This is ELTON YASOKAWA from the ZEN Jibun Sodate.
Now, I have always been very conscious of self raising, but one of the reasons I got into the habit of being conscious of it is because of how I have worked almost exclusively in “what I like to do”.
e01-en-jibun-sodateWhen anyone does what We like to do for a living, we inevitably want to be able to do it better!
we want to be able to do it faster!
This leads us to observe other people’s techniques.
We become to be always on the lookout for clues from all kinds of information.
And, We will always keep someone antennae up for any hints.
In my case, I can say that I have only worked at what I love and as a result it had become a habit.
As of July 2024, I am 55 years and 6 months old,
I had my first part-time job in the spring of 1984 when I was 15 years old.
That was exactly 40 years ago.
The job was washing dishes at a chain restaurant.
At the time, I was paid 380 yen($2.5) per hour, and the first three months were an apprenticeship,
I was given a 40 yen(25cent) discount for the first three months.
So the actual wage was 340 yen($2).
I worked for 3 hours and earned 1,020 yen($6.3).
This was the reality of a high school student’s part-time job 40 years ago.
When I came home from high school, I would go home around 5:00 to 6:00 pm.
Then I would go to 3 hour part-time job, because at that time, 15-year-old students could only work until 10 pm,
Even though I worked 3-hour shifts from 7pm to 10pm, 5 days a week,
I was only able to earn about 20,000 yen($125) a month.
That part-time life changed abruptly in the summer.
That same year, 1984, I was practicing backflips and other moves on the banks of the Yodo River in the summer heat.
I was scouted by chance by a member of Toei’s action team.
(Toei is one of Japan’s top entertainment companies, including the film industry. )
He gave me his business card and said, “Come and watch us practice first!
We parted ways that day, with a friendly smile,
“Come to our practice! “I thought he was a suspicious man.
But I was curious.
I decided to give it a try and visit him the following week for practice.
At that time, the underground parking lot of an apartment building located between Shin-Osaka and Nishinakajima-Minamikata was called was a practice field.
It is unthinkable nowadays, but the practice was done in an underground parking lot with the permission of the condominium.
The social freedom of the time was everywhere.
This is a long story for another time.
Well, in September 1984 I officially joined the team,
I joined practice twice a week.
And although I was a rookie, I was offered a job for three days from the end of December to the beginning of the New Year’s holidays.
It was at the Nakamura-za Theater in Kyoto’s Uzumasa Film Village, a place known only to those in the know.
As I found out later, I was very lucky to be able to make my debut in only three months.
There were many people who were scouted, practiced for a year, and could not make their debut.
My first job was as a “Hidler Soldier” in “DENGEKI SENTAI Changeman”, a badass underling.
That’s right. The stage was Hero show.
I was a fighter in a children’s hero show where I had to fight many battles, get defeated, and come back to life to fight again and again.
Even so, my garantie was paid 5,000 yen($31) for two shows a day.
In just three days of work in total, I had earned more money than I had ever earned in 16 days of dishwashing a month at my previous job.
I wondered.
Don’t people have more fun and make more money by playing to their strengths than by working for money?
That was the moment when I was strongly imprinted with this idea.
From then on, I would only engage in work that I liked or that allowed me to make the most of my qualities.
In this way, I began to constantly keep my antennae up in order to raise my own paycheck.
In high school, I just focused all my energy on what I wanted to do.
While in high school, I worked hard on weekends and during spring, summer, and winter vacations at action shows.
The stage locations were places where many children gathered, such as Hirakata Park, Hanshin Park, and a skating rink in Nagaokakyo, which is no longer there.
My high school life was more like that of a child actor than that of a normal student, and I actually missed about 50 days of high school a year.
(I was late and left early more often).
However, while I was selected for the very prestigious honor of making my debut after only three months of practice,
The following year, during the summer vacation of 1985, I acted ungratefully and did not appear on stage even once.
I had planned since the first year of high school to ride MAMA bicycle(no road race bicycle) around Eastern Japan during the summer vacation of 1985.
And it was impossible to accomplish this without using the entire summer vacation period.
As it turned out, I actually completed the 5,500-kilometer round-the-east Japan trip on a mama bicycle over a period of 33 days.
Newspaper reporters were waiting for me when I returned home,
My silver ring trip was published with photos in the Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Osaka Nichinichi Shimbun, and other newspapers.
I was living my high school life with all the freedom to do whatever I wanted,
Naturally, I neglected my schoolwork,
I could never go on to a normal university.
Even though I was doing such things,
In the winter of my second year of high school, while I was seriously performing action shows in my third year of high school,
I seriously want to enter the world of expression.
