I.D Essay Book - When I was a Child Star (Part 5)

I know, it's been too long. But finally the next part is here!! The title and first few paragraphs talk about snot. Yes, the green stuff that comes out of your nose. Think of the English phrase: snot faced kid. She means it like that. A little kid, snotty nosed, regular, scruffy.

Apologies for not posting more regularly, real life is busy. Enjoy the essay!

NOTE: Actually, after posting this I just want to add that perhaps a closer title to the original Japanese would be 'Snot Green' (aoppana karaa) but that isn't nearly as poetic as it should be!

Note 2: weirdly, my old fansite from way back in the day still won't die on google rankings. Guitar Chords and Grapefruits. How I loved you (T_T)

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I.D Essay Book - When I was a child star (Part 5)

The Colour of a Runny Nose

“You were so small back then and now you’re so grown up!”

Even now this is always being said to me. It seems that the sight of me coming into the studio with a school bag on my back from way back then has left a strong impression on all the adult actors I worked with. There are also still people who ask ‘Oh, is today a school holiday?’ Or they say something like ‘You were such a snot-faced kid!’. No, no I was most certainly not a snot-faced kid.

‘I remember changing your diapers!’ No, no, I was most certainly not that small.

There are people who say these ridiculous things but I’m very happy that they still remember me from when I was a child actor.

Nowadays you can’t find elementary school kids walking around with snot dripping from their noses. ‘Ah, but I think there were some like that in Komadori!’ – why is it that I start dwelling on that thought?

When I remember all the friends who I went to Komadori with, there were the three Nakamura boys. Each of them had something individually interesting about their characters, but all you saw when you looked at them was that the younger two were wearing the older brother’s hand me downs. The youngest was the same age as me and I have a vision of his rolled up sweatshirt sleeve having snot on it…

Although I was definitely not a snot faced brat, I was definitely ‘as normal a kid as you’d find anywhere’.

When I became an adult and sometimes worked with child actors, they are without exception always dressed up in an adorable way. There is no child who looks like their hair has been cut by the local barber or by their mother. They’d always be in a colourful designer outfit and despite being kids, a lot of them had some kind of aura about them.

I can’t really compare because time has moved on since I was a kid but I haven’t met anyone who was like that younger brother, coming in with a bed head and snot hanging out.

Incidentally, the monthly fee for Komadori was shockingly cheap. Compared to the amount asked for after the first audition that I took at the mainstream theatre troupe it was laughable. This was something I learned later but apart from the joining and handling fees charged by that company, they also charged a fee for shooting profile photos of 40,000yen a year.

When you attend an audition you have to bring a photograph of yourself and it’s true that if you pay a lot of money then you can have a beautiful photo by a photographer that makes you look great but the Komadori profile photos were taken by Nishimura-sensei on a normal camera: ok, cheese! The background was full of bookshelves, dolls and other things with no particular reason for being there.

When going to a big audition where you would meet kids from other theatre groups, our photos were so uncool in comparison to the other children’s photographs that there were times when we’d try to hide the photos with our hands, lest the red eyes and uncombed hair be seen.

By the way, the youngest Nakamura brother was someone who has left a lasting impression on me. He was an actor who put everything into what he was doing. He had a very cute lisp when he spoke and wherever he was he was always popular. He was a complete one-off, there was no one else quite like him. I used to think that maybe he was someone that one would call a genius. Even though he was someone who could have made it with ease, he quit acting without a care in the world when we entered middle school, with the excuse ‘I’m busy with my afterschool club’. And so people graduated, one after the other.

Not everyone entered the theatre troupe because they were enamoured with the glamorous world of the entertainment industry. To lose one’s shyness, as a respite from an unpleasant academic enviroment, there were many reasons for kids joining the group. I think now that there was not one single child there who had conciously thought ‘I will walk the path of an entertainer’.

Children have countless decisions in front of them and countless things which capture their imagination, and they can all be caught in your hand at the same time. Each of these things are real, all of them are equally attainable. In this unique world they continue on, easily doing one thing only to be entranced by something else and naturally letting the first wonder go.

We wanted to do everything. We didn’t work when we were busy with our studies. We didn’t want to skip afterschool club activities. Playing with friends, going on holiday with our families, going to school every day. Without giving something up, doing work on top of all that was something that was a luxury but with Komadori we were somehow able to do it all.

But because of that, sometimes we weren’t able to see the boundary between work and play, and there were times when we pulled too many pranks. But to the very last we were able to express ourselves as we truly were and it was wonderful.

If the Komadori Child Theatre Troupe was still around today, I think that it would still be full of kids who were just like us back then. It’s pretty mysterious but it was a place where strange people, those unlike anyone else, gathered together.