Actor Terunobu Shinoyama appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi), which aired on November 21st. He spoke about his memories of his father, photographer Kishin Shinoyama, who passed away on January 4th last year at the age of 83.
Terunobu is Kishin's second son and is currently 41 years old. His father continued to work as a photographer until the end of December, just before he passed away. "His physical strength had declined considerably, but being on the job site gave him great energy. My father always drew strength from the site and expression, and he was blessed with work until just before he passed away. I think he was able to fulfill his career as a photographer thanks to the support of everyone," he said.
"My father kept his work and private life very separate, so he never took any private photos," he says, but Terunobu had photos taken when he got married and at his Coming of Age ceremony. His father suddenly told him to put on a suit and come to the Kabukiza, and when he went there thinking he might be shown a Kabuki performance, he found a photo shoot there, and the father said, "You're having your Coming of Age ceremony, right? I'll take your photo," and he ended up posing for a photo with kabuki actors Bando Tamasaburo and Onoe Kikunosuke (now Onoe Kikugorou). "I was nervous just having my photo taken by my father, but then Tamasaburo and Kikunosuke were there. There were a lot of staff around, and all I remember is just being nervous," he recalls.
Her father was cheerful and skillful at home, but when she went out to eat with her grandchildren (her younger brother's two sons), "When he was with his grandchildren, he got really nervous, like he didn't know what to talk about, and suddenly he stopped talking. I'd never seen my father like that before." When she was alone with her father, she said, "Kishin Shinoyama is a bad grandfather," to which he replied that he basically left child-rearing to his mother (Saori Minami) and worked outside all the time, so he didn't really know how to interact with small children.
His grandchildren would call him "Grandpa!" and talk to him with a sense of familiarity, clinging to him, but Kishin was very happy but also nervous. "It was the first time I'd seen my father so timid, and I thought he was even cuter than my grandchildren," he said with a smile.
