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Category: Humor

  • My Heartland Stay Program—A Visit to Iowa

    My Heartland Stay Program—A Visit to Iowa

    For the past two decades, I’ve visited the cultural festival at Kokugakuin Tochigi University High School every year to see performances by Ms. Saigusa’s musical club. There, whenever I saw the display for the homestay program—organized almost every summer by Mr. Devin Kelso, an English teacher at the school, in which students from the school visit his hometown in Iowa—I’d dream of going there myself someday.

    That dream came true this year. During the week of Silver Week in September—which is packed with national holidays—I visited Mount Vernon and Lisbon in Iowa, Mr. Kelso’s hometown, as well as the filming location of the movie Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, the world’s steepest funicular train in Dubuque, Iowa, and the Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer museums in Hannibal, Missouri—destinations frequently visited by students on the homestay program. By driving a rental car on American roads, staying at motels, and eating at diners, I experienced America’s good old-fashioned culture.

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  • Shofukutei Riko

    Shofukutei Riko

    Shofukutei Riko (笑福亭里光) is a professional rakugo artist who speaks Kansai-dialect rakugo stories. Rakugo is, as Wikipedia puts it, a form of Japanese verbal entertainment in which the lone storyteller sits on stage and depicts a long, complex, comical (or sometimes sentimental) story using only a paper fan and a small cloth as props.

    He was one of my classmates when we were in junior high school. Besides, he was one of my best friends. In junior high, I talked to him a lot, played with him a lot, belonged to the same club as he did, and resigned from the club together with him on the same day. He sometimes played rakugo on stage in school events. His performance was rising above the level of an amateur, so he was called shisho, a title used for professional rakugo storytellers.

    After we graduated from junior high, we went to different high schools. We didn’t see each other for ages.

    One day in 2012, I was staying in a hotel room watching an entertainment program on TV, where several rakugo artists who had just been promoted to the shin’uchi rank were on stage, and they were giving speeches in turn to show their thankful feelings for the promotion. The program reminded me of the classmate who wanted to be a rakugo storyteller. I wondered if he still kept up his hobby. Watching TV, I thought he might appear on such an entertainment program someday. To my surprise, he really did it in the very program that day.

    According to online sources, after graduating from university, he became a disciple of Shofukutei Tsuruko (笑福亭鶴光), a well-known rakugo artist, and began his rakugo career in 1998. He was promoted to the futatsume rank in July 2002 and became a shin’uchi in May 2012.

    I tried to contact him. Since he had a Twitter account, I sent him a direct message. He replied to me soon. We talked a bit on Twitter for a while. Several months later, we met face-to-face for the first time in more than 25 years. He had not changed at all since we saw him in junior high.

    Now I sometimes go to his stage to listen to his story and see him offstage. Last night I saw him in Shinjuku and went for a drink with him at an izakaya in the west gate area. He was fine. We talked a lot. I drank too much, and I have a hangover this morning, though.

    I think that being friends with public figures might help me have a chance to see the celebrity world, and maybe it would even change my life.