Actor Wakana Matsumoto appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on April 8th. He talked about the "dark period" he experienced for over 15 years before his breakthrough.
In 2006, at the age of 22, she moved to Tokyo and passed her first audition with flying colors. In 2007, she made her debut in "Kamen Rider Den-O" as the older sister of lead actor Takeru Satoh, but then she entered a dark period. "There were periods when I had no work at all, and there were times when I would audition but fail, and even when I was grateful for work, there were times when I was given roles that didn't have a name, like a passerby. It was a time when I was quite far from the image of an actor I had in mind," she recalls.
Shortly after moving to Tokyo, he lived in a room that leaked. He lived on the first floor of a two-story wooden house, but it still leaked. He didn't know how the leaks were coming from, but he said, "I experienced the same thing I'd seen on TV and in manga: you put a pot on the floor and it goes, plop, plop." He thought it was unpleasant, but he also had the guts to think, "What the hell?"
After moving to Tokyo, he worked part-time at various restaurants. At the cafe where he last worked, he was responsible for everything from ordering ingredients to creating and cooking the dishes, and he recalls that it was "tough." What helped him was the chef's license he had obtained in high school. He recalls that if he had told his part-time workplace that he had a chef's license, the treatment he received would have been completely different.
