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The story
Maki Watase (57), vocalist of the rock band LINDBERG, revealed that midway through her third year of high school she had already landed a job as a dolphin trainer at an aquarium in Hyogo Prefecture. She’d moved to Tokyo from Mie Prefecture for singing lessons and ultimately turned the offer down — a backstory that had the thread buzzing with theories that “it must have been her aunt’s connections” and nostalgic comments about her era-defining hit “Ima Sugu Kiss Me” (“Kiss Me Right Now”).
LINDBERG’s Maki Watase already had her post-graduation path lined up, but moved to Tokyo partway through her third year of high school… “Dolphin training and the like at an aquarium in Hyogo Prefecture”
Maki Watase (57), vocalist of rock band LINDBERG, appeared on TV Tokyo’s “Nikenme Dou Suru? ~ Tsumami no Hanashi” (Saturdays, late night at 0:55) on the 22nd, where she revealed the job she’d had lined up after high school graduation.
Watase, who was born and raised in Mie Prefecture, revealed she’d moved to Tokyo at 17. “I came out to Tokyo partway through high school, in my third year. I transferred schools. As a high schooler I was taking singing lessons to become a singer — I was commuting to a vocal school, all the way to Nagoya,” she said.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Sounds fishy to me
It's called getting hired through connections, that's what everyone's saying
Ohh, deear, my looove~ (mimicking the drawn-out way she sings the lyrics)
Though it's probably brutal once you actually try it
Even the guy with an Olympic swimming silver couldn't get one
She said her aunt worked there, so it's basically just connections, right?
I did the Shinken Zemi correspondence course, so I remember the CM song "Munasawagi no After School"
Right after that she went on hiatus for marriage and childbirth
Maki Watase's a rare case — someone who made it big both as an idol and in a band
And getting hired through connections on top of that — I'd love to see her parents' faces
That place is great
But it took a while before she made it big, so her aunt probably felt awkward at work for a while
She also did Kyuji Fujikawa's entrance song, and apparently a soccer anthem too
Go read Wikipedia and educate yourself 💢
the band suddenly broke big,
which made juggling both the idol and band careers feel kind of awkward
A rare type of artist
https://youtu.be/FJHJCK7PhaI?si=7nBTVrqjfwzollW-
Wasn't it her hometown's Toba Aquarium?
The "Kimochiku" Aquarium? (a joking mispronunciation)
Maybe turning it down didn't cause too much friction
Guess I was wrong
I think the line goes "We haven't met since the day Ichiro hit that grand slam~"
On NHK they swapped in a different player's name when she sang it
Background and Key Points
LINDBERG broke through in 1989 with “Ima Sugu Kiss Me,” one of the biggest-selling Japanese rock singles of its era, and Watase has fronted the band ever since, cycling through a hiatus for marriage and childbirth in the mid-90s before later reunion activity. Before the band, she had already been working as a teen idol and gravure model, which is why several posters frame her as a rare case of someone who “made it” in both the idol world and a rock band, careers that in Japan’s entertainment industry are usually treated as separate tracks with different audiences and agencies. Aquarium trainer positions in Japan are genuinely scarce and competitive, often requiring biology or animal-husbandry credentials, hired in small batches by a handful of parks nationwide, which is the backdrop for the thread’s skepticism.
The thread didn’t split over whether she was talented or whether the story was true; it split over how to read the job offer itself. One camp took her mention of an aunt working at the aquarium at face value, as an unremarkable family connection that got her foot in the door before her singing career existed. The other camp treated that same detail as proof the “offer” was really a favor, not a competitive hire, and needled the idea that a 17-year-old could casually land a job people spend years failing to get through normal channels.
What’s easy to miss is that this was relayed secondhand on a late-night TV variety show, not a formal interview, so details like which aquarium, whether the position was full-time, and how her aunt was actually connected to it were never pinned down or verified.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Entertainment] LINDBERG’s Maki Watase already had her post-graduation path lined up, but moved to Tokyo partway through her third year of high school… “Dolphin training and the like at an aquarium in Hyogo Prefecture. That’s where I was going to work”.”
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