Naoki Matayoshi dreamed of wearing pajamas to sleep with dragons.

Matayoshi-san is a comedian who is a self-confessed clothes lover. Before touching on pajamas this time, I would like to ask him about how he first became aware of fashion. My first encounter with fashion was much earlier than I had imagined, dating back to my elementary school days.

I played soccer all the time, so I wore jerseys to school, and the only time I got dressed up was when I went to my grandparents' house. Before going to my grandparents' house, I always went with my mother to a department store in Neyagawa and picked out my own clothes. On the way home from my grandparents' house, I was playing outside with my classmates when I bumped into a group of five or six girls on bicycles. I was always wearing only jerseys, but when they saw me wearing a gray and black bi-color baseball shirt with black jeans, they said, "Wow, Matayoshi, that's really stylish. Did you pick it out yourself? There was an exchange of, "Yes, I did. I got carried away and said, "I'm fashionable? I got carried away. It must have been a good color match by chance, but I was very happy to receive the compliment from an unexpected angle.

For Matayoshi, a sixth-grade boy in the midst of puberty, the unexpected compliment was a shock, he recalls, comparable to the shock of being uke at his first stage performance. With the rocket start he had made, he rapidly became passionate about fashion.

I was so happy that I went home and asked my sister, "Isn't there a fashionable area called Amerikamura? I asked my sister to take me there sometime, and later she and I went there together. I bought a black and blue buffalo check flannel shirt and cargo pants there, and that was when I really fell in love with vintage clothing.

Amerika-mura in Osaka is a fashion area with throngs of secondhand clothing stores, like Shimokitazawa and Koenji in Tokyo . In an age when the Internet, let alone smart phones, was not widely available, the method of exploring the stores was too unpredictable.

I looked at magazines and such, but my main reference was the fashionable people walking around town. About once a month, after practice on Sundays, I would go to Amerikamura alone and sit in Triangle Park and observe people. If I saw someone I thought was fashionable, I would follow them until they entered a second-hand clothing store. I would follow them to the fourth floor of a suspicious building, and when I followed them, the atmosphere would be very awkward because the shop was not a clothing store. I wanted to buy vintage jeans, but I didn't know which stores were the best, so I thought, "If it's a store where people who wear good jeans go, I'm sure I can find it there.

Although it is not advisable to imitate them in this day and age, it makes sense, and it is interesting to see how unexpected encounters may occur. Another useful textbook for using color was, surprisingly, a soccer magazine.

Even before I fell in love with clothes, I was very particular about soccer jerseys. I would look at the uniforms of various teams around the world in soccer magazines and think, 'How cool! Inter Milan is good, but Juventus is cool too. So I learned the color combinations and sizes from the jerseys and game shirts. While many teams use a single color for their uniforms, Argentina, Brazil, and other South American teams use three or four colors, and I thought the color schemes were very beautiful and interesting to watch. The more colors you add, the more difficult it becomes to match them, but I think I learned that sense of balance from soccer uniforms.