Following in the Footsteps of Legends: Hidehiko Ishizuka’s Encounter with Watanabe Production
Honjamaka" Hidehiko Ishizuka's ″Mayday to Day″ vol.07
Hello, everyone. The days with temperatures in the single digits are becoming more and more common. Are you wearing two layers of short sleeves? My name is Hidehiko Ishizuka.
I have already written about how I entered the Sunflower Theater Company’s training school to become a Japanese Sylvester Stallone. This time, I will write about what happened after that.
The manager’s words that hit me hard
I belonged to the youth division of the training school and worked hard with about 40 classmates in the evening classes. We had lessons in voice training, pantomime, and acting.
However, after one year, half of my classmates had dropped out, and by the end of the second year, only four of us remained. I thought, “There’s no way I can become a star in just two years,” so I wasn’t particularly anxious. Instead, I enjoyed myself, often making my classmates laugh during lessons. Then one day, the manager of the theater group said to me:
“Ishizuka-kun, you know. it might be better to be in a situation where you’re praised for making people laugh, rather than one where you make people laugh and get scolded.”
It hit me hard. Looking at the entertainment world objectively, there were people like Chosuke Ikariya, Shiro Ito, and Haji Hana, who were active as actors while also making people laugh on TV.
To reach the summit, I need to take a route that suits me. This was the first time I seriously thought about my life.
But I didn’t know what to do. I was feeling lost, lying around at home, when I came across a page in a magazine about an entertainment audition. My finger stopped on the section titled “Follow in the footsteps of Hip Up! Watanabe Production.” For some reason, I suddenly felt a strange confidence that I could “follow in the footsteps of Hip Up.” I immediately took action, passed the document screening, and the second-round theme was “Three-minute act.”
Wait a minute, what’s a “three-minute act”? I had made people laugh in conversations, but that wasn’t exactly “a bit.” That’s when I came up with the idea of using puns.
