Akiko Shimoju, an 88-year-old author and former NHK announcer, will be appearing on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi), which will air on April 7th at 1:00 pm.
Having worked in the field of language for many years, she is very interested in changes in the way words are used. For example, she was surprised to see that the polite expression "boyfriend" can be used with the suffix "san" ("boyfriend"), and she is amused to see that the word "yabai" ("yabai") can be used in both a positive and negative sense, so she tries using it herself.
She is very conscious of the use of language and calls her husband her "partner" rather than "husband." Since they got married, she and her husband, who worked at a TV station, have had separate wallets, and now they even have separate bedrooms, so they are "living separately within the home." They say the secret to their happy marriage is that they respect each other and have their own rooms. When her husband fell ill and was hospitalized last year, she heard that he had been to the hospital three times before with the same symptoms, but that he had hidden this. She thought it smelled like water, but she thought that it was just like them.
