LIFE IN JAPAN
Lisle Wilkerson
 Occupation:
In-store Disc Jockey at
Shibuya HMV and co-host of Inter-FM Saturday afternoon Super Studio show.
Time in Japan:
21 years
"I' not a very good morning person, so I
usually get up at 10 or 11am, when the phone rings. Since I'm very into music the very
first thing I think is, 'What will I listen to? What kind of mood am I in? Am I in a
Luther Vandross mood or a Roberta Flack mood?'Because I'm freelance every day is different. Sometimes I have to go into
the studio to do voice jobs, for video games, or English text books. The ones for video
games are fun, because I might be playing a villainous character. Two weeks ago I played
this evil witch. I was like, 'Hah hah! Down with you boy!'. It was great.
Almost everyday I'm at HMV at four, so I'll
go to the gym before work. I don't like to eat until after work. If I eat, I'm groggy. I
need to be really alert.
My radio voice is a lot deeper than my
regular voice, so I need to hear myself through the headphones to get a proper level. At
HMV I work a six hour shift, and usually at about seven o'clock, I start to burn out, so I
drink a lot of coffee to keep myself peppy.
Because I stand out at HMV a lot of people
know me. I had this one guy come up to me, and he had all these pictures of me from
different events I had hosted. The events were for famous groups, but the pictures were
only of me, and he gave me copies! He's like, 'this is for you.' I was shocked. I was
like, 'Oh gross, leave me alone'.
My philosophy is, I'm there for the
customers, and I want to give good energy. I have a lot of people who come by every day,
and I don't know their names. But I wave to them, and they wave to me. I get energy from
people, as well as giving it. I've been working there for six years, and I still love it.
Right now at Inter-FM I do the Saturday one to five show in the afternoon. It's called
Asahi Super Dry Super Studio. It's the countdown show. I'm the street reporter, so I'm
always out and about. My favorite was when the Magic Johnson All Stars were in town and I
got to interview Magic Johnson.
The gap in price between domestic and
import CD's is sometimes more than 1,000yen. But instead of bringing the price of domestic
CD's down, what they'll do is release the domestic version first, so fans of an artist,
say Mariah Carey, will rush out and buy the expensive version. Imports are getting a lot
cheaper though, so things will have to change.
Because I've grown up in Japan I feel
Japanese, but I still don't look Japanese. So I'm always having to deal with that foreign
treatment, which can be very frustrating. Sometimes I get asked to go to TV auditions, and
they'll ask me to act like a stupid foreigner-but I refuse to play that game. However,
there are also advantages; if I was a Japanese woman, it would have been much harder for
me to get into the position that I'm in. I never thought I would be in radio but it just
kind of happened. And now I look back and think this is the only thing I could be doing. I
was meant to do this, because music has always been my passion. It makes a whole lot of
difference when you love what you're doing. You can wake up in the morning and feel like
'Yes! I'm doing this.'"
Lisle spoke with Bob Cronkite
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