Asian Beauty Appreciation

Yui Aragaki has finally achieved her first lead female role in a J-TV Series. After playing a series of high school sweeties, and ingenues, “Gakki’ has finally been tabbed for a starring role. The series is called Zenkai Girl or Full-Throttle Girl. As we meet her in the opening scenes, she has just graduated from law school and has landed a job at an international law firm.

Yui is cast as Wakaba Ayukawa, and she’s good at everything she does – she graduated at the top of her class, she’s multi-lingual, and she has what is takes to become an ace lawyer. Only her first assignment is to baby-sit her boss’s five year old daughter, who is five going on 30, or so it seems.

Wakaba is driven because as child she grew up in rather desperate circumstances – her father was in debt from gambling to the Yakuza loan-sharks.

Little Wakaba got them out from under this by studying and then filing a motion and getting a decree for Voluntary Bankruptcy. That set her on her path of wanting to be lawyer and for seeing anything that she took on to its finish. In her own personal lexicon, there was no such thing as not finishing anything to the best of her ability.

But she hadn’t counted on taking a smart-ass five year old girl to pre-school every day. However everything was not all bad. At the law firm every once in a while she got to do a project, or a report, or a translation of a law-brief, and people took notice of her skills. At the pre-school she ran into a single parent Dad whose step-son also attended this school. This was Ryo Nishido as Sota Yamada , a would-be chef.

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You might think, after hearing about a TV Series entitled The Bull Doctor, that the series would be about a veterinarian whose medical practice included bulls, cattle, and the like. You might think that the setting would be out in the American west, and you’d probably consider that the show would include some cowboys. If you thought any or all of the above, you’d be dead wrong – emphasis on the ‘dead’.

The Bull Doctor is a Japanese TV Series about forensic pathology – or the study of why a person or people have died. We have Makiko Esumi (below) in the lead role as Dr Tamami Oodate (Oodate Sensei). She’s just been asked back to the Joto University Hospital to work as a forensic doctor – in short conduct autopsies. The last time I watched Makiko in a role, she played a brilliant surgeon who had the worst luck in finding a guy to be with. That show was called The Love Revolution (produced in 2001 but I saw it just a few years ago. This one is her first appearance in a TV series since 2007. Welcome back. (Okari)

Also on hand is Satomi Ishihara (below). I’ve seen her in a high school baseball TV series called H2 (2005), as a nurse in the TV Series Ns’ Aoi (2006), as an athletic airline stewardess – sorry – cabin attendant/basketball player in The Flying Rabbits film (2008), as a high school teacher in the TV series Puzzle (2008), and one more – as a forensic medical student in the series Voice (2009). This time she’s a homicide detective working with forensic doctors. Go figure.

So what is this one about, besides the overview of forensics? Read more…

I’ve introduced you to many of the Japanese TV Series featuring the beautiful Meisa Kuroki. In virtually all of these she’s played either the lead female role in a romantic or romantic comedy, or a supporting role. She’s usually cast  because of her looks.

What would you say if I told you that Kuroki is in a J-TV series that is currently airing in which she plays a tough as nails lady cop. The full title of the series is: Jiu: Keishichou Tokushuhan Sousakei, but most are simply calling it Jiu.

As the series opens, Kuroki’s character is a member of the SIT (Special Investigative Team). She’s a loner, she repels all and any invitations of friendship from either colleagues or outsiders, at least in the first couple of episodes. She’s barely able to hold conversations with her colleagues; not because she is inarticulate, but because she doesn’t see the point of it.

By the end of the opening episode she has saved a female detective who had been asked to go into a hostage situation by posing as a delivery from a restaurant. Kuroki’s character – called Isaki Motoko, guns down the perpetrator before he can slit his own throat in an attempted suicide.

Isaki’s actions are noticed by the higher ups in the Tokyo police. But they don’t know what to do with her. Is she a loose cannon about to go off like a Dirty Harry. Is she a danger to her colleagues?

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Imagine this: After a long, tiring day at the office, you’re ready to go out for a couple of tall, cold, Kirin Beers with a few of your mates at work. However – they decline. Just then your wife calls. Can you come home right away? We have a problem. It’s serious. When you ask her is everyone okay, she says, Just come home right away. It’s very serious….

When you finally get home, all the lights are out. Tadaima! (I ‘m home!), you say but there’s no answer. When you turn on a lamp – your wife jumps out and says turn it off. You’re dumbstruck – you have no idea. What’s wrong?

She directs you to get a flashlight, and to take a look out in the courtyard. And it is out there, in your own courtyard, which is your enclosed back yard – a young girl lies dead in your back yard. Hello…!

Not quite the Okari (Welcome home) response you expected. This is how the latest entry from the producers of Shinzanmono which I reviewed last year here, begins. This time, the series has returned to the broadcast medium in the form of a 2 hour Special Movie. The title is Red Finger.