Already, suddenly, the professional world! I was okay,
But I was only 18 years old, and with the advice of my teacher, I enrolled in film school.
My film school days
I think it would be subtle to say that it is a film school and can be called higher education,
It is now called “Japan Academy of Moving Images”. After I left, that is.
Even back then, a film school did not admit just anyone; there was a written test and an interview, just in case.
At that time, there was an interviewer who set my heart on fire during the interview.
It is funny to think about it now, but he was the director Shohei Imamura.
Yes! The university was led by Shohei Imamura.
Director Shohei Imamura, positioned directly in the center of the interview desk as the interviewer, asks me in a fiery tone, “What do you want to make movies for?
It is not a real film unless it is based on a real passion that you have experienced and that has moved your emotion.
A film is an expression that conveys a message, a documentary that looks at people from a bird’s eye view! .”
I am now filled with gratitude for the memory of director Shohei Imamura’s spitting and blasting me, an 18-year-old, with so much passion.
It was a moment that blew away my longing for the movies, because I was so excited about them.
It was the moment I realized that this is a world that cannot be handled half-heartedly.
In this way, I was successfully accepted and enrolled in the school.
I attended the school for one year, but my attitude toward my studies was not very praiseworthy, and my homeroom teacher at the time, Mr. Shunsaku Ikehata, recommended that I leave the school, which I did.
I was bored and in pain in the classes that I attended.
To go one step further, the idea of paying money to learn technique seemed ridiculous to me, and I just didn’t like it.
Watching and learning are important to be observant and seamless, and there is always a tense atmosphere.
However, learning these things in class was very circumscribed for me, who had been trained in actual practice, and I often felt like it was a detour to make the class seem more voluminous.
For me, it was more efficient to absorb knowledge and skills by watching and learning while earning by putting in real work.
What I gained from the film school, which I eventually left after one year, was Shohei Imamura’s passion for film and Shunsaku Ikebata’s actually dumb but realistic eye for reality.
After realizing these things, it was only natural for me to
After that, I will be striving to make a career out of what I am interested in.
The work I have experienced since then
- Tour operator for tour trips.
- Assistant director of a television production company.
- Highway construction
- Recycle service
- Ski resort restaurant cook and dorm chef (two seasons)
- amateur sports photographer (big tournaments such as volleyball, rugby, soccer, baseball, track and field)
- Commercial photo studio assistant
- Photograph shop (developing and enlarging photos)
- Horse racing photographer (KEIBA BOOK Magazine, Kyodo News, Japan Central Racing Association PR center)
- Travel guide photographer and writer (Rurubu, Mapple)
- Fishing writer (Spoichi)
- Event planning and management (major department stores and companies)
So far, this is the work I have done as an active member of somewhere.
In the meantime, backpacking around the world and cycling around Japan,
living in Toronto, Canada on a working holiday visa.
I sometimes worked as a full-time employee, but I didn’t work there for long because I wanted to broaden my horizons.
And the following is the work I tried to do as a business after getting the hang of it myself.
- Natural stone distributor
- Accessory producer
- Writing (including digital books)
- Digital imaging (Capcom, Biohazard, Outbreak I and II)
- Store management and restaurant business
- Internet shop
- YouTuber
I mention the last youtuber because I was able to monetize it about 2 years ago now and it is generating a small amount of income.
I have been engaged in many jobs like this.
I think it looks unstable from the side, and even now, when other people ask me what I do for a living, I can’t really say.
I could have been a full-time employee several times, so I could have settled down and worked there.
In fact, when I left any of the places I worked, I was always asked, “What are you going to do when you quit? It’s hard to run your own business! I was sometimes stopped by some employers.
However, some of my jobs, which were popular at the time, now seem to be going by the wayside.
For example,
- A travel agency that asked me to become an employee because they would let me get a national certification.
- A TV program production company that asked me to become an employee because the test was only a formality.
- A department store event business that generated several hundred thousand yen in sales per day when it held its events.
- A horse race photographer who could travel all over Japan (drastic decrease in print media)
- Newspaper and magazine reporters who sometimes received tips in addition to their salaries just for publishing articles. (Also a drastic decrease in print media)
All of these have fallen to the ground and have an uncertain future in just 10-20 years or so.
What we can see from this is that no job is stable.
Even the jobs that are considered good now are the same.
As you can see when you are fishing,
No matter how great the point or how great the technique, it will not work someday.
The environment changes, the wisdom of the fish improves, and nothing stays the same.
It is truly impermanence.
Thus, I learned that I had to keep “adapting to the environment” while maintaining a “self-nurturing” mindset when I thought about the consequences.
I have not been unstable, I have just adapted to go with the flow of the times.
The next session is scheduled to be on self-nurturing mindset.
