For new encounters… “Honjamaka” Hidehiko Ishizuka’s experience of “graduation

Memories of the Second Button

Hello, everyone. The weather is getting warmer. Have you already changed your clothes from cotton T-shirts to mesh T-shirts?　My name is Hidehiko Ishizuka.

After the graduation season, many of you have entered a new company or started a new job. In this issue, I would like to write about some “graduations” that I have experienced.

The first graduation in my life was an elementary school graduation ceremony. I do not have the impression that it was very sad. This is because most of my friends from elementary school are going to the same junior high school. However, the junior high school graduation ceremony was different. It was different from junior high school graduation because all of my classmates were going on to different high schools.

On the day of the graduation ceremony, memories of the past three years came back to me at once. I looked at the classrooms and thought, “Oh, how I got hit by Mr. Sato here by mistake,” or at the corridor and thought, “Oh, how a junior girl confessed to me here,” or at the pool and thought, “Oh, how I got water in my ears crawling here,” my heart was filled with emotion. Starting tomorrow, I will never come here again. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

All the graduates were reluctant to say goodbye and were reluctant to leave. Boys without the second button on their uniforms were moving left and right. Some of you may not know this, but back then it was customary for girls to get the second button of the boy they liked.

After many of the graduates had left the school and only a few remained, all the buttons were securely sewn on my uniform. I plucked off the second button myself and handed it to a girl who had been unable to confess her feelings to me. and handed it to her. I wonder where that button is now.

In spite of such hot memories, when I entered high school, I immediately fell in love with a girl. Human beings are like that.

Despair over fried horse mackerel

In high school, I devoted everything to judo, so when I graduated, I was very happy to be released from those hard practices, and as for college, I only have memories of curry rice and Neapolitan that I ate at the school cafeteria. After that, what was hard was graduating from a part-time job.

For nine years after graduating from high school, I worked part-time as a waiter at a steak restaurant at the east exit of Yokohama Station. I chose this restaurant because I thought I could eat steak as makanai.

However, on my first day, the makanai was fried horse mackerel. I despaired, but the manager, other part-timers, and employees were all so nice that I was able to continue working there for nine years.

The manager who gave me kind words when I made mistakes, Saito who competed with me to see who could hold more cases of mineral water, Matsubara who took me shopping for erotic books on the way home from work, and my friends who rode their bikes to Honmoku after work and shouted bad words about customers they met that day whom they didn’t like. The others.

The time finally came to say goodbye to them as their jobs at “Honjamaka” began to come in. The manager said, “Good luck with your job there. How nice he is. On the last day, when I finished my work and peeled off my nametag from my locker, I felt a cold wind blow into my heart.

Since then, I have experienced a number of “program endings” in the name of graduation in the entertainment industry, and here I am today. Graduation is not a sad ceremony. After graduation, there is always the “next. I wonder what kind of friends you will meet in your new life from April. I hope you will spend your time with excitement.

From the May 1-8, 2026 issue of “FRIDAY