74-year-old singer Yoko Kon appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on April 14th, where she talked about the circumstances surrounding the fracture of two ribs she suffered last November.
On Saturday evening, at Tokyo Station on her way home from a performance, she fell down the stairs, though she doesn't remember exactly what happened—she thinks her shoe got caught on the edge of the stairs. She was so shocked that she didn't feel anything, but later found out that she had broken two ribs.
It was the time when her elderly mother, who turned 99 in February of this year, had returned home from day care and was hungry, waiting for dinner. "When I fell, more than anything else, more than myself or the pain, I thought, 'Oh, Mom's waiting, she's hungry, I have to get home no matter what.'" A crowd gathered, and they said it would be better to take her to the hospital by ambulance. However, "all I could think about was that I had to get home quickly, Mom was waiting," and "I said, 'I'm fine, I can stand,' and I stood up, but something felt wrong, but I thought I had to go home, so I rushed home."
The pain gradually returned after she got home, but the clinic was closed on Saturday. "It hurt so much I couldn't walk or breathe." All she could think about was what to do about her mother, and she called many acquaintances on her cell phone to ask if they could look after her. She found a friend who could look after her, but it wasn't possible right away, and it was two days later that she finally got to take care of her mother. "Those two days were hell," she recalled.
She also talked about how she got her start in the entertainment industry. Ima is from Aichi Prefecture. When celebrities came to Nagoya, her father would act as MC, even though it wasn't his profession. When she went to see Ayumi Ishida perform, Ishida took a big liking to Ima, and Ishida's manager at the time asked her, "Are you interested in the entertainment industry?" Ishida was 17 at the time, and Ima was about 14. She recalled that this was the start of her career.
