**A~chan**
*Nishiwaki Ayaka*
born 1989.2.15 / from Hiroshima prefecture / blood type A / 160cm
Beginning as a model in kindergarten and singing at the festival in the apartment complex where she lived with her family at the time, A~chan says she was a girl who “loved to stand out ever since [she] was little” with a laugh. An admirer of SPEED, she first passed through the gates of Actors School Hiroshima in her fifth year of elementary school.
It was when Okinawa Actors School, where SPEED-san had attended, was in the news. There was this show called B.B. WAVES [featuring students of the school including SPEED] that came on at night. In Hiroshima, it aired at around 2:30 AM. I was little and couldn’t stay up late, so my mom taped it on video for me, and I really looked forward to coming home from school and watching that. I wanted to be in that Actors School like them. I started attending the Hiroshima branch of that Actors School I admired so much in the fifth grade, so in my elementary school graduation album, I wrote these really clear-eyed dreams I could never say now. Things like “I want to be someone who other people see as a goal” and “I want the whole country to know the name Nishiwaki Ayaka”... Those are some big dreams (laughs). Now I see that and wonder how I was so brazen back then, but I couldn’t have kept going in the school if I wasn’t always holding on to those dreams. Everyone else there was serious about it, too. Some of them were just little, but they’d say things like “I want to be an entertainer,” and it was like, “How do you even know what the word ‘entertainer’ means?” (laughs)
At a young age, she leaped into the intense world of entertainment. As she toughed it out through hard lessons day after day, her family was her rock.
I was constantly at the school from fifth grade to my sophomore year in junior high, seriously. I went to school in the morning, then school ended around three, so I’d get picked up by car. Then I went straight to lessons, came home at one or two in the morning, and started on my homework… Then back to school at seven AM. I look back on it now and it was a really intense schedule. Getting three hours of sleep daily and things like that… I wouldn’t be able to bear that now (laughs). But that’s how important it was for me to do, and I suppose it was fun. Honestly… I think it was really hard for my mom. Our house was really far from the center of town and we had to take the highway when we went in the car, so the highway fees added up and so did the cost of gasoline. Apparently our mileage was eight times the normal average, and we put so many miles on the car that she actually got nervous about it (laughs).
That support that I got from my family really made a difference for me. I mean, the entrance fees and tuition costs at Actors School are nothing to sneeze at (laughs). It was really just… Like a gamble. Even though there was no guarantee of how that risk would turn out, they bet all that on me. Just because I said I wanted to do it, they took that on their own shoulders and genuinely supported me… I’m really grateful that they worked even harder than me to give me that opportunity. If not for all the effort made by my mom, dad, little sister, little brother and grandma, I don’t think I ever could’ve made it this far, and I think I’d just be an ordinary kindergarten teacher right now (laughs).