The RIHGA Royal Hotel Kokura is My Home in Kokura. There’s Nowhere Else to Stay So I Can’t Help It!
Guests of the RIHGA Royal Hotel
Lily Franky
The multi-talented Lily Franky is active in many fields as an actor, writer, illustrator, host, and personality. “What a pain” may be his favorite phrase, but everything he talked about was brimming with love for his hometown, his friends, and the people he works with.
My hometown pride is almost nonexistent... but you can’t fight your blood.
“Ah… I know this room. They let us use it once before for a drama shoot.”
Lily seemed to reminisce as he walked into a suite at the RIHGA Royal Hotel Tokyo.
“I was playing a hit screenwriter, holed up in this room, and then Masaki Okada, playing a lawyer, came barging in. They also let us use the lobby and the lounge.”
That was for the 2019 TV Asahi drama Rikon na Futari (Two Divorced People).
“When I started writing lyrics for Mitz Mangrove‘s group Hoshikuzu Scat, this was also the first hotel that let us do a dinner show. Hoshikuzu’s dinner shows are still going on, aren’t they?”
Lily is also one of the most frequent regular guests at the RIHGA Royal Hotel Kokura in his hometown.
“When I go back home, I don’t have a family home there anymore, so the RIHGA is the only place I can stay. I think I’ve spent more than a hundred nights there by now. Even if I go planning to stay only two nights, more often than not I end up staying longer. In the old days, if I was still asleep at noon, the hotel staff would just know I was probably staying another night and wouldn’t even call. These days they do call, though (laughs). I don’t think I’ll ever stay at one hotel this much again, so I feel a bond with it, in my own way.”
He says he mostly goes back to Kokura for work.
“Since I serve as a judge for the Kitakyushu Literature Museum‘s Children’s Nonfiction Literature Awards, I always go back to Kokura twice a year for each judging session and awards ceremony. And since I was born the same year the city of Kitakyushu was founded, I tend to get invited to events on the grounds that we’re the same age. I think I’m the type who’s extremely lacking in anything you’d call hometown pride, but even so, when it’s work connected to my hometown, it’s hard to say no, so I end up doing it. I guess that too is a kind of hometown loyalty. You can’t change your blood… or maybe you just can’t fight it.”
He also says he goes back to Kokura just for fun.
“When I’m in Tokyo, I never really feel like I’m taking a break, so I go back to enjoy myself with my hometown friends. I go home for New Year’s. Lately, the pattern has been that people whose families are in Tokyo don’t really have this idea of ‘going back home,’ so they tag along on my trip. Kokura feels like it keeps getting smaller and smaller as a city, and that’s fine. Cities that feel a little lacking are more fun to be in, aren’t they? My friends from Tokyo find Kokura more interesting than Hakata too. It has an atmosphere you just don’t get in Tokyo.”
“What’s sad is that because of things like the shopping arcade fire and COVID, a lot of the old-style eating and drinking districts and old movie theaters disappeared all at once over the past few years. Places like a ramshackle bar run by an old woman on her own, or an eel restaurant run by an old woman and her son. When a movie theater that had been around for about eighty years burned down, I helped support its rebuilding.”
It was also at the RIHGA Royal Hotel Kokura that Tomomi Higuchi, the third-generation proprietor of the Kokura Showakan movie theater, which had been completely destroyed by fire, held a silent film event as the first step toward rebuilding. Later, with support from people like Lily, crowdfunding, and other sources, the Kokura Showakan was rebuilt and resumed operations one year and four months after the disaster.
As I get older, going out feels like a bother, so I’d like to get back to work writing
Lily is also in constant demand as an actor, and lately he has often appeared in overseas films, including the Korean film Harbin, in which he co-starred with Hyun Bin of Crash Landing on You, the Japan-UK co-production Cottontail, and Diamonds in the Sand, a joint production by Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
“Last year, films I appeared in were released overseas all at once, so I ended up going to about seven countries for stage greetings and things like that. You can tell from the kinds of roles I’m offered that people overseas probably see me differently from people in Japan.
Working overseas with the people there feels a bit like studying abroad. The way films are shot is different, and I get to learn about things like how people work, their habits, and their culture.”
Originally, after graduating from Musashino Art University, Lily began his creative career as an illustrator. Later, in 2005, he became a writer and published a novel, Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad. The book became a huge bestseller, selling more than two million copies.
