Singer Shinichi Mori appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on July 29th. He spoke about his 20 years of living alone and his younger brother who passed away in 2011.
"I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I make it myself. I make a lot, freeze it, and microwave it. So I eat the same thing every day. It's what suits my body, you know? You have to do everything yourself." He wakes up around 4am. He tries to go to bed around 9pm, but says, "A little over five hours of sleep is enough."
When he wakes up, he does some light stretching, then drives to various places, stopping the car and walking for about an hour. "You have to move your body. I realized you have to use your nerves too. I'm lazy, but I try to use them," he says.
His younger brother passed away in 2011 at the age of 54. He had good grades in Kagoshima, but after transferring to a school in Tokyo, his grades dropped. "Every time I got home from work, I would encourage him. I would write him a letter telling him to do his best and put it up in his room," he recalls. His brother worked hard and his grades became top class. Apparently, a teacher at school told him, "Your brother is a celebrity, so he'll never get into medical school," but he replied, "What are you talking about? I'll support you no matter what," and encouraged him to keep trying. He also arranged for his brother's financial support for medical school, which he enrolled in.
His younger brother had been researching cardiac catheters in the United States. He had been feeling unwell and was in Hawaii for an event when he received word of his brother's death. "He couldn't come back right away, so I asked him to wait a little while, and then I returned to Japan and held a proper funeral," he said. "I don't know what to say. It's the same with my mother's death. It feels like everything is being destroyed," he said. "But that's life, after all." Later, Juntendo University professor Atsushi Amano, who performed the Emperor Emeritus's heart surgery, told Mori's second son, "Your uncle was amazing at cardiac catheterization." Mori mourned his brother, saying, "He really did his best."
