Actor Keiko Saito appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on June 24th. She talked about her daughter's condition and her memories of her time in graduate school.
My daughter is almost 25 years old. She is working as an announcer for a TV station in Nagoya. "I first recommended (announcer work) to her, and she is really enjoying it. She sometimes reads the news, so when she comes home, she watches news programs and studies." Since it is a Nagoya broadcasting station, there are few opportunities to see her work on TV in Tokyo. "My husband is originally from Nagoya, so he goes back and forth to Nagoya, so he takes pictures of the (TV) screen (on his smartphone) and sends them to me," she said.
At the age of 55, she entered graduate school at Keio University. We would all write reports together and go to a nearby izakaya afterwards. During a training camp, she even slept in a pile with kids who were 24 or 25 years old. "It was a good experience," she said, "Everyone drank a lot. We drank until the morning." In the media design department she went on to, she made short films and even created a small stage play. She made presentations in groups of six, and people said things like, "Your acting is great," and "You were in the drama club, weren't you?". "At the time, I wasn't working much (people didn't know what I was doing), so that actually made it fun," she recalls.
After graduating from high school, I went on to Kumamoto University, but I dropped out due to being too busy with work. I always had a desire to study again. By chance, the Media Design department at Keio University looked interesting, so I thought I'd take the exam, and that's what prompted me to go on to university.
"If you ask me if what she studied at graduate school was useful, I wouldn't say it was specifically useful," she said with a smile, "But I wanted to get a taste of student life, campus life. We all gathered there and worked toward one thing, with one theme, and we talked and created it. That could be a play or a report. I made all kinds of friends, and many of my professors were older than me, so there was a wide range of ages, and I enjoyed a lot of it."
