Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

Before the crush of Winter quarter really takes over, we’ve been trying to finish watching “Ryusei no kizuna,” a Japanese television series originally broadcast on the TBS network in autumn ‘08 and rebroadcast here late last year on the TV Japan network. The original Japanese-language homepage for the series is here.

Based on a mystery novel by Higashino Keigo, the series won a number of Television Drama Academy Awards last year, including Best Drama. It’s a bit of an odd duck, a hybrid bricolage of every popular J-Drama genre. In the first episode it started out as a mystery, then spent several episodes as a con-game yarn in the mode of the J-Drama series Trick, and now (I’m up to episode seven of ten) it has morphed into the always popular romantic-tensions-among-attractive-young-people-who-live-together mode. The children of a restaurant owner sneak out one night to watch a meteor shower; when they return home they find their parents brutally murdered. Flash forward to fifteen years later: the grown children devote their lives to finding the true murderer and along the way realize that they aren’t actually blood relatives, setting in play unexpected romantic tensions.

The oddest touch of all is the appearance of singer Nakashima Mika in a recurring role. She plays a mysterious girl obsessed with the oldest brother in the family. Nakashima sings “Orion,” the show’s closing credits theme, and it’s not unusual for a musician performing a series’ theme song to make an appearance in it as an actor. After all, the role of the oldest brother here is played by Ninomiya Kazunari, a member of the idol band Arashi who provide the show’s opening theme, “Beautiful Days.”

What makes Nakashima’s appearance so striking is the strange role she plays. She shows up at the oddest moments, bearing in hand precisely what the main characters need at that point and accepting only one thousand yen (about ten dollars) in payment for her services. Whereupon she goes and throws herself into the ocean — literally. Moreover, in episode six, she breaks through the fourth wall of tv drama realism: the two brothers are having an argument outside on the street when the camera cuts to Nakashima sitting on a staircase inside. She is singing the closing theme, at times looking straight into the camera. No narrative explanation is given. When the quarreling brothers burst in on her at the end of the song, she tells them she couldn’t hear what they were arguing about because she was singing. For a brief moment, this very commercial series crosses over into the realm of surrealism.

It’s that time of year: when critics and others assemble their “best of” lists. For the first time ever, I’ve discovered my own name on one of them: the website for Public Radio International’s “The World” has included Natsume Soseki’s Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, which I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy, on its list of “World Books: International Reads for the Holidays.” I feel flattered, even if the author describes our book as “the nerdiest pick on my list.”

Over at the Japan Times, Mark Schilling has posted his best ten list of Japanese films from 2009. I haven’t seen a single one, alack. Meanwhile, over at the Daily Yomiuri, the erstwhile “Wm. Penn,” whose column I have been reading religiously for two decades now, gives us her picks for the best of 2009 Japanese television dramas.

Closer to home, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, picks the top rock albums of the year. Alex Ross of the New Yorker does the same for classical music recordings.

As for me, I’m just glad to be done with my grading. Now it’s time to plow ahead and try to finish that last unwritten chapter in my book on postwar popular music in Japan….

There’s a fascinating story (Japanese-language only) in the Tokyo Shinbun newspaper. It should give pause to the music industry and other intellectual property rights holders who are currently waging Holy Wars against their own consumer bases.

The Taiga Drama is one of Japan’s most successful television programs. Since 1963, each January the NHK network has launched another year-long weekly drama that takes up some incident from Japanese history and gives it the full-blown epic treatment. Broadcast on Sunday nights, the show is usually among the top-rated programs, and it has produced some of the most beloved television series of all time. As a result of its popularity, the satellite broadcasting network Jidaigeki Senmon Channel has begun rebroadcasting old entries from the series, to the delight of its viewers.

Unfortunately, because of the high cost of broadcast-quality videotape back in the day, NHK routinely used to recycle cassettes, recording over the master tape of episodes after they had been broadcast. As a result, many episodes from the first two decades of Taiga Drama are now lost. But the program is so popular that Jidaigeki Senmon Channel decided to rebroadcast episodes even from series that were no longer complete.

For example, they recently aired the 14 extant installments (out of an original total of 51) from the 1979 series, “Kusa Moeru,” based on the 12th century exploits of Minamoto Yoritomo and his clan. When those were broadcast, viewers contacted the network to let them know that they had home recordings of some of the missing episodes. The network followed up, and it turned out that one of the producers who worked on the program had also recorded a number of episodes for personal use. Eventually, NHK put out a call for tapes on its webpage and located yet another fan who had home-taped copies of 50 of the original 51 episodes.

