77-year-old singer Akira Mita appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on May 27th. He talked about the time when Yukio Hashi, Kazuo Funaki, and Teruhiko Saigo were known as the "Four Heavenly Kings," and the "Big Three" era when he was active with Funaki and Saigo.
When they debuted as teenagers, record companies were competing with each other. "Hashi-senpai was in a separate room," and the three of them were in the same room but sat separately, with record company people and managers clinging closely to them. "After saying 'Good morning,' I couldn't say a word to anyone else," he revealed.
The first time they spoke was when they were promoting as the "Big 3". It turns out that the three of them thought they hadn't spoken to each other at all. They spoke for 4-5 minutes during the three-person stage, but their conversations after the stage were over were longer.
"Funaki-san got really into it, and we started off like, 'We weren't really talking back then, were we?' The three of us talked for about an hour. Before we knew it, it was already time for the next performance. We were talking that long."
The "Big 3" toured around the country. "Funaki-san can't drink, but Teru-san likes it. In the end, it was just me and my manager, and we went around to all the famous bars and drank until the wee hours of the morning," he revealed.
Saigo, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 75, mourned Teru's death, saying, "The fact that he passed away was unthinkable. He called me again and said, 'Aki-chan, let's go out,' and he wanted to go out (drinking) here and there."
