I think your routine of “always writing the last sentence of the book in the same place” is really cool! A big part of my work is reading manuscripts aloud and speaking. In that situation, the most obvious mistake you can make is to “flub your line.” When I was starting out, I always got flustered when that happened, and I sometimes got into a vicious circle where I’d keep messing up words after that. At times when I’m thinking, “I’m definitely going to mess up here, but I absolutely can’t mess up here!” I do an exercise when I’m off camera: I move my tongue in a circle around the inside of my mouth several times with my mouth closed. It’s a kind of mouth training that a colleague taught me. Amazingly, when I do this, I stop flubbing words; so at some point I started doing it as a routine.
The colleague who taught me this exercise is Tomoko Honda, who I worked with for a long time on the program “SPORT.” She started in the job a year after I did. We truly supported each other, and we were station staff announcers in the same period. You could say she’s a comrade in arms. She taught me a lot and helped me tremendously.
The broadcast usually ended at around one a.m., so we had quite a hard time finding places where we could have a drink after the program. We had this treasured list of “places with good food that are open until 4 a.m.” And together we lamented how quickly places in Tokyo come and go.
Now we’re both freelance and we have families, so we aren’t able to see each other very often. But recently we worked together for the first time in ages, and we were saying, “We’re completely in synch, aren’t we?” We felt that keenly.
Mr. Hayamizu, when you hear the phrase “comrade in arms,” who comes to mind?