As a result of all of this home-taping (back then the bête noire of the television and film industries, just as peer-to-peer file sharing is for today’s music industry), the full “Kusa Moeru” series has now been recovered and restored. The Jidaigeki Senmon Channel will broadcast it in its entirety starting early next year, and no doubt NHK will pursue other means of exploiting the treasure it has recovered–entirely thanks to fan copying.

It’s been a hectic week since last I posted here, which in large measure is why it’s been a week since last I posted here.

The week began on a high note (and on some low notes and some sweet in-between notes): we took in Dee Alexander’s terrific concert at the Chicago Cultural Center last Thursday night. She appeared with her all-string Evolution group (violin, cello, bass and special guest sitar) and was as usual resplendent. Her summoning up of the “ancestors” on “C U On the Other Side” was particularly memorable, as was a sing-like-talking number I hadn’t heard before, a biting revenge song that I’m guess is titled “It’s Over, Supernova.”

Over the weekend, I managed to score me a swine flu vaccine: I know a man who knows a man who…. I also started watching “Hissatsu Shigonin 2009,” the latest incarnation of the cheesy samurai tv drama I’ve loved since 1985. It features Fujita Makoto as the hen-pecked Nakamura-san, a low-ranking samurai who leads a secret band of superhero ninjas who defend justice in a corrupt world. Fujita’s getting on in years, though, so he is mostly reduced to cameo appearances this time around. The central role goes now to Higashiyama Noriyuki as Watanabe-san, another low-ranking samurai who gets no respect at home. Most excellent fun, and I’ve enjoyed introducing my 13-year-old to one of J-Drama’s guiltier pleasures.

I’ve also been watching the on-going sumo tournament in Fukouka, where the biggest scandal has been the banks of empty seats — even on the opening day.

The week will end on a high note: Ray Davies appears on the Letterman Show tonight. His West Coast concerts last weekend were greeted with ecstatic reviews. The show opens with an acoustic set, and then Ray is joined by full band. After intermission, a 29-piece choir comes on stage and they proceed to turn out stunning versions of some of Ray’s best compositions, including a suite of songs from the 1968 masterpiece, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.

In other words, Ray’s been having a good week. Hope you have, too. Let me leave you with video of Ray from San Francisco last week.

We’re currently halfway through watching the comedy series Seigi no mikata「正義の味方」, originally broadcast in summer 2008 on the NTV network and only now reaching these shores via the feet-dragging providers at TV Japan.

Originally based on a manga, like so many television dramas in Japan these days, it’s not the sort of show I would necessarily choose to watch on my own. But it makes a terrific series to share with my thirteen-year-old. The heroine is a hapless middle-school girl who spends her days tormented by her devilish older sister, who everything else believes to be an angel of mercy. The other reward in viewing it is to see the always wonderful Shida Mirai in the lead role, for which she won Best Actress at the 58th Television Drama Academy Awards.

The official website for the series (Japanese language only) is here, and there’s a good English language introduction here. The series’ opening sequence can be watched here, complete with English subtitles.

This evening I’ll be flying out to Berkeley to participate in a workshop tomorrow on Natsume Soseki. It will be my first visit to California in over a year; I can’t wait to feel the dry air when I get off the plane. In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying re-reading Soseki’s Sanshiro, the topic of our discussions tomorrow. We are all just stray sheep….

I’m certainly not an economist, but I was intrigued by this blog post by Jon Taplin I came across a couple of days ago. With a striking combination of hopefulness and pessimism, Taplin argues that the current global economic crisis could be the harbinger of a fundamental change in our basic living patterns, akin to what happened in the 1930s.

It seems to me that the American public has already made a shift to a culture in which spending at the mall will be a lot less important and yet the politicians are acting like their job is to restore the status quo ante–a world the public no longer cares about.

In the meanwhile, however, Japanese television carries on with its usual aplomb. We’re currently watching “Around 40,” last year’s hit drama starring the always terrific Amami Yuki. It’s the tale of a single female doctor nearing her fortieth birthday who increasingly feels her biological clock ticking and decides it may be time to get married. We’ve just finished watching NHK’s similarly themed “Konkatsu Rikatsu” (“Seeking Marriage, Seeking Divorce”), notable above all for the rather everyday quality it lent not only to marriage, but also divorce. Even Japan’s staid public broadcasting network is acknowledging that divorce is a fact of contemporary life, not an unthinkable trauma.

Neither series, however, is anywhere near remarkable as the new animated hit “Unko-san,” in which the leading characters are all turds–literally. According to the Pink Tentacles website, the show is a hit among teenagers in the Kansai area. For your viewing pleasure, here’s a sample, complete with subtitles. Don’t forget to flush when you are finished watching.