[I’ve never had any desire to get married, not ever. Instead, I always thought “Why would I want to get married?” Ever since my teens, probably, that’s how I saw it. I have no aspirations in that direction. At one point, I even went as far as to think “Marriage is the graveyard of life.”]

– That’s a fitting phrase, isn’t it? For someone who’s never wanted to get married, that is.
[Actually, it’s a quote from a musician I like, I read that line in an interview once and thought “That’s so cool!”. That was back in middle school or high school, though.]

– Then, has your opinion on the subject changed at all, recently?
[I wonder. I don’t hate children. I think my nephews and my friend’s nieces are so adorable. But, it would be completely different if they were my kids. I still feel like a kid, myself. I’m not much of a thinker.]

– Don’t you ever wonder “What if?” Like, maybe a married lifestyle would be nice, or something like that.
[That’s unthinkable. Among the married people I know, very few of them actually seem to be in happy, peaceful marriages. Especially in this business, most people end up separating, don’t they, within two, three years.]

– It could be because of how busy you are, or maybe it’s the way your values are slightly different from those of a regular person, right?
[Yeah, yeah, yeah. And besides, with my work, sometimes it’s the middle of the night, getting to be morning by the time I get home. I don’t think ordinary people could understand. The people who can understand, well, they’re pretty rare, right?]

– Then, are you comfortable with being a lifelong bachelor?
[I don’t think too hard about that, either. In the end, if I fell in love hard enough to turn my current values completely upside-down, I’d probably get married right away. So it’s not that I’m negative about it, it might just be that I’ve got my sights set too high. I look for perfection in everything, that’s probably why I’m not married yet. But you know, I only date people with marriage in mind.]

– Oh, really! That’s rather……
[Well, you can’t seriously date a girl who isn’t thinking “What if we end up getting married?” right? But of course, I don’t want to tarnish my family register (1), either.]

– Ahahah! So you don’t want any black marks (laughs).
[That’s right, I don’t (laughs).]

– So, supposing you were going to get married, are there any traits you’d want your wife to have?
[No. Of course, I’d be delighted if she was a good cook, but I don’t want to marry a housekeeper. So, I don’t have any conditions for a woman I’d marry…… Ah, trustworthiness? My work keeps me out late so much that if my partner decided to cheat on me, it would be easy to do. Like, “My husband never comes home, he’s always at the studio.” (laughs) I don’t want a partner who’ll keep me wondering “What is she doing right now?” or “Is she out having dinner with another guy?”, because worrying about that would break my concentration at work. If I can’t have peace of mind, my work will suffer. That’s it! Of course, it’s my work that’s at the centre of my life right now. So, she’s got to be a girl who’ll help build an environment where I can concentrate on work.]

– On a mental level, I understand, but part of me still reacts with something like “Eeh? He just doesn’t care~”
[You see, I don’t mind going to extremes. I’m Takumi from NANA (laughs)(2). Like he says : “To me, work is what’s most important.”]

– Let’s be prepared (laughs). Moving on, for most of the world “finding happiness = getting married,” or so they say……
[If you listen closely to what those people say, it turns out that what they’re really saying is “If you don’t get married and have kids, who’ll look after you when you get old?” But I think “As if I’m gonna do that just so someone will look after me when I’m old!” I think it’s a twisted way of thinking. I mean, from the kid’s point of view : “Is that the whole reason I was brought into the world?” Isn’t that horrible? Instead, I’ll save some money and put myself in an institution to get someone to take care of me, I think that’s a lot healthier.]

– It is rather sickening to think of a person as insurance.
[Right. As for girls, some girls say things like “When I go to my child’s school events, I want to be younger than all the other mothers there, so I want to have a kid as soon as possible,” and I think “Just for that?” I wouldn’t want a child to be raised by someone who thinks that way, not at all. Not if it was my kid. Besides, apparent age and true age aren’t always the same, you know. People aren’t always the age they seem to be. Take me for example, I’m 34 but people are always telling me I don’t look that old at all. Some people in their twenties look like old ladies or old men already, and some fifty year-olds look much younger than they are. I think the Japanese in particular are too picky when it comes to age. In the sports news, for example, whenever they write someone’s name they always have their age in brackets next to it, right? I wonder why they go out of their way to write the age.]

– That reminds me, in foreign scandal articles, they never print any ages. So like “How old is Jennifer Lopez?”
[See? I think it’s unique to Japan……. I’m saying cool stuff without even thinking (laughs).]

– Ahahaha. And so, tetsu-san, I can imagine that you’d only ever get married for love, right?
[No? I have no particular intention of ruling out a miai marriage(3). Whether it’s a miai or someone I fall for on my own, no matter how we meet, it doesn’t matter as long as we like each other, right? Yeah. But I think a miai would make me nervous.]

– Interviewer : Honma Yuuko
Translated by Natalie Arnold

1. The family register, called koseki, is an official register of all the births, deaths, marriages and divorces in a Japanese family. It’s a type of census document. In this context, he is implying that if he got married rashly and then divorced, it would be recorded on his family register and thus make for a permanent negative mark.Go back.

2. See Yazawa Ai’s manga, NANA. Go back.

3. Miai marriages are a type of arranged marriage, where the potential couple are introduced to each other by a matchmaker. However, miai is not as strict as other types of arranged marriages. If the couple in a miai decide they don’t like each other, they aren’t obliged to get married. Go back.