&TEAM’s debut trailer takes on the perspective of a wolf running down with its pack. “Howling together, the members of the pack recognize their own power,” says a voiceover. “Even someone as weak as me has a role to play.” What role do you play in the pack, I ask her, and what is your personal howl?
In addition to his role as a translator, Maki says he’s “something like our team’s cleaning manager. Whenever we have to clean the dormitory, I have to say to the others, ‘Okay! let’s clean.’” Harua sits next to him, half his face hidden by a delicate curtain of black bangs and thick-rimmed glasses. I tell him that I read that he likes to organize and he nods.
“What kind of things do you organize?”
“The location of the remote control,” he says in Japanese, setting up an imaginary one on the table in front of him. I don’t think he’s trying to be funny, but his honesty elicits giggles of delight from the table, the off-screen staff, and me. He smiles. “I’ll feel a little weird if it doesn’t line up perfectly.”
Maybe the two of them – Maki and Harua – could become a cleaning team, I suggest. Maki smiles: “Definitely.”
It’s cute to see the two sitting so comfortably together. During a confessional until late at night & FOREPLAY, Maki tearfully apologized to Harua for a mismatch in communication style. He had hugged and chatted with Harua as a sign of affection, but as it turned out, Harua preferred a friendship with more physical distance. Maki was appalled that he might have made Harua uncomfortable by acting too hard. Harua assured him it was nothing and they hugged him.
Now Maki turns around and asks Harua about his role in the group. “I think I’m quite observant. So if someone chats during practice and misses what the teacher is saying, I can supplement them,” says Harua. He prides himself on being detail-oriented, which explains his interest in the remote control. But being attuned to this level of detail is sometimes overwhelming: “I’m very sensitive to what’s around me, to objects and sounds around me. So I prefer the sound of nothing, of silence, so I can relax.”
In a dorm with eight other guys, that kind of quiet is hard to come by. “I’ll take nature walks to relax,” he says.
Fuma, on the other hand, describes himself as “an indoor guy” who likes books, though lately he’s been playing more than reading. We’re popping into a chat about what they’re playing on their switches – superfan Fuma is engrossed in the recently released game Pokemon scarlet and Pokemon VioletTaki in splatoonand Yuma in Mario Kart, among other games. “And EJ wants to play, so he buys a lot of games, but he gets tired of it after two or three days,” teases K. “I like to play zelda and also animal crossing,says EJ from the side, but he mixes up the names in Japanese and sends K into a fit of laughter.