Style Resume Saito Hisao #01

I was born in September 1945, so I'm just a postwar generation. My father didn't go to war, so my mother called him a traitor (lol). I was born in Hongo, and moved to Mejiro when I was one year old. When I was little, I used to play at Gokokuji Temple, catching crayfish and dragonflies.

I have two older sisters, and my younger sister loves the sea, so she used to take me to the beach when I was in elementary school. I had no choice but to swim, so before I knew it, I had become good at swimming. I even won a competition that brought together several elementary schools.

I wasn't interested in clothes, but one day, I had a classmate at Koishikawa Technical High School who was very fashionable, and he was talking about jeans with his friends. So I asked him, "Where do they sell them?" and we went to buy some under the overpass in Ueno. That was the first piece of clothing I bought myself. I had no knowledge or money, so I bought the cheapest one. It was 260 yen. It was a pair of sailor pants with four patch pockets (lol). The guy said, "This is completely different," and when I asked him what was different, he said, "It has to be Levi's®. The pockets and stitching are different." I thought, "You should have told me that earlier" (lol).

Speaking of jeans, I think I was around 19 when I got a surfboard. I bought a new pair of Levi's® under the Ueno overpass because I wanted to show them off when I went to the beach with my girlfriend at the time. They were expensive. They were 4,800 yen at a time when the starting salary was 7,000 yen.