrown away an award presented to him by Ukrainian veterans. These allegations are particularly difficult for outsiders to assess. Personality disputes between former collaborators are not evidence of financial wrongdoing, and recollections of arguments inevitably become coloured once a relationship has broken down. They should therefore be distinguished from questions that might conceivably be established objectively through accounts, contracts, bank records and legal documents.
The financial accusations require even greater caution. Public reporting establishes that the accusations were made; it does not establish that either side committed fraud. Indeed the reporting of the dispute reveals a more complicated picture than the social-media accusations that surrounded it. Tsuchiko claimed that money had been improperly handled, whereas Hrama maintained that she was attempting to keep a humanitarian operation functioning when the existing financing arrangements became inadequate. Tsuchiko displayed financial records that he said demonstrated continuing payments. Hrama insisted that the practical burdens of operating the canteen nevertheless left her scrambling for money. Both propositions could theoretically contain elements of truth without establishing criminal conduct by either person.
There is also an important piece of historical evidence that should temper attempts to rewrite the entire relationship retrospectively. Before the dispute, Hrama spoke positively and publicly about Tsuchiko’s contribution. In a 2023 account she described Japanese donations as instrumental in establishing the café and said that she and Tsuchiko were friends working together. The same reporting explained that she had established the Fumi Fund because Tsuchiko, as a non-resident, could not himself establish the necessary Ukrainian structure. This does not determine what happened subsequently, but it demonstrates that the partnership was genuine before it collapsed.
The dispute eventually destroyed that partnership. Hrama continued the humanitarian operation separately, the Fumi name disappeared and the charitable foundation was renamed. Tsuchiko announced plans for another operation and pursued his complaints against his former collaborator. Contemporary reporting said that Tsuchiko and his lawyer had initiated proceedings relating to his allegations and that he intended to accept the eventual decision of the Ukrainian courts.
The Lviv Herald has subsequently interviewed Hrama about the successor operation. She remains deeply critical of Tsuchiko and alleges that the breakdown concerned control of donations, financing and the management of the original café. Those claims deserve to be reported because she was intimately involved in the project, but they remain her account of a dispute in which Tsuchiko has presented a competing version. The Lviv Herald has not independently established the financial allegations made by either side.
Another controversy surrounding Tsuchiko arose in early 2025, although it was of a very different character. He publicly complained that difficulties dealing with the Ukrainian migration authorities threatened his ability to remain in the country. The resulting publicity produced considerable sympathy for him, but subsequent analysis suggested that the episode was more bureaucratically complicated than the initial social-media narrative implied. The State Migration Service invited him to clarify his position and his permission to remain in Ukraine was ultimately extended; he also indicated an intention to apply for Ukrainian citizenship.
There is a broader lesson in all this about wartime humanitarianism. Small voluntary organisations frequently begin with trust rather than governance. Somebody has access to donors, somebody else has local knowledge, another person owns a vehicle, somebody knows a restaurant supplier and another volunteer understands Ukrainian bureaucracy. Nobody begins by contemplating litigation between themselves. Yet once substantial sums are passing through an organisation, the absence of formal structures becomes dangerous even where everybody involved begins with honourable intentions.
That appears to be one of the most important ways of understanding the FuMi affair. The project depended heavily upon Tsuchiko’s extraordinary ability to attract Japanese sympathy and donations, while its daily operation depended upon Ukrainians who understood how to run a kitchen, purchase supplies, employ staff and serve hundreds of people. Those are different functions and they generate different perceptions of ownership. The person raising the money may naturally believe that without him the project would never exist. The people working inside the project may equally believe that the public figure receiving the attention is only one component of an organisation they actually operate.
Money magnifies these tensions. A donor may think he is giving money to Fuminori Tsuchiko because he trusts Fuminori Tsuchiko. A Ukrainian charitable foundation may regard the same money as resources dedicated to an institutional humanitarian purpose. A café manager may see an urgent need to purchase food tomorrow morning while a fundraiser may insist upon accounting for yesterday’s expenditure before transferring another tranche. Once trust disappears, each person’s perfectly intelligible perspective can begin to look like misconduct to the other.
