第701回「傍流論」

Tatsuo Finally Appears on Daikichi's Podcast — Why They Called It a "Royal Broadcast"

Sankyu Tatsuo (サンキュータツオ) has appeared as a guest on the podcast hosted by Daikichi (大吉) of the duo Hakata Hanmaru & Daikichi (博多華丸・大吉). Makita Sports (マキタスポーツ) celebrated by saying he "sat formally with Daikichi's family and listened to it," and called the occasion a "gyokuon hoso" — a royal broadcast. The three hosts had previously invited Daikichi to a Kyokakyoku live event, but this was the first time Tatsuo and Daikichi had ever spoken alone together, and they described it as the "last piece" finally snapping into place.

The conversation flowed, they said, because of a shared language. Daikichi had read Tatsuo's 2012 serialized column "Geinin no Insuubunkai" (芸人の因数分解) — an attempt to anatomize manzai scripts through the lens of literary style. Daikichi is also an unusual figure in that he drops the names of Puchi Kashima (プチ鹿島) and Sankyu Tatsuo on mainstream television, even in situations where he could easily say "a comedian I know." "He properly names his sources even when he has no obligation to" — that intellectual honesty, the three agreed, is precisely what connects Daikichi to their world.

Daikichi's Mainstream Resume, Boryuu Résumé Underneath

From the outside, Daikichi looks squarely mainstream: Hanamaru won R1, the duo won The Manzai (ザ・マンザイ), and Daikichi has been a face of NHK's morning programming for more than a decade. But the details tell a different story. He was in the first cohort of Fukuoka Yoshimoto, with no successful seniors to use as a model and no image of what "making it" even looked like. When M1 Grand Prix launched, he had already exceeded both the age limit and the limit on years since forming as a duo, so he could not enter. He also missed the Bokura Tengoku (ボキャブラ天国) wave. By his and his partner's own account, the show "Radical" was the gateway to a national audience — not a mainstream competition circuit. The three hosts agreed: "We never had the impression of him breaking through on a full-throttle gag show." Their conclusion was that it was the path from Konya Battle (今夜バトル) to The Manzai, not the standard route.

1990s Tokyo — An Era When No One Knew How to Become a Comedian

In the 1990s, when all three hosts were trying to break into comedy in Tokyo, the door was nearly invisible. Training schools existed, but every one of them found the idea of paying money to learn comedy hard to believe. Makita Sports (born 1970) suspected such schools were scams outright. Tatsuo (born 1976) noted that for his generation, comedy schools were still a novelty. The romance of Beat Takeshi apprenticing at France-za in Asakusa was still deeply embedded — "dropping out of normal life and washing up in Asakusa" felt more real than enrolling in a curriculum.

Makita Sports was strongly drawn to the Tokyo comedy world of Beat Takeshi and Takada Fumio. At age 23, he cold-called Ota Productions and sincerely asked to be taken on. He also tried to slip into live shows around Asakusa, but when things started drifting toward a formal apprenticeship arrangement, he pulled back. He eventually joined Yoshimoto and was surprised to find it "unexpectedly literary and comfortable." Tatsuo, while performing as part of a duo, had been aiming at M1, but after the duo broke up he resolved in 2008 to join Office Kitano (オフィス北野). It was a cliff-edge decision — his university enrollment was about to lapse, which meant no path back — and he described it as a moment of going all in with his back against the wall.

The Moment They Knew They Were Boryuu, and the Podcast That Changed Everything

Makita Sports didn't realize his own displacement until he started appearing on TV. "I saw it in their eyes — I had been perceived as someone who had always been in roughly the same territory, but the people who walked the real center path saw me as a completely different kind of person." Tatsuo says his own reckoning came the moment he launched a podcast after his duo dissolved and started discussing M1 as a commentator: "I decided then that it was fine to be an outsider talking about it." Puchi Kashima says the feeling accumulated gradually — around the Bokura Tengoku years and the studio relocations of the early 2000s.

The three were early to a podcast format that nobody was paying attention to, and in that space the distinctive conversational grammar of Tokyo Pod Kyokakyoku was born. That grammar, they believe, is part of what made them seem like they were "playing by entirely different rules" whenever they turned up on mainstream variety shows.

The phrase they return to is "it doesn't appear in the timeline." The chaotic Tokyo comedy geography of the 1990s and 2000s — the lineage around Narikozaka, the Asakusa Kids (浅草キッド) thread, the old Hori Pro axis that eventually produced Sandwichman — has grown invisible. The episode closes on a laugh: every time Tatsuo appears alongside today's hot young acts on the Knights' (ナイツ) radio program, he braces himself for the possibility that they have no idea who he is. That tension, played for laughs, is the ongoing, present-tense reality of being boryuu.