She lived for some time in Tahiti and Lido di Venezia, and opened an Italian café in 2009 in her home province, Kōchi.
[2] In August 2006, in two separate essays in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, she revealed that she had killed kittens by throwing them off a cliff while living in Tahiti.
[3][4] Yuriko Koike, who was Japan's minister of the environment at the time, said that "what Ms. Bandō had done was regrettable from the point of view of an animal lover".
About a month later, the Polynesian government was reported to have begun investigating it as a case of animal cruelty.
Bandō rebuked the criticism in the Mainichi Shimbun's Tokyo evening edition, saying that as long as there was no official report from the Polynesian government's side, she considered the criticism against her to be a case of suppression of freedom of speech.