Freelance Announcer Aika Kanda: “Should I Get My Fortune Told by a Fortune Teller?”

It all started with the “Great Calamity”

Have you seen the Netflix drama “I’m Going to Hell,” which has been generating a lot of buzz?It’s a drama based on the life of fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki, who took the world by storm on TV shows and elsewhere in the early 2000s. It’s unclear how closely it sticks to the facts, but I can’t help but be intrigued by comments like, “Even that was quite toned down,” and “Her real life was even more tumultuous.”

That’s because Kazuko Hosoki is a figure who left a powerful impression on my generation. Back then, there wasn’t a day that went by without seeing her face, and everyone was talking about her. Yet, one day, she suddenly vanished from TV, and I hardly ever saw her anymore. For me, a high school student at the time, it was a truly sensational event.

It was around this time that I started taking an interest in fortune-telling, and it was all because of her. Even though I didn’t believe in fortune-telling at all, Kazuko Hosoki’s concept of the “Great Killing Period” terrified me to an extreme degree.

(I thought, “If I’m in the middle of the ‘Great Killing Period,’ I’ll have to change my ways—otherwise, just as she says, I’ll ‘fall into hell!’”) So I checked to see if I was in it. From then on, I became curious about fortune-telling in general, and even when reading fashion magazines, I started by reading the horoscope pages at the back.

Then I joined NHK and was assigned to Fukuoka for my first posting. As the first female rookie announcer at the Fukuoka Bureau in over a decade, I received guidance from nearly all of my senior colleagues in the Announcers’ Room. I was very grateful, but since their advice differed from person to person, I felt it was impossible to put everyone’s advice into practice.

As I was worrying, “What should I do…?” one senior colleague advised me, “Pick one senior—‘this person’—and just follow that person’s advice. Then, if it doesn’t feel right, you can switch to someone else.” “I see!” I thought, and immediately decided that this senior colleague would be “this person.”

Actually, around that same time, I was struggling with the same dilemma regarding horoscopes. I was reading the horoscope pages in every magazine I could get my hands on, wondering, “Is there anything here that might serve as a guide? Are there any words that might offer me solace?” But each magazine said something completely different, and I felt it was impossible to follow all of their advice.

It was exactly the same situation as with the guidance from my seniors. “I’ll do the same with horoscopes!” I decided to make the horoscope at the back of my favorite magazine “my horoscope” and stopped reading any others entirely.

More than twenty years have passed since then, and now I rely exclusively on Crystal Tamago’s horoscopes. I’m not sure if they’re accurate for me personally, but when I look at how they’ve played out for other celebrities—especially in terms of their careers—they’re spot-on, so I’m sure the same must be true for me.

Is this world a miniature garden of the gods?

Lately, though, I’ve heard a few stories from acquaintances that sound straight out of the entertainment industry: “I heard you can actually get an appointment with that fortune-teller who’s usually impossible to book if you go through so-and-so. Want to give it a try?” Naturally, it costs a pretty penny. Even though I’m interested in fortune-telling, the only thing I’ve ever paid for is a book by Suishou Tamago that I buy once a year.

How much value is there in a fortune-telling session that costs tens of thousands of yen for just a short time? Do people who get their fortunes told actually go on to live without worries and achieve their ideal outcomes? I’m full of doubts, but it’s also true that many people in the unstable entertainment industry—where you never know when you might lose your job—rely on fortune-tellers, so it wouldn’t be strange for me to do the same.

But here’s the problem. I have my own theory about how the world works: “We’re born through our parents’ will, and while it appears we’re living by our own will, aren’t we actually just playthings for the gods?”

What if the universe were contained within a sort of aquarium called “the universe,” and the gods were manipulating humans for their own amusement, saying things like, “I’m going to observe the life of this person living on a planet called Earth!” or “Okay, I’ll make this person win the lottery and see what happens next!”…?　If that were the case, what would be the point of fortune-telling? It would be nothing more than entertainment.

To me, it seems more important to determine the truth of this “gods’ plaything” theory before spending a fortune on fortune-telling. How can I find out? Can I change the course of my future life through my own will? Maybe I should have a fortune-teller look into that first.

Aika Kanda / Born in 1980 in Kanagawa Prefecture.After graduating from the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, at Gakushuin University, she joined NHK as an announcer in 2003. She left NHK in 2012 to become a freelance announcer. Since then, she has been active primarily in variety shows and currently appears regularly as the main MC on the daytime series “Pokapoka” (Fuji TV network).

★ Her first book , *Where Does the ‘Royal Road’ Lead? *, a compilation of this series , is now on sale to great acclaim!

From the June 26 & July 3, 2026, combined issue of *FRIDAY*