5/16 Wednesday
Worked at a desk all day. Also taught English. Some days are more boring than others.
Author: Stephen Tetsu
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 15th
5/15 Tuesday
Worked at a desk all day. Also taught English. Some days are more boring than others.
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 14th COMPLY
5/14 Monday
I don’t know about you but I just love signing a binding contract every single year. Today was our annual “compliance” seminar, designed to both bore you to tears and indoctrinate you in the ways of Yoshimoto. It is exactly as exciting as it sounds. Continue reading
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 13th Eigyo in the Boonies
5/13 Sunday
Eigyo. The lifeblood of young comedians in Japan who are good enough to not completely suck but not popular enough to perform at any of the big theaters for money. Unlike most of your other gigs, it’s paid work. But is it good work?
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 12th
5/12 Saturday
“What do you do on your days off?”
It’s a question that people ask more often than not, blissfully unaware that as a brokeass young comedian, I have no days off.
Today for example, was a “day off” where I had no official work but rather spent the day with my comedy partner working on stuff for our act at a local park. The weather was great, the stuff we were coming up with was coming along well, I got beaned in the back of the head with some kid’s baseball.
I don’t know if it qualifies as work but I certainly don’t feel like I had a day off.
PS, even though it’s probably the city-est city in the world, Tokyo still has its charming places of greenery.
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 11th
5/11 Friday
Some lives are better than others. That’s just a matter of fact in this world of punchlines and acts. The show we performed at today in Ikebukuro may have been the worst I can remember.
It’s not like we bombed or anything (we didn’t) but the overall atmosphere of the night when combined with the zombie-like audience and harried MC made what should have been a relatively relaxed night to try out new material into a night ripped straight out of a horror story.
I should backtrack and explain a bit. As far as a young Yoshimoto comedian is concerned, there are two kinds of lives: jimusho official lives and those that are not. Today’s live, despite the incredibly demanding people who put it on, was one of the later.
The theater where we performed, located a few minutes from Ikebukuro Station in north central Tokyo, isn’t exactly brand new and, it being cramped and dark, with room for maybe 40 people at the most, no one can really blame the over 60 people who came for not exactly being in a laughing mood. That said, the last time I performed in front of an audience as listless and unresponsive as the one we encountered tonight was probably back in comedy school when the instructor told everyone not to laugh before class even began. Continue reading
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 10th
5/10 Thursday
I’ve been seeing a lot of head office of late. With my new part time job and increased first-thing-in-the-morning English lessons, I’ve spent far more time sitting around the offices of the biggest comedy entertainment company in Japan than I have actually being a comedian for the company itself.
I don’t really mind. I get more money doing menial office tasks and teaching English than I do with the all-too-often pay-to-play set up afforded to young comedians in the labyrinthian Yoshimoto Creative Agency bureaucracy. Today after my Yoshimoto work ended, I went to my ramen job. I’d like to say that I enjoy doing it but it turns out I enjoy eating ramen more than I do slinging noodles and taking orders from drunk assholes til the crack of dawn. Considering how much I’ve been working at Yoshimoto recently, I don’t really need to be working that job anymore. But (a) the ramen is good and (b) I live in constant fear that my cushy sit on my ass at a desk all day doing absolutely nothing gig is going to go up in flames sooner rather than later. Continue reading
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 9th
5/9 Wednesday
So I’ve started trying to run more. Writing it down makes its seem like some sort of big life decision but really all it is is that I’m bored. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found life to be series of routines, a long river riddled with whirlpools in which one can get bogged down and circle aimlessly for years on end. This is all, of course, simply from my perspective.
On my end, whenever I feel myself start to get bogged down into a set routine, I do something to change it. Be it quitting my English job to go to Japanese comedy school, starting work at a Japanese ramen shop, or, in this case, taking up jogging again. Continue reading
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 8th
5/8 Tuesday
Today was a desk day. I’ve been working part-time at Yoshimoto head office for about a month now, sitting at a desk in the Live Production Department under the guise of helping improve the entire department’s English on my free days. Really, this job mostly consists of me sitting around on the internet all day, occassionally shouting basic English greetings to people as they pass by on the way to some place or another.
The work’s much easier on the body than my normal parttime job at a ramen shop so I’m not necessarily complaining but, after spending a couple of years away from the officework lifestyle, I’m finding it rough getting back into the flow of things. Plus, getting paid (however little) to do literally nothing is better than not getting paid to do the same.
I went to work at ten and clocked out at six. Literally nothing happened during those eight hours. Yay me.
Stephen Starts a Diary: May 7th
5/7 Monday
Walking home in the rain is probably never a good idea. And yet, there I was, struggling against the wind and rain as I tried to hammer out the hour-long walk to my apartment in Shinagawa from the wakate young comedian theater in Shibuya, trying desperately to not lose another umbrella to the wind whipping sheets of rain into my eyes. Continue reading
Stephen Tetsu 