Actor Momoko Kikuchi appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on December 12th. She talked about her husband, a former government official nine years her senior whom she remarried five years ago.
Kikuchi had one son and one daughter with her ex-husband. She had decided not to remarry, but her children encouraged her, saying, "Stop whining and get a grip." Her son is now 28 and her daughter is now 23. She noticed that they had grown up and "sometimes they make better decisions than I do."
When her daughter was in high school, her husband started helping her with her studies. When she was given a difficult assignment, she would ask her husband what time he would be home and what time he would help her with her homework. "Seeing him like that made me feel grateful and happy," she said.
Ever since she was a child, Kikuchi had believed that bacon should not be eaten unless it was cooked. Things would often disappear from the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and on one occasion, it appeared that her husband had eaten the bacon without cooking it. When she asked, "Who ate the bacon?" her husband replied, "Yes, it was me." When she asked, "Did you cook it?" he said, "You can eat bacon as is." She was surprised because she thought bacon was something that you had to cook and let the aroma come out before eating it. Looking back on the "bacon incident," she says that when you come from a different family or have spent different times in different places, there are bound to be some surprising things.
She said that her husband's good physique makes him look a bit like a mascot character to her. She also said with a smile, "I think he's cute enough to be ranked quite high if he were to enter the mascot character grand prix."