Hiroshi Abe returns as Detective Kyouchiro Kaga

Detective Kyoichiro Kaga, portrayed once again by the wonderful Hiroshi Abe, returns to TV. This SP is a prequel to the series and takes place two years earlier. Kaga is still a great detective. And the beautiful Meisa Kuroki is once again on hand as a local reporter Aoyama.

Meisa Kuroki as Ami Aoyama

As the DVD cover tells us – when Maehara returned home to find a corpse on his property, this average salary-man and his family, were looking at just the beginning of a tragic chain of events.

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Akari (Aki) Dojima, played by Yukie Nakama, is an illustrator, and the third daughter of Chairman Dojima, the head of a construction company. During her childhood, she had an accident which left her crippled and forced her to spend her life in a motorized wheelchair.

The sudden suicide of Akari’s father sets off a chain of events. Members of Dojima family gather and their servants are killed one after another and an investigation begins. After that, the body of their driver (Kitaro), who had hung himself, is found in the garage.

So there’s your set-up for the March 2011 release Gaze (aka Mesen) taken directly from the DVD box cover. I decided to watch this one because I’ve been a fan of Yukie Nakama for a long time.  She’s the cover girl , and the lead actress, but this is far from a glamorous role for her.

In fact even though we get a brief peek at her in a hot-springs (onsen) this made for TV movie is definitely short on glamor. This is not to say that the female actresses are unattractive. No, with certainty I can state that all of the three daughters are quite nice looking, as is the girl friend of one of the sons. She’s played by Misa Uehara. While I’m at it – let’s not forget the family housekeeper either.

Misa Uehara as the girl friend who is marrying into this family

The head of housekeeping

The eldest sister

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The Japanese Fall TV Drama Season was in full swing last month, and is now winding down at this time of the year. The Winter Season will soon begin. There are a number of shows currently being broadcast, or just recently concluded shows that featured some of Japan’s best actresses, former gravure idols, and women that are just beautiful. I’ll give you a few images from many of these shows with a small plot synopsis for each.

Face-Maker began on October 7th. It the story of Kirishima played by Masaru Nagai, , a skilled plastic surgeon. Before returning home to Japan, Kirishima was affiliated with the US Federal Witness Protection Program. Kirishima’s nickname is Face Maker. His practice helps those in need of an identity change as well as a need to look completely different. This doctor doesn’t work for cash. His payment for these surgeries is that he gets to keep someone’s previous face.

One such patient is the beautiful former gravure idol, Hiroko Sato, who has a featured double role in Episode Three. She first appears as one of the ‘before’ patients – Emiko Masubuchi.

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I’ve been following the career of a particular Japanese actress for a few years. Her name is Yuko Takeuchi. She was born on April 1st, 1980 so she’s 30 years old now. Her career in acting may have started before 1996, but that was the year she appeared in her first Japanese TV Drama Series which was called Saibougu. Her first film appearance was in 1998 in a film called Innocent World. Those were 14 and 12 years ago. I wasn’t able to find anything on Saibougu, but here is a clip from Yuko’s first film appearance.

http://s625.photobucket.com/albums/tt332/toyohara_fan/Video%20Clips/?action=view&current=InnocentWorld.mp4

From that beginning role, Yuko has gone on to win a number of awards for acting in both films and TV, so I thought I’d present a look back at Yuko on both the big screen and the small screen. From this point, I’m going to limit the presentations to those shows that I’ve actually seen. We will follow these chronologically so you so you get to watch as Yuko seemingly has grown more beautiful with the passing of years.

Lunch Queen Cover

In 2002, Yuko was the female lead in a TV series called Lunch no Joou or Lunch Queen. Yuko had top billing as Natsumi Nagita, a girl for who lunch was the highlight of the day. Through some rather unique circumstances, Natsumi ends up working at this restaurant called The Macaroni Kitchen. The restaurant was famous for it’s Rice Omellette with a demi-glaze sauce as shown in the image.

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The China Lover is the 2008 novel by Ian Buruma, a Dutchman  now living in New York and teaching at Bard College. I’ve included the novel as the introduction to this article because the book jackets cover art are really eye catching.

The subject of the novel, or maybe it should be called a historical-fiction book based on real life events, is Yoshiko Yamaguchi who was also known as Shirley Yamaguchi, Li Xianglan, and Ri Kouran. Yoshiko was born in Manchuria in 1920 to Japanese parents.

Following the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese had set up a puppet Manchurian government. By the late 1930′s, she’d grown into a very pretty and talented young woman who soon caught the eyes of the Japanese working there. Yamaguchi wanted more than anything else to be a singer and a movie star.  The Japanese believed they had struck gold with this talented young woman, because she was fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese. Her movie career began and her career seemed to be fast tracked. But there was a problem.

Yamaguchi, was asked to pose as a Chinese girl by her Japanese handlers. Though born in China, and raised in China, she was Japanese. She was even given a Chinese name, Li Xianglan, to attract the Chinese audiences.

The agent makes a pitch to the director

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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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