As a promising playwright, director and actor, 31-year-old Junichi Hirota highlights a cruel fact running through Japan's theater world — namely that once technicians such as lighting engineers, sound people and set-builders are paid from box-office profits, there's often little or nothing left for the likes of Hirota and other such talent in the business.
Most stage actors outside the big- theater league can't live on what they earn from acting, and most young dramatists have to pursue other jobs to survive.
For Hirota, all this was not his initial life plan, when, at the University of Tokyo, he originally wanted to specialize in international politics. Midway through his course, however, he joined a theater group; and then, in 2001, he founded the Hyottoko Rambu (Jest Dance) company, dropped out of one of the country's top learning institutions and began to devote all his energy to theater — regardless of the financial sacrifice.