…I met this fellow (Kouji Yamamoto) and some of his friends. Most of them belong to the cast of the current hit drama Shinsengumi, airing on NHK Sunday evenings.
He was joined by the vivacious Tomoko Tabata, who plays Tsune Kondo in the same drama, and struck up a conversation with Dave and I from the next table. He had picked up some English while appearing in Rent in New York, and we ended up bouncing back and forth freely between English and Japanese, discussing cross-cultural topics over imo-jochu. In the drama he plays a burly samurai-type, but in person seems almost, well, gay. Good fun hanging out and talking with the lot of them.