Asian Beauty Appreciation

A recent article in Japantoday.com was a short piece about beautiful actress Akiko Yada and her marital woes. You can read the piece here, but the long and the short of it is that hubby Manabu Oshio is currently being detained, as in held in custody, by the Tokyo police, while facing a charge of failing to exercise due care resulting in a death.

It seems, per the article, that Akiko long suspected her husband of infidelity, but she is surprised that drugs are also involved. She filed for divorce four days after Oshio’s arrest.

I’m not going to comment further on the arrest, the alleged crime, the alleged drug use, or infidelity. Those things will work themselves out with or without press coverage and definitely without my opinions.

Maybe it is part of the press campaign for her next motion picture. In a more recent Japantoday.com article, they’ve  announced that Akiko will play a police detective along with Kenji Sakaguchi doing the Bruce Willis role in the Japanese version of Die Hard.

But let’s set the news blurbs aside. I do think Akiko Yada is a beauty, a wonderful actress, and I have had the good fortune to see her in at least five Japanese TV Dramas. I am not only willing to share these with you, but I am very happy to do so.

The first series I saw with Akiko was called My Little Chef (MLC).This show was produced and aired in 2002. Akiko starred and had the lead as Seri Kamosawa, a talented but unknown chef. She comes in from the country to work at Etoile, a fancy French eatery. But it has gone out of business. However, the fates are kind and she hooks up (not romantically) with that restaurant’s former manager Kenaku Tachibana. played by Hiroshi Abe, and they open their own French restaurant.

With Aya Ueto on board as a hostess and server, and a fine assortment of actors as chefs and cooks in this restaurant, the series will entertain you three ways:

- The stories are often about the guests of the restaurant and all will be well after they taste and enjoy the fine food
- We are treated to the preparation and service of some really tasty and artfully created and presented dishes. The menu for each meal was created by Seri after having a brief conversation with the restaurant’s guest.
- The restaurant itself must fight to survive. It is being taken over by a French outfit, and the CEO is none other than Seri’s Mom who she has not seen in almost twenty years.

My thought was that this was a very fine production, beautifully presented. The cast was extremely likable, and Akiko shined as a young chef struggling to find her footing in the world of culinary arts, as well as pleasing the customers, and keeping the restaurant afloat.

Plus there is a bonus. The theme song of MLC is a wonderful song called Voyage by the superstar Japanese songstress Ayumi Hamasaki.

The second drama featuring Akiko Yada was called Top Caster (2006). It is set in the News department of a network TV station. Yuki Amani as Haruka Tsubaki has been hired as the new News Anchor. She’s bossy, bitchy, and a  ball-buster. She cares about just one thing and that’s getting scoops which translates to higher ratings for the network. The higher the ratings the higher her bonus.

She tabs TV weather girl Nozomi Asuka played by Akiko to be her assistant. That doesn’t mean editorial assistant. It doesn’t mean production assistant. It means both of those AND personal assistant 24-7.

Poor Akiko as Nozomi is nearly overwhelmed. She must wake her boss up every morning with a cup of tea at the ready. She must unpack the dozens and dozens of boxes and crates and that means set up her boss’s apartment.

So Akiko must work her tail off. Will she stay with it, or will she be crushed by the steamrolling anchorwoman Haruka? And will Haruki be able to bring in the scoops to keep the network honchos happy that they brought her in from New York at a super high salary?

The third series was called Voice. It has hints of CSI but it isn’t really about deaths caused by criminal activity. Instead it centers on 5 med students who are in the forensic pathology field. Most of them aren’t thrilled by this field but that will change.

The lead actor believes that medicine ends with death. But as he and the other students will find out, medicine also applies to the dead. The so called ‘voices of the dead‘ is really the pathology and study of the tissues and relevant facts that caused the person to die in the 1st place.

Akiko Yada portrays Reiko. She’s not one of the students. Instead she’s one of the staff at the med school. She befriends the students and helps them along with their studies. It’s not much of a role, but Akiko looks good in a doctor’s white coat.

Akiko played a high school health teacher to Takashi Sorimachi’s Enzo the Art teacher in HOTMAN. Enzo is a family man in a big way. He’s raising a 5 year old girl who is his daughter as a solo parent. He also lives with his 2 sisters and twin brothers. And in effect he is serving as their father, while in truth he is their brother. They all had the same mother, but the brothers and sisters had different fathers.

Akiko gets involved through the school, and her relationship with with Enzo is not the main story. The main story is Enzo and the children. Still as I’ve mentioned before, Akiko is great to look at, and always seems to get a role that you can’t help but like her in.

The last and most popular of Akiko’s TV series was called Last Christmas. Produced in 2004 for the holiday season, the series was broadcast between October 11th and December 20th that year. Her co-star is Yuji Oda as Kenji. Both Kenji and Yuki (Akiko) are employed at a large sporting goods company, a Japanese version of Nike. Yuki is dating Kenji’s boss, while Kenji is concentrating on business.

You probably can guess where this will take us, but there’s plenty of side stories – two other couples including the busty MEGUMI and the gorgeous Nana Katase, round out the cast.

But this story is more than just a rom-com. There’s some decidedly dramatic parts to this series. Akiko Yada is certainly beautiful in her own right, in fact, men really go for her in this series. but there’s more to find out about her, much more than meets the eye at first.

While Yuki and Kenji are the central characters, Yuki’s role is much more complex.  My opinion was that this was indeed a holiday treat.

My conclusion is that Akiko Yada is an attractive as well as accomplished actress. I look forward to her return to TV dramas. By the way, a simple google search for each of these dramas will produce lots of links to English language subtitled dl’s.