Singer Goro Noguchi appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on January 22nd. Noguchi, now 68 years old, is celebrating his 55th year as a singer this year. He talked about the setbacks he faced when he moved from Gifu to Tokyo at the age of 13 to become a singer.
"I was 13 years old when I experienced my first failure in life," says Noguchi. He went to Tokyo to make his debut and visit the teacher who had written his songs for him, but his voice had gone through puberty and he couldn't sing. The teacher told him, "Let's take a break for a while," and all of a sudden, his future and his past disappeared. Gradually, his key dropped, his voice became distorted, and he was no longer able to sing the teacher's songs.
He said that he wanted to go back to his hometown of Gifu because his dream had disappeared. When he moved to Tokyo, he received a handkerchief with messages from friends such as "Decorate yourself with brocade" and "Don't come back until you're successful." "I was young, so I thought that I couldn't go back because of this, and I'm sorry to my friends, but I burned it. I thought that if I didn't have this, I could go back. But I couldn't. I couldn't speak. But I couldn't go back," he revealed.
My mother came to Tokyo with me and worked at a factory, doing things like cooking for the workers and doing laundry. My father came to Tokyo once a month to bring money. When my father was leaving, he said to me, "Keep up the good work." I wanted to tell him that it wasn't going to work, and I wanted him to notice me somehow, so I followed him until he entered the subway station. But my father didn't even look back and just went inside the subway.
A few years ago, I found a note that my father had written while drunk. In fact, my father had noticed. If he had looked back, he would have had to give up his son's dream, so he looked straight ahead and entered the basement without looking back. "I can't believe I was able to do something like that," it said. "I think it was good that I was able to debut as a singer and then release songs that people could listen to," he recalled.
