In the midst of the period of being an underling: …… “Honjamaka” Hidehiko Ishizuka looks back on his “hard work

Hello, everyone. My name is Hidehiko Ishizuka, and I have been drowning in night sweats lately.

This time, I would like to write about a job that was hard. I don’t think work is easy in the first place, so I can say all of them, but I will introduce some of the most memorable ones.

A job where the more pies you throw, the more money you make.

When I first started in the entertainment industry, I still feel like I had a lot of hard work. I entered an acting school when I was 20 years old and spent my days working hard in lessons. One day, I had a job as an extra. Simply put, it was a “scenery” role. It is a job that requires you to be there to make it work, but you must never stand out.

On the day of the job, we would meet at Shinjuku West Exit at 6:00 a.m. and take a location bus to our destination, but we were never told where our destination was. When we arrive at the location bus, a plastic sheet is laid out in front of the bus, and a large cardboard box containing costumes and shoes is placed on top. Extras choose the size that fits them best and change on the spot.

From there, they must wait endlessly, not knowing what scene they will be in or when it will end. There were days when I participated in a whole day of shooting and ended up just walking 5 meters for a single cut. It was tough to work not knowing what I was going to do.

After that, I continued to create material with the goal of becoming a comedian, but there was no way I could suddenly appear on TV. My first job was at a show pub in Roppongi. At that time, I was doing material by myself, and I was paid 500 yen per stage, for a total of three stages, so my fee was 1,500 yen per day.

The show pub also had a pie-throwing corner at the end of the stage. The customers would throw pies at the comedian to relieve stress, and the comedian would get 100 yen for each pie sold to the customer for 300 yen.

In other words, the more pies were thrown, the more money was made. Depending on the day, the profit from the pies sometimes exceeded the day’s fee. After all the performances were over, when I was in the dressing room removing the whipped cream stuck in my ears – it was definitely tough, but at the same time I felt the happiness of “making money from laughter”.

In a sense, it was a “hard” job.

After we formed Honjamaka, I got my own costumes, my own dressing room, and my own schedule. It was like heaven when I think about the time when I was working as a lowly employee. But there were a few jobs that were “hard.

Shortly after I started working as “Honjamaka,” I took a cab from Shin-Fuji Station on the Shinkansen bullet train with my manager to a sales site. The driver told us to go this way and we got off at a hair salon.

Apparently, the hair salon had organized the “Honjamaka” show as a token of appreciation to their regular customers. For the first time, we performed our material between the shampoo tables. The range of movement was very limited, so the movements of the comedy were also very cozy. I was thankful that there were people who still invited us.

Typical sales stages are school festivals and cultural festivals. One time at a school, when the story was going well, my pants belt snapped. I was in my prime at the time, and my pants belt snapped. That was the most popular story of the day, and in a way, it was tough.

There are many things in life, but the harder you experience them, the more “heavenly” they seem. So I am not averse to hard things.

From the August 1, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY