Looking for show recommendations for NHKオンデマンド (NHK On Demand)

2 comments

1. “On demando”? Gosh… wa-i du ze-i ri-a-ri ni-do ni-hon-go i-fu ze-i ken te-i-ku e-we-ri-sin-gu fu-ro-mu ei-go?

2. I’m a big fan of マッサン. The plot is pretty simple so it should be easy to follow in that respect. It is a historical drama, so there are some characters who use dialect/antiquated speech patterns, but iirc it’s just a couple of side characters.

   It’s a fictionalized, but still pretty accurate, account of the founding of the Nikka whiskey company. Basically Japanese boy moves to Scotland to study whiskey making in the early 20th century. He falls in love with a local girl and they decide to marry and go back to Japan together, despite opposition from both their families so that he can fulfill his dream of opening up the first Scottish style distillery in Japan. The drama follows them as they return to Japan, specifically focusing on the wife and the trials, tribulations, and discrimination she faces. It has a real theme of accepting diversity and internationalization and standing up bigotry. The show inserts stories from real international couples before the credits at the end of each episode.

   My real pitch for this show is that the lead actress deserves an award because *she doesn’t speak a word of Japanese.* The role is almost entirely in Japanese and watching it, I initially assumed that they’d just gotten a Tokyo based bilingual white actress. I Googled it though an no, this girl is from like Arizona or some shit, had never been to Japan before filming and didn’t speak a word of Japanese. She learned all her lines phonetically. The cherry on top is that despite being American, and working on a show that will be viewed almost exclusively by monolingual Japanese people, she still went the extra mile to do a Scottish accent for her English lines. This woman deserves an award