Rie Tachikawa Interview Full -

One of the most poignant moments occurs when the host asks about her father. Tachikawa pauses for seven seconds—an eternity on radio.

She reveals that her father was a mid-level corporate bureaucrat who died of overwork (Karōshi) in the 1990s. She describes his life as a series of invisible grids: the train schedule, the office cubicle, the family hierarchy.

“My threads are those grids,” she says. “But I loosen them. I allow the warp and weft of rigid society to sag just enough for light to pass through.”

For Tachikawa, the act of tying a thread to a rusted nail was a ceremonial act of mourning—a way to add flexibility to a world her father found too rigid.

Following the release of the “full” unedited interview transcript on the paid subscription site Note, the reaction was polarized. rie tachikawa interview full

Older industry critics accused Tachikawa of “performative nihilism”—of making her depression an aesthetic to sell more niche tickets. In a follow-up interview (unrelated, but frequently linked by algorithms), a former co-star anonymously suggested she “takes herself too seriously for someone who once voiced a cartoon rabbit.”

But her core fanbase defends her fiercely. On Reddit’s r/JDorama, a user wrote: “Finally, someone who admits that acting is violence against the self. The ‘full’ interview isn’t depressing. It’s liberating. She gives us permission to admit that our jobs cost us something.”

Interviewer (I): Rie, thank you for agreeing to a full interview. For those searching for your name, the first thing they see is the term "silent sculptor." Do you accept that title?

Rie Tachikawa (RT): (Long pause, then a soft laugh) No. A sculptor adds. I remove. Perhaps I am a "silence arranger." But even that is not correct. Silence does not exist. True silence is a myth we chase. My work is about the awareness of the sound that is already there—the hum of the refrigerator, the groan of a wooden floor, your own breath. One of the most poignant moments occurs when

I: Your 2018 piece, Memorandum of Oblivion, involved taping a single, broken teacup to the ceiling of a room in an abandoned apartment. People waited in line for four hours to see it. Why?

RT: Because they recognized it. That cup—it had a hairline crack. The tape was yellowed, brittle. It looked like someone had tried to fix it in a hurry and then simply... left it. When you walk into a pristine white cube gallery, you are an observer. When you walk into a room where a teacup is floating above you, you become a trespasser. You ask: Who lived here? Why did they leave this? That question is the artwork. Not the cup.

I: So you are a storyteller?

RT: No. I am a questioner. A story gives answers. I give clues to a mystery that doesn't exist. “My threads are those grids,” she says

To understand the demand for a complete Rie Tachikawa interview, one must first understand her media strategy. Unlike many of her contemporaries who maintain daily social media diaries, Tachikawa is a minimalist. Her Instagram is a curated void—landscapes, shadows, never a face. Her public appearances are rare.

Thus, when she sits down for an interview, every minute is precious. Partial interviews (the 5-minute news segments, the magazine excerpts) often cut out what makes her compelling: her pauses, her corrections, her habit of laughing at her own existential dread.

In a 2023 feature-length interview with the indie journal Eiga No Tabi (The Film Journey), the moderator asked her about her infamous 2019 hiatus. In the 3-minute TV cut, she said: “I needed rest.” But in the full interview, the unedited version, she unpacked that for twelve minutes:

“Rest is a lie we tell the public. It wasn’t rest. It was deconstruction. I sat in my apartment in Setagaya and realized I had been performing ‘Rie Tachikawa’ for twelve years without knowing who the scriptwriter was. When you say ‘full interview,’ you mean the part where I admit I didn’t recognize my own voice in a playback monitor. That terrified me more than any horror script.”

This is why the keyword persists. Fans aren’t looking for gossip; they are looking for the architecture of a creative mind.