One of the reasons why I don't automatically dismiss low rated, barely watched, or seasonal filler for Japanese television drama is that I enjoy keeping an eye open for the young, emerging talent. One of the aspects of Drama World that has greatly surprised me ever since I took it up as a passion is how improbable it is that the industry continues to find such brilliant child actors. Maybe it's for this reason that young men and women tend to get overlooked as actors. If children can act so brilliantly, then why should we expect anything less from our young adults?
But of course not everyone can stand out (maybe even for that reason), and so when somebody does, you take notice. A person like Nikaido Fumi struck me right away as an unusually different kind of actor. I think like all those her age she was asked to play marginal, minor roles, at first. The 2013 drama WOMAN was not seasonal filler but an exceptional drama, maybe one of the best I have ever seen, and though the plot didn't revolve around Nikaido's character, she ended up greatly contributing to the drama's profound, emotional impact. Anyone who watched Nikaido in her early years had to have known that she was not one to be sidelined as an apprentice for long.
By the time I saw Nikaido again in the 2018 Taiga Drama SEGODON I did something I rarely do: I looked up the actor's interviews to see if I can learn a little something more about who this person is outside her profession. I mainly wanted to get a better sense for the source of power that we saw expressed in Nikaido's eyes, one that showed an unusually intense, passionate, and sensitive personality. In WOMAN, she played a lovely, yet isolated, creative type who was borderline suicidal. If all Nikaido brought to that drama was superior acting, as opposed to drawing on her own experience for the sake of acting, then all the more reason to admire her. But I suspected that the part Nikaido played for WOMAN, and whatever she is like in private, overlapped in a beautiful way. In the interviews I found her to be exceedingly modest, strangely so, as if her acting career hadn't fully prepared her for the public side of it. I am just an actor, she seemed to be saying; I am just doing my job. True, I thought, but whenever I watch a Nikaido Fumi role, I feel that I am not just observing an actor at work but a force of nature who is conveying to us some essential quality about the Japanese experience. And all this originating from someone initially cast to play minor roles.
I wouldn't say Imada Mio has fully developed her talent yet, it is clear that she still has a lot of work to do as an actor, but ever since she played an elite, mean-spirited, rich girl for the high school drama HANA NOCHI HARA~HANADA: NEXT SEASON (2018), and with such aplomb, it has been nearly impossible for me to take my eyes off her. The fashion world will often say of a great model that she has the "It" factor. But no one in the fashion world ever takes the time to explain what that "It" is, probably because few people have the rhetorical power and literary skills to articulate what "hot" or "cool" or "fashionable" is. I like it, I don't like it, she's hot, she's not, is usually about the extent of how we try and explain our tastes. "We know it when we see it" is another lazy explanation for describing our "It" girl too, which sounds to me like an evasion for not knowing what one is looking for in the first place.
I was thrilled when Imada was chosen to play a key role in the 2020 HANZAWA NAOKI single spinoff episode, and then felt hugely disappointed when she was given a very minor role for the full drama which the spinoff teased. While every character portrayed in the banking, financial, and tech industries HANZAWA featured looked hyper ambitious and serious, Imada stood aside with her big beautiful eyes seemingly amused by it all. I thought that was a nice touch, especially for the way the producers decided to employ Imada's youth as a neutral observer. Though she wasn't given a major role for the Second Season of HANZAWA, as with Nikaido Fumi, the world of Japanese drama had to have known by that point that it couldn't hold Imada down for long.
I feel like I'm watching a similar process take place with Sakurai Hinako; like her two predecessors, she deserves a special place in the world of Japanese drama. Over the past month I've seen three of her dramas back to back to back. None of them were earth-shattering, but Sakurai as a young actress shows great potential. She stands apart from other actresses her age by showing an ability to portray a variety of acting styles, even within the same drama. One drama I watched, the 2020 FURO GIRL, was a whimsical comedy, to which she brought an underplayed, largely monotone, comic touch. The other, the 2019 JANUS NO KAGAMI, was a psychologically challenging story, which required her to sit still and play soft-spoken, pathologically timid, gentle and sweet; next, to roaming the nightlife district playing sort of a bitch. During the school day, remove the classroom structure from the girl and she is at a loss for how to conduct herself; at night, among the lowlifes, rebels, and creeps, she walks languidly among the drunks as if she has seen it all. Both sides to the character, a dual personality that alarmed everyone around her, was meant to represent a girl's extremes of personality, the two different paths in life a girl might take, but Sakurai was able to make both sides to her character look appealing, such that I came to the conclusion that she is able to show her humanity (and not merely act) no matter the role she is asked to play.
