Five people, all twenty-somethings, are active in the workplace as well as members of the digital world. Somehow, via Twitter, or some other social network which they’ve used to communicate, they ultimately agree to meet. This is how the 11 week Japanese TV series called Sunao ni Narenakute begins. I’m not sure what the title actually means – but the tag-line of the series is - It’s hard to say I love you, and that is a pretty good description about what will follow.
Basically, over the life of the series, which ran this year from mid-April through June 24th, we will learn some in depth info about the five lead characters. We watch as they struggle with their problems like: their aversion to commitments, their lack of confidence, their unwillingness to either express the truth or to face it.
If that sounds kind of grim and disturbing to you, you can rest assured that the series is not completely or only about bumps in the road, it only seems that way. The cast is youthful, attractive, and their problems/issues are not too remote for most of us to identify with or relate to. As they’ve agreed to meet for the first time in the opening Episode, I’ll give you a little thumbnail sketch about each of them to help you decide if you’d like to watch this series.
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Shinzanmono is a Japanese TV Series that just ended its run last Sunday night, June 20th. Broadcast on Japan’s TBS Network, this show was definitely prime time as it aired on Sunday nights at 9:00 PM. The 10 episodes of the series can most simply be described as a detective story. The crime was a murder, and it took place in the Ningyo-cho neighborhood of Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Of course the series was shot in the very neighborhood being portrayed.
I think shinzanmono means something along the lines of ‘new neighborhood people or person’, which is what Detective Kaga Kyoichiro is in Ningyo-cho. Kaga was just tranferred to the Nihonbashi precinct, is placed in charge of the case. With virtually all of the residents of the neighborhood’s main shopping street, harboring one secret or another, they will all emerge as suspects, Detective Kaga must use his keen sense of deductive reasoning to uncover the truth about these people as well as solve the case..
Much of that is from the synopsis provided on the d-addicts.com website. But it really doesn’t do the series justice. Calling it a detective show is truly an over-simplification. Unlike American detective shows where the detective solves a new crime each week, this series focuses on just the one case. We, much like Detective Kaga, are in the dark. Though we witnessed the murder in the opening episode, and have seen snippets of it, in flashbacks, in every episode that followed, we still have no idea. This is a literal, “Who done it?”
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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.
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Real Clothes was a Japanese TV Drama series that played last fall. Starting on October 13th, its last episode aired on December 22nd, a few days before Christmas, and just a little more than two months ago. The DVD will be released in the middle of next week on March 3rd. Simply described, the story has everything you ever wanted to know about high fashion, or to be more exact – it is about selling high fashion which is really the selling of dreams. If they had a tag-line, it might have been, To be your best, you have to look your best.
Karina has the lead role and is just one of many Japanese beauties lighting up the screen in this 11 episode series. She does a superb job as Kinue Amano, a girl who was doing quite well selling bedding in the fictional top of the market Echizenya Department Store in Tokyo. Then one day she finds she’s been transferred to the Women’s Clothing Department.
Karina as Kinue Amano, looking like a plain Jane in Episode 1. This scene is in Paris where the series begins.
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Dance Subaru is not an animated cartoon about dancing Japanese cars. It is a 2009 film about one girl’s climb into the world of ballet; a place where deception, lies, back-stabbing, and using people to get ahead are considered the norm.
Subaru Miyamoto is played by the beautiful and talented Meisa Kuroki. As is usually done in the movies – to achieve success one has to have previously suffered. Subaru and her twin brother Kazuma are introduced to ballet at an early age by their Mom who soon passes away because of a cancerous brain tumor. But not before ballet had taken hold in the children.
The kids loved ballet and shared a dream about becoming ballet dancers. They could be seen in the street practicing some classical dance movements from Swan Lake. However their conservative father discouraged them, But again, death intervenes. Kazuma dies at the age of 10 from a brain tumor, just like his Mother. Read more…
Ai No Uta (aka Love Song) begins with a despondent woman telling us how she was an unwanted child. We are told that her mother did as much as she could to prove that theory again and again – including making her 7 year old daughter hide in a closet while she entertained male guests.
She is shunned by other children at school, is given stale bread to take to school for lunch, and her birthday or Christmas were ignored by her Mom. At one point, while still as a child, she had attempted to run away. She tried to live in a cardboard box nearby. When she was driven back home by severe rainstorms, and hunger, her mother greeted her with an indifferent, “Oh you’re back? Didn’t you run away?”
We learn just about all of this in voice-overs and flashbacks in the first 7 minutes or so of this TV series. This child, named Yoko Matsuda, and played as an adult by TV actress Miho Kanno, grew up to be a woman who lacked both friends and family. She was totally lacking in any kind of happiness at all. So we are not surprised when she, after giving up all hope, decides to take her life by jumping off a bridge in Tokyo. She climbs up on the railing and jumps off. All that remains are her shoes. Roll intro.
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Ordinary Miracle is a story about two people who meet by chance on a train platform. They’re total strangers and unrelated to each other in any way other than both are coming or going either from or to their work while passing through this one station.
The event that caused them to meet was anything but romantic. On their own, they each consider or think that a third person, a man standing by himself at the far end of the train platform, may be going to take his own life by leaping in front of an oncoming train.
Independently they watch him, and as the train approaches, this man edges toward the side of the platform of the oncoming train. They spring into action and barely pull this man back to safety from a sure death by punching him and wrestling him down to the platform’s surface.. Read more…
Lost in Beijing (Ping guo) is a 2007 film directed by Yu Li about two financially opposite couples entwined in a greedy and selfish dispute over a yet-to-be-born child.
The film has been steeped in controversy due to the realistic tone and with its roots in a censor-heavy China.
Trouble started even before its premiere with Chinese censors demanding multiple cuts of the sex and gambling portrayed as well as scenes in slum-like settings. And despite the film acquiring international distribution, it still had problems being released in its own country. Read more…
I guess I saw Koyuki for the 1st of many times in The Last Samurai (2003). She had a key-role in the film as Taka, the widow of a warrior slain by Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise). In her role she spoke only Japanese, but it was her ethereal beauty, and her soulful eyes that captured my attention.
I’ve since watched this film again and again. The reality is that Koyuki was so mesmerizing, that I’ve wanted to see her in other roles. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to see Koyuki in a good number of Television drama series. Read more…
Lust, Caution (Se, jie) is a 2007 film directed by Ang Lee based off a story by Eileen Chang. The setting is 1930-40s China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
It stars Wei Tang as the foolhardy young student Wong Chia Chi who poses undercover as Mak Tai Tai in a resistance effort to assassinate Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a high-ranking official of the Wang Jinwei Regime. Read more…
