Talent IMALU appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on October 10th. She talked about her memories of her father, Sanma Akashiya. Her mother, Shinobu Otake, and Sanma divorced when IMALU was two years old.
When he was a child, he was often taken to the movies. Meeting up somewhere and going to the cinema together to watch a movie was "quite a routine," he says. When they went to a theme park together, Sanma would wear a hat, glasses, and talk while holding a towel draped over his shoulders over his mouth. He thought that this way no one would notice, but "even so, we were recognized and surrounded by people," and because he had to wait for the autographs and photo taking to finish, "I remember not being able to ride any of the rides."
She said that she and her grandmother, father, mother, and older brother would go to the same shabu-shabu restaurant about once a month. "Even when we were eating dinner together as a family, (Sanma) was the MC. So (we) didn't have much chance to talk, or rather, we didn't have time to talk," she said.
Sanma rarely attended school events. "I'm the type who doesn't like to stand out, and when my father comes it causes a huge commotion, so I didn't want him to come too often. That's why he didn't come. My mother used to come often, though," she said. Back in the 1990s, the entertainment media would be in front of our house and in front of the school during sports day. "I was a child then, and I didn't like to stand out too much, so I felt a little embarrassed," she recalled.
