【青木理/タブレット純】2026年10月22日 本当の無駄話 ＋ 今日のニュース（高市政権発足1年 反省点は広報／対米関係の再構築を／不起訴16歳女性衰弱死 県警・神戸地検の捜査・勾留は）

Opening Talk: The Fine Line Between Drinking and Creativity

The day's guest was Tablet Jun. Asked why he hadn't drunk the previous night, he explained that he devotes the evening before each Golden Radio appearance entirely to working out his one-man comedy sketch. No ideas came to him that night, and inspiration only struck the following morning at a family restaurant.

The conversation turned to the relationship between alcohol and creativity, and everyone on the show agreed: being fully drunk is no good, but being in a slightly pleasant mood is the sweet spot. They all lamented, however, that the window for that sweet spot narrows with age. Otake Makoto shared that in his thirties, nine times out of ten he would read a draft he had written while drinking and be disappointed the next morning — but once in ten times it was something remarkable. Joined by announcer Sunayama, the group laughed that one-in-ten was hardly a dependable rate.

Tablet Jun's Solo Trip to the Kawagoe Festival

Over the weekend, Tablet Jun visited the Kawagoe Festival alone. He was so moved by the parade of festival floats that he began to cry, wandering the streets with a plastic cup of citrus drink in hand, tears streaming down his face. The more he cried, the more his nose ran, and he resorted to blowing it with his bare hand multiple times.

Immediately after stepping out of a portable toilet, a fan couple approached him and asked, "Are you Tablet Jun?" then requested a handshake. He recalled it as "the worst possible moment," adding that he wiped the condensation from his plastic cup onto his trousers before extending his hand.

Before heading to Kawagoe, he had stopped in Akabane, where a bar open from 10 a.m. served him a ¥190 highball and a ¥800 motsu set meal in the middle of the afternoon. In Kawagoe itself, many shops were closed on the festival day and food stalls were hard to come by, so he ended the night at Hidakaya with a single order of stir-fried vegetables and a chuhai. The next morning, he walked out into the corridor with a toothbrush in his mouth before thinking to look in a mirror — where he discovered a dried piece of bean sprout stuck in his hair.

The "Supernatural Incident" at the Kawagoe Inn

The following morning at his health spa accommodation, Tablet Jun stepped into the hallway with his toothbrush still in his mouth and found he could not get back into his room. Cleaning staff were called, and even two or three of them working together with a spare key could not open the door. A staff member with twenty years of experience said they had never seen anything like it.

Eventually, a third staff member spotted a sesame-seed-sized protrusion below the doorknob. Pressing it with a finger caused the door to open without any further effort. Staff described it as something that cannot ordinarily be triggered by human hands.

There was a postscript. Once the commotion had settled, an unfamiliar key turned up in Tablet Jun's bag — it was the spare key in question, which he had received the night before and completely forgotten about while drunk. The reason the staff could not "bring" the spare key was that he had been holding it all along. Aoki Osamu quipped, "This doesn't hold together at all as a short story," and the studio dissolved into laughter.

News Segment: Was "PR" Really the Takaichi Administration's Biggest Regret?

One year after taking office, Prime Minister Takaichi was asked by reporters what she considered her administration's biggest shortcoming and cited "the way we handle public relations." She emphasized that a ¥10.9 trillion package of measures against the cost-of-living crisis had been delivered "without interruption," and pointed to holding Japan's gasoline price at around ¥170 per liter as a key achievement. Noting that some advanced nations now pay ¥380–¥400 or more per liter, she said Japan's figure was "the lowest" and that the failure was not communicating those results "accurately enough."

A separate report noted that the newly appointed head of Cabinet PR communications was found, just five or six days into the role, to have received a ¥300,000 donation from a company with agricultural-sector contracts; they subsequently returned the money and resigned.

Aoki Osamu responded to the "PR is our regret" framing directly: "I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here." Listeners of this program, and the broader public, already know about the gasoline subsidies, he said — and they are questioning the policy precisely because they understand it. With economic experts debating whether such subsidies are appropriate in the first place, the problem lies not in communication but in the substance of the policies themselves. He also noted that the Cabinet PR budget has ballooned tenfold to ¥7 billion, and closed by calling it propaganda in all but name.