That is why the accusations against Tsuchiko and the accusations he made against others should be approached with the same discipline. Neither admiration nor suspicion is a substitute for evidence. Photographs of a foreign volunteer surrounded by grateful pensioners do not prove that every administrative decision he made was correct. Conversely, arguments over accounting, management and personality do not erase the fact that hundreds of vulnerable Kharkiv residents were fed through a project to which he contributed substantially.
There is also something peculiarly Kharkiv about Tsuchiko’s story. This is a city that has accumulated eccentric foreigners, improbable friendships and improvised institutions throughout its history. Wartime Kharkiv has intensified the phenomenon. People who might never have spoken to one another in ordinary circumstances have found themselves sharing Metro platforms during air raids, distributing bread from car boots and constructing charities out of whatever resources happened to be available. Tsuchiko became part of this strange wartime social fabric.
He also became a celebrity, and celebrity is dangerous to charitable work. The international media understandably preferred the compelling story of an elderly Japanese man who abandoned a comfortable life to feed Ukrainians under Russian bombardment. It was an excellent story because much of it was true. Yet humanitarian operations are almost never the work of one charismatic individual. Behind the photographs were cooks, administrators, suppliers, Ukrainian volunteers and donors thousands of kilometres away. When the relationships between these people fractured, the heroic narrative proved incapable of accommodating the resulting complexity.
A fair assessment of Fuminori Tsuchiko therefore lies somewhere beyond the two caricatures that emerged from the controversy. It is unreasonable to transform him retrospectively into a villain merely because an ambitious humanitarian partnership ended in recrimination. It is equally unreasonable to suppose that conspicuous acts of courage place any volunteer beyond questions about financial transparency, governance or treatment of colleagues. Charitable work involving substantial donations requires accountability precisely because donors and beneficiaries place such enormous trust in the people undertaking it.
What remains beyond serious dispute is the extraordinary nature of Tsuchiko’s decision to come to Kharkiv. At an age when most people would understandably prefer security, he chose a city being struck by Russian missiles. He lived among people sheltering underground, helped distribute food and became part of a project that fed large numbers of civilians. Whatever the eventual interpretation of his disputes with former colleagues, those acts occurred and should not be written out of the record.
Nor should the controversies be written out. They are part of the story as well. The appropriate response is neither canonisation nor condemnation but scrutiny: accounts should be examined, allegations should be tested and each person accused of wrongdoing should have an opportunity to answer. Where facts cannot presently be established, responsible journalism should say precisely that.
Fuminori Tsuchiko’s Kharkiv story may ultimately be less a tale about whether one unusual Japanese volunteer was a saint or a sinner than about the difficulties of doing good in wartime. Human beings bring generosity, vanity, loyalty, suspicion, courage, pride and misunderstanding with them even when they set out to help others. War does not abolish those characteristics. It intensifies them.
The elderly Japanese man who came to Saltivka should therefore be judged neither by his mythology nor by the allegations of people with whom he later quarrelled. His humanitarian contribution deserves recognition. The questions surrounding the administration of his projects deserve examination. The accusations made against him deserve his answer, just as the accusations he has made against others deserve theirs. Holding all three propositions simultaneously is not indecision. It is the elementary fairness that should distinguish journalism from a social-media feud.
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Before publication, the Lviv Herald provided Fuminori Tsuchiko with a draft of this article and expressly invited him to comment upon its contents, including the controversies and allegations discussed above. Mr Tsuchiko declined to comment. We respect his decision and record it here in the interests of fairness and transparency. We nevertheless hope to interview Mr Tsuchiko in person shortly, when he will have a further opportunity, should he wish to take it, to give his own account of his humanitarian work in Kharkiv, the circumstances surrounding the breakdown of his relationship with his former collaborators and his continuing activities in support of Ukraine.
