[1] His father worked for a company that printed album cover of phonograph record and his mother was a nurse.
[2] He was sickly and weak, so his father bought records with the company's employee discount and played him a lot of music when he was often absent from school, and his mother raised him to take good care of his health.
[7] At the time, Kitagawa knew that he wanted to be a physical education teacher in the future, but he did not specifically tell him to become a celebrity, he just took him to various movies and shows.
Higashiyama had a shaved head and looked like Masao Ohba, a boxer active at the time, while Uekusa was impressive because his family was wealthy and he had an oilcloth red bag, as if he was already a celebrity.
The experience of singing and dancing in front of an audience of different languages and cultures made him determined to further improve his performing skills.
[12] At the end of 1984, Nishikiori made a direct appeal to Mary Fujishima, Kitagawa's elder sister, at the 1984 year-end party for Johnny's, asking her to let him make his debut, even if it was on a flexi disc.
[19] Nishikiori is currently known for telling amusing stories and jokes, but according to him, he was not an interesting person at the time of his debut and was scolded by Kitagawa, who said, “Your stage banter is not fun.
[22] His co-stars were all stars, including veteran actors Isao Bito and Tokuma Nishioka, so he was under a lot of pressure.
[27] Nishikiori directed the musical productions Ode to Joy and Setouchi Koshinkyoku at the Botchan Theatre, Tōon city, Ehime Prefecture, for two consecutive years starting in 2018.
[32] Although they did not discuss it, Katsuhide Uekusa, another member of Shonentai, also left the Johnny's at the same time, triggered by Kitagawa's death.
[30] In September 2021, he and Uekusa launched the YouTube channel "Nicky and Kacchanel",[33] and the following year, they held a dinner theater.
[36] In 2022, Nishikiori acted for the first time in five years in Salaryman Night Fever, a play he wrote and directed.
[2] The reason for focusing on office workers was that when he used to perform in Yurakucho about 20 years ago, the audience was mostly women, and his old local friend asked him, "Is there any theater that we can go see more casually?
He said he wanted to create a production that would cheer up office workers of his age who commute on crowded trains every day, are made sarcastic remarks by their bosses, and are kept at a distance by their daughters when they go home.
[37] In an interview with 2023, Nishikiori had been working in show business and doing the singing and dancing he loved, but after he turned 40, he was not sure if it was contributing to society, and considered retiring from his job.
However, after the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that seeing Wahaha Honpo, a comedy troupe, doing their best to make the audience laugh made him decide that this was the only thing he could do, and that he would continue to do this work.
[38] He said he became independent after his idol days and wanted to compete as a theater director in a place where no one knew who he was, and that he is now closer to his original self when he lived Shitamachi and before he entered show business.
[39] In 2022, he and Uekusa held a dinner theater in Tokyo and Osaka, where they entertained the audience with songs from the Shonentai era and a talk mixed with jokes between the two.
[34][40] In 2023, he launched a new project "Funky Diamond 18 (Funky Diamond One Eight)" with Papaya Suzuki, a classmate of his high school,[41] and released a mini album Primemax on July 12, followed by a nationwide live tour Live Tour 2023 Primemax in four cities throughout Japan.