The common denominator is “love for people”… “Honjamaka” Hidehiko Ishizuka’s insights from his visit to a mansion

Before the food report, I was visiting a mansion.

Hello, everyone. Are your knees sore from chasing after a car of stone-baked sweet potatoes? My name is Hidehiko Ishizuka.

Actually, there was a time before I became a gourmet reporter when I used to do reports on visiting mansions. It was a segment of a morning wide show. I was always excited to go to the site.

What kind of mansions were they? What kind of people lived there? How do you become successful enough to live in a mansion? I would like to introduce some of the places I visited that left a deep impression on me.

A mansion and 200 million sliding doors…the “treasures” of such a president

First, we visited the house of a president who sells used motorcycles in Tokyo.

The building is a magnificent wooden structure that could have been designated as an important cultural property. When we opened the door with trepidation, we were greeted by a spacious entranceway as large as a studio apartment room. Going up one step, I saw a gold sliding door. I had never seen such a scene even in “Rorenbo Shogun.

I was so curious that I asked the president, “How much for all the sliding doors?” He laughed and said, “200 million. It would be a disaster if a relative’s child played catch here and made a hole in it.

How could he live in such a nice house? When we also asked him the reason, he said that when he was a college student, he repaired a friend’s broken motorcycle and received money for the repair. That friend introduced the president to other students, and word of mouth spread rapidly. Eventually, he turned motorcycle repair into a business.

During our conversation, I mentioned that I had given up my old Yamaha SR400, and the president said, “We have an SR. Do you want it?” He said, “We have an SR at home. I felt as if a neighbor was offering me his leftover side dish. Naturally, I politely declined.

Finally, he asked, “Do you have any treasures?” He pulled out an old wooden box from the back of his study. Inside was a love letter that he had exchanged with his wife when they were young. It made my heart flutter. This is the kind of person who stands above others, I thought.

Next, a trademark owner of a certain product. He lived in a house that stood on a hill overlooking the sea. The house itself was a small one-story house, but there was a stream running through the yard, and there were stream crabs. With the ocean spread out before their eyes, it was like a paradise.

Usually, he and his wife spend their time together painting in oil. When we asked him about his particular lifestyle, he mentioned that he changes his residence every five years. The reason, he said, was because he wanted to enjoy various places in Japan together.

When I rudely asked him why his house was so small, he said, “I miss my wife because I can’t see her in a big house. At this point, my interest changed from the “big house” to the “people.

Why does the female president wear “big earrings?”

Finally, a female president who runs a ryotei restaurant. Here, it was not the building but the accessories she was wearing that caught my attention. An expensive ring that even an amateur would recognize, and earrings so large you could almost hear the screams of her earlobes.

Perhaps sensing my puzzled look, the president said, “Oh, this is it. I wear them because I’m in the business of selling dreams to the customers who come to the store. It doesn’t matter if they laugh at me for wearing a strange accessory. I was ashamed that until then I had thought that people who lived in mansions were money losers.

People who live in mansions. It is a person who keeps love for others. Incidentally, 70% of the mansions I reported on had an ornament of Hotei, one of the Seven Deities of Good Luck. I immediately purchased Hotei-sama as well, but he still doesn’t seem to smile at me.

From the February 21/28, 2025 issue of FRIDAY