But JANUS NO KAGAMI was a difficult drama to watch because the grandmother, suspecting not a dual personality but a girl trading in nothing but lies, beats her mercilessly and relentlessly. Not brutally with fists, but smacking her around by right as if the girl is worthless. It being manga-based material, the atmosphere clues us into the fact that none of this is really meant to be based on reality, so the beatings exist in a "for example" part of the world just so that some added drama can be layered onto the story. Sakurai's character, called Hiromi by day, Yumi by night, couldn't reconcile these two sides to her personality, and because the switching of her dual personality happened without her even being aware of it, it made it difficult for her to adjust herself to her various social roles.
Sakurai played Yumi, the bad side to the girl, as non-expressive and droll, when sauntering around at night, resourceful, Machiavellian, even, a loner, afraid of no one. The grandmother, picking up evidence that Hiromi was degrading herself by roaming the nightlife district secretly, saw lies that the girl didn't even know she was committing, but for the grandmother, having her authority questioned was too much to take, and so she smacks the girl around. Maybe I am showing my bias, but I happened to like both sides to the girl, the sweet and the shady, but seeing the sweet side to the girl getting beat by the grandmother bothered me a lot more than the horror of seeing a good girl falling off the middle class career path by learning her social chops in the sketchy nightlife district that can be found in any major city. Though the violence wasn't meant to be taken seriously, Sakurai had portrayed the good girl side to her character so convincingly that I found the beatings hard to watch.
The story JANUS NO KAGAMI was originally broadcast on television in late 1985, early 1986. It's worth noting that the television industry felt this story needed to be remade for the year 2019. It's a version of a modern-day fairy tale, complete with the character of a cruel grandmother. It represents the two paths any girl might take, even today. As a fairy tale, the story is as psychologically rich as any of the folkloric fairy tales of the distant part. Any girl feels the tug between being good and cruel, but what is leftover in the middle? The story needed to sensationalize any girl's basic morality by giving Sakurai's a split personality. This means to suggest that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a modern girl to reconcile these two competing forces within.
The other way to interpret the story is that the good girl and the rebellious one are both fictions imposed on a girl from without, such that it makes it impossible for any girl to find her true value as an individual with these archetypes being forced upon her. That's weighty content for a drama that was relegated to the lower tier of production. Sakurai was certainly presented with a difficult role, asked to portray psychologically complex material that few women in their early twenties can ever fully grasp, but I feel she grasped the complexity and shone brilliantly. I cannot say that JANUS NO KAGAMI rose above its lower tier rank, but Sakurai's performance was, without question, exceptional.
There are any number of clips I could show to demonstrate Sakurai's talent. The following is not one of them. I choose to share it because I liked the interaction between Yumi, the shady side to the girl's personality, and Tatsuya, one of the fools she meets in the nightlife district. He is entertaining here, because his big hope is to get to see Yumi again the following night. When she assents, with barely any enthusiasm, he gives a gut-pose (a fist-pump) that's one for the ages. I have rewound this scene repeatedly just to watch the way Shiono Akihisa unspools his wiry body, thrilled at his success for having won the girl.
Fascinatingly, Shiono's Tatsuya is a lot more interesting when he didn't realize that Yumi had a good girl side to her personality. He's freer, more at ease, spontaneous, always with something amusing to say when he sees her as hot, troubled, and alienated from her school and society. But once the good girl side to Yumi's character emerges in his own consciousness he becomes cautious, sentimental, guarded in his speech, deeply confused, whether in love or not it is hard to say, and frankly pretty boring too. Yes, he becomes just another earnest young man desperately seeking validation for doing the right thing. The more I think about it, this was a very good drama. Psychologically, it gets many things right about young men and women. It went off the rails a bit toward the end, which is why I cannot be overly enthusiastic about it, but overall it made an impact on me.
As for FURO GIRL, Sakurai was given almost no script to work with. And practically no other actors to work with too—literally, the cast is less than half a dozen. It was as if the world of Japanese drama said to this young, promising talent, "Okay, you're on your own. Let's see what you can do."