“After turning that into a book, I quit all the serial work I was writing by hand. It got to be too much of a pain. Around 2000, I had about forty-five regular columns and serials a month, and if you count individual manuscripts, I was writing more than a hundred pieces. Now, about the only writing I do is lyrics.”
But it seems the wind may be starting to shift direction a little.
“I’ve got a few short stories that still haven’t been collected in a book. The editor who was in charge of them has retired, and I feel like I need to get them into book form while he’s still alive. To do that, though, I’m one piece short. I need to write another one with about 150 to 160 manuscript pages. So I’ve been thinking maybe I should try writing it… As you get older, going out starts to feel like a bother. So I’d like to get back into writing. But writing manuscripts isn’t about brainpower—it’s about stamina. Writing takes more grit.”
The word “grit” somehow doesn’t seem to fit Lily, but this is a case where we’d like him to summon some and write a new work for us to read. Then again, speaking of things that don’t seem to fit him, the stylish Lily set a Snoopy-patterned pouch down on the table. He loves Snoopy, and he actually uses the various gifts his friends give him.
Attached to the pouch were two keychain-like items with “JISOO” on them. When asked what they were, it turned out they were K-pop girl group merchandise.
“It’s Jisoo, from Blackpink. When we were shooting Tokyo Swindlers for Netflix, I asked the staff, ‘I’m going to Blackpink’s concert in Osaka, can you put me on a morning Shinkansen?’ They said, ‘No way. Absolutely not.’ So I said, ‘Then I’m not working today,’ and ended up blowing off the shoot and getting it called off. But Jisoo, the singer I like, wasn’t there because of COVID, so I saw a three-member Blackpink. Later, I went to Jisoo’s solo fan meeting, and now, finally, the day after tomorrow, I’m going to be able to see Blackpink in its complete four-member form!!”
Clap clap clap, congratulations… no, wait—that’s not the point. He actually caused a shoot to be canceled?
“Japanese film productions should stop doing those old-school, boot-camp-style shoots. In the end, the staff got a break, so there was no bad side to it.”
He shows not the slightest remorse. In fact, on the day of this interview, Lily arrived late because he stopped off for tsukemen (noodles dipped in sauce).
“I almost decided to just go home because it was such a pain, but I’d already done one job earlier and was wide awake, so rationality kicked in and I decided to come.” Somehow I ended up saying, “I’m glad you came. Thank you.” But then I found myself thinking, “Wait a minute… Something’s off here…” And yet he’s impossible to dislike.
Even after producing a massive bestseller and winning the Japan Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, he is never the least bit arrogant. Even when he says something sharp, his gentle voice and calm way of speaking keep it from sounding harsh. And when he’s hosting, you can sense how attentive he is to the smallest details. This man, I thought, is an exceptional charmer. His final words to me this time were:
“RIHGA is my ‘home in Kokura.’ And I’m not saying that in a nice way, okay? If you write it up to sound nice, like ‘RIHGA is my home in my hometown,’ I’ll cut it. It’s just that there’s nowhere else, so I stay there because I have to. With a heavy heart… Well, I guess it really is home in the literal sense.”
Okay… let’s see whether the charmer manages to get that line cut!
Text by Yasuko Shibaguchi
Photography by Yukino Nakanishi
Location / RIHGA Royal Hotel Tokyo Crown Suite
Lily Franky
Born in 1963, from Fukuoka Prefecture.
Lily is active across a wide range of fields, including illustration and design, writing, photography, lyric and songwriting, and acting. His first full-length novel, Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad, won the 2006 Japan Booksellers’ Award, and his picture book Oden-kun was adapted into an anime.
In film, he won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Newcomer for All Around Us (2008, directed by Ryosuke Hashiguchi), and has received many other honors, including the 37th Japan Academy Film Prize for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for The Devil’s Path (2013, directed by Kazuya Shiraishi) and Like Father, Like Son (2013, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda), for which he also won Best Supporting Actor. Shoplifters (2018, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda), in which he starred, won the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival.
RIHGA Royal Hotel Kokura
Phone: +81(0) 93-531-1121 (representative)
2-14-2 Asano, Kokurakita-ku, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka
RIHGA Royal Hotel Tokyo
Phone: +81 (0) 3-5285-1121 (representative)
1-104-19 Totsuka-machi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
