SANTA: “I’m not starting over from zero. I’m just doing what I’ve always wanted to do”
- CZMOS Redazione
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Some artists change direction in order to reinvent themselves. Others simply keep expanding their own language, without erasing any of the previous versions of who they are.
SANTA, the Japanese artist active across dance, music and acting, belongs to the second category. Dancer, idol, singer, actor, creator: his path moves across different disciplines, yet never seems to lose its center.
Dance gave him the body. Music gave him a voice. Acting is now opening a new narrative space.
In this SANTA interview with CZMOS Magazine, he talks about family, language, artistic identity, the need to be directly involved in his own creative process, his acting step with Forgiveness, and an unexpected connection with Italian art.
Your father was active in the world of comedy before opening his own dance studio. You’ve also evolved your career over the years, as a dancer, an idol, a singer, and an actor.
Do you think that ability to “start over again and again” is something you learned from your father? Or was it something you had to discover on your own?
I don’t really think of it as having the ability to “start over again and again.” I feel like I’ve always just been doing what I wanted to do. When I was a dancer, I wanted to win competitions. Then, when that wasn’t enough for me anymore, I wanted more people to know about me, so I aimed for the entertainment industry. I debuted as an idol, then continued as a singer and dancer, and now I’m moving toward the dream I’ve had for a long time: becoming an actor. In that sense, my family, including my father, has always pushed me forward. Actually, my father didn’t have a very positive image of dancers at first. But even so, his approach was: “You can do whatever you want. But if you do it, do it with everything you have.” Now, he’s even more of a dance nerd than I am.
When you sing or act in Chinese, do you feel like you are “playing a character” or “being someone else”?
And when you switch back to Japanese, does it feel like returning to yourself? Or is the transformation like starting from scratch again?
I don’t really feel a big difference because of the language. Whether I use Japanese or Chinese, I’m still me. But of course, the version of me at home and the version of me on stage are different. Still, both are me. If one of them were missing, I feel like I wouldn’t really be myself anymore. I can get ideas from my everyday self, and when I enter a role as an actor, I receive a lot of power from that version of myself too. When I leave a role, come back from the stage, and return to myself, I feel like I’m a happy person. That’s probably why I want to continue both as an actor and as an artist.
You design your own logos, you edit your own videos, you write your own lyrics. Is it about control, or is it the fear that someone else won’t understand what you’re trying to say?
And is there something you’ve made that you’ve never shown anyone?
Works of art continue to remain. For me, facing that with responsibility is part of being a professional. When I feel that my own involvement is necessary, I do various things myself. I think it comes from not wanting to regret my own work. Every project and every stage is not something to take for granted. There are so many people supporting it, and that’s how it becomes complete. That’s why I want to face it sincerely. As for works I haven’t shown yet, I’m working on them right now. Please look forward to it!
You’re related to Shun Oguri, and as a kid you used to say you wanted to become an actor just like him.
Now that you’ve gotten there with Forgiveness, what was it like? Was it what you imagined, or did you discover something you didn’t expect?
It was more painful than I imagined, but also more fun and happier than I imagined. Especially with this work, there were many parts that I produced myself while connecting it to music, so I felt a lot of responsibility. But when I saw it on the screen, I felt a happiness unlike anything else. Since then, my knowledge and love for acting have grown even more, so I want to keep challenging myself more and more.
CZMOS Magazine is published from Italy. Our editorial perspective is built on the intersection between Italian culture and contemporary Asia.
So we have to ask: is there an Italian artist, musician, filmmaker, designer, or creative figure who has surprised or influenced you in an unexpected way?
It might be a classic answer, but there was a period when I studied Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. I’ve also made a painting inspired by The Last Supper.
CZMOS point of view
What emerges from this SANTA interview is not the portrait of an artist trying to escape one definition in order to enter another. It is the opposite.
SANTA does not describe his path as a sequence of resets, but as a continuous expansion. Dance, music, performance, acting, language, visual creation: each element becomes part of a wider identity, one that refuses to be reduced to a single role.
Even when he talks about transformation, he never speaks as if he is leaving himself behind. Whether he works in Japanese or Chinese, whether he is on stage or in front of a camera, the point is not becoming someone else. The point is finding another way to express what was already there.
And maybe that is what makes the Japanese artist’s career so interesting right now: SANTA is not choosing between being a performer, dancer, singer or actor.
He is building a language big enough to contain all of them.
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