#1(Part 1)

Jiro Sato is now active in television and film as an actor, director and screenwriter, but he looks back on his twenties as “a dark period that I never want to return to,” during which he twice took and quit jobs at regular companies.

His turning point into film came when he was 31 years old. He happened to be performing on stage at a performance of “Jitensha Kinkreet” when director Tsutsumi Yukihiko happened to see him, and he was selected for a small role of a doctor with only a few lines in one scene in the one-off drama “Black Jack II” (2000/TBS) starring Motoki Masahiro. This led to him being welcomed into his current agency, and he has since expanded his field of activity to include dramas and movies.

Every day I was given 1,500 yen and told to “get by with this.”

–You often say that you never want to go back to your 20s.

I’ve written about that in my books and I’ve been saying it for a long time. But if you think about it, I met my wife when I was in my 20s, and I also met Hiromi Suzuki, the stage director who is still a good friend of mine and who founded the theater company “Jitensha Kinkreet,” and Yukihiko Tsutsumi in my 20s.

Well, that was towards the end of my 20s, and if you ask me if I want to go back to my 20s, I certainly don’t want to. I physically had no money, I lived in an apartment without a bath, and I foolishly believed, without any basis, that I was born to be an actor, which I still believe to this day, but I never got close to it.

When I returned home from summer practice, there was no air conditioning, and I couldn’t take a bath unless I went to the public bath by a certain time. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, gave me 1,500 yen every day and told me to “get by with this.” With 1,500 yen including transportation costs and pocket money, there was no way I could go out drinking, so it was pretty tough.

–Was he what you would call a gigolo?

No, we both worked part-time. Even when I was working as a full-time employee, she was working part-time as a temp. I met my wife at a theater company research center, but she quit acting early on and has never had any regrets since then.