Sakurai's "Furo girl" Sayoko does little more than prepare a special bath she takes every day while living in a two-floor, unimpressive apartment complex. At times it looks like Sayoko's desire to come up with new ways for creating exotic environments for her baths borders on the obsessive. And the drama makes it look like bathing is all that this unusual young woman has on her mind. She has a ditzy, not very self-aware girlfriend who wants to talk about boy issues in a giddy, cheerful, tedious way. What's so striking about this friendship is one wonders how these two women ever learned to tolerate one another. Sayoko strikes me as a young woman who would never need a friend to answer the question, "Should I call him back or should I make him wait?" She would rely on her own judgment, and if that didn't work out, move on to something that actually interests her. It was this quality that made me want to know more about Sayoko outside of her innovations regarding a bath.
But Sayoko's odd, rather excessive interest in creating original atmospheres for her baths really isn't about an obsession. What it does show is a young person developing a love for a subject before she's even aware that she's pursuing it as an art form. The idea that taking a bath is as an art form is not so far-fetched when we consider that this is the same culture that has turned drinking tea or enjoying the fragrance of incense into art forms too.
FURO GIRL barely developed a story. It looked more like it belonged as a feature on a television variety show. It's a kind of drama that's main purpose is to express a certain style. We get a sense for that style here as Sayoko fails? succeeds? at speaking with a young man whose deep knowledge about baths matches her own. The drama's style here might seem a little odd, but the scene is not meant to show the young man as he actually is, but only to refract him through the eyes of Sayoko.
Yes, as this scene shows, Sayoko just might come off as no more than a harmless, overzealous nerd. But I like the tone Sakurai sets. If Sayoko is odd, socially isolated beyond endurance, Sakurai doesn't play her as pathetic, needy, overly sensitive or easily hurt. When the annoying girlfriend wishes to discuss boy issues, Sayoko shows that she has no interest in the matter in the kindliest way possible; she also looks like she has heard it all before. Her commitment to developing exotic bathing atmospheres shows a kind of resourcefulness that most young people don't have. The scene shows that she is not very skilled at seducing a young man because she is controlled by her enthusiasm. It makes her look socially awkward, but I find it a charming quality to have. If she has a crush on this young man, she may appear too eager about it, but I suspect her enthusiasm originates from the fact that the art form he and she enjoys isn't as odd as society tells them it is. But it's hard to come to any conclusions about this young man, because all we're really seeing is Sayoko's projections onto him.
I wish Sayoko had been given a better drama so that we could see her ups and downs in a larger context than through an interior monologue. FURO GIRL didn't quite hold my interest, but in terms of its dramatization for how a young woman might develop her style and craft, this was a surprisingly fascinating one to watch. It worked, to the extent it did, mainly because Sakurai made it work.
I wonder if Sakurai will receive the backing from the television industry that we feel she deserves? In reading a few comment threads based out of Japan I see that she has a number of admirers, but that we are unhappy to see that she is still largely unnoticed. The industry is employing her, but that's not enough. I have a bad feeling that Sakurai won't receive the kind of backing that Nikaido Fumi or Imada Mio have received for their careers. I hope the industry knows what it is doing. If I were an industry head I would turn Sakurai into becoming the next Kinami Haruka. They already share many of the same characteristics. They can play intelligent, deep and penetrating roles when asked, but really they should be working comedy, for they both have a type of character that has a knack for either mischief or humor. What makes them act this way? I have known the type, and my feeling is that these are the kinds of women who seem to know more about us than we do ourselves. That's what makes Shakespeare so hilarious, and I wouldn't put it past women like Sakurai or Kinami that their sensibilities run as deep. Poke holes in our self-importance, ladies! We could use the laughs.
[Photograph: Publicity shot for ふろがーる！FURO GIRL!, featuring 桜井日奈子 Sakurai Hinako.]
Scripts
ヤヌスの鏡 Janus no Kagami, from Ep. 2
(Note Tatsuya's use of the word オール. It means "pulling an all-nighter.")
Tatsuya: 勝手にかえんなよな そうだ クラブ行こうぜ クラブ
Yumi: 今何時？
Tatsuya: また？ お前ケータイ持ってねえのかよ
９時２０分 おい かえんのかよ まだはえーじゃん
Yumi: 明日多分 １０時過ぎに来る
Tatsuya: まじで じゃあオールすっか 待ってるからな
ふろがーる！Furo Girl!, from Ep.3
Sayoko:《どうしたことだ｡ さっきから心臓が炭酸発泡入浴剤の泡なみに弾けている｡
まさか私が 殿方に？ いや違う そうだ ｻｳﾅだ｡
私は ｻｳﾅにときめいているのだ》