Akai shôgeki

This is the second of "Akai" series drama featuring Momoe Yamaguchi, and Tomokazu Miura.

Tomoko (Momoe Yamaguchi) is a 17 year old high school student. She's an Olympic grade short distance runner. She practices every day to win the gold. One morning while practicing, she meets Hideo (Tomokazu Miura) . He's a detective, and a former runner himself. He gives Tomoko few advise. Tomoko's father Gosuke is an entrepreneur with not so good of a reputation. This night, his past is about to catch up to him. Hideo was staking out Gosuke to prevent assassination attempt on him. In the heat of the moment, Hideo shoots Tomoko by accident. Tomoko becomes paraplegic due to her injury, but Tomoko was already falling in love with Hideo.

This series was popular in the '70s, and occasionally still finds air time on reruns attesting to its lasting popularity. The plot is somewhat over melodramatic, and people in the story are very pessimistic. This is similar to old school Korean drama in that everything in the story is geared to be a tear jerker.

Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura is great in this drama. They are stunningly beautiful, and you get to see the side of Yamaguchi not seen elsewhere. Together, they really carry the story. One of the better Japanese drama from the '70s, the program is recommended for viewing.

And the reason of the comparison I make is very simple: because the main problem of this series, like the one of that anime, is the typical 70's dated way of doing drama by going full throttle on emotional displays that results in the viewer doing the contrary of the intended reaction, meaning that the viewer gradually loses all the possible emotional investment because it's just too much to process. The various social commentary about the problems of the handicapped people also is really on your nose, with no subtetly to speak of, like are on your nose the attempts of this series at ridicolous product placements (the two episodes in the Okinawa Islands are a giant advertisement for Japan Airlines and the tourist routes they offered at the time) that I would have cut entirely from the show, since they padded out a ripetitive series already prolonged beyond its useful runtime with no reason to speak of (typical fetish of japanese TV producers of overproducing content for no reason other than doing it, thinking that more stuff in your eyes amounts to more content per se). On an interesting note, if you're a Toshiki Inoue fan like me by watching this series you'll see one of the possible inspirations in the writing of the Maestro (there's even a location reminescent of one present in Choujin Sentai Jetman), just without his ability to move you both in laughs and in tears and to make social commentary through the use of FAR more subtetly than the one on display here (I didn't cry once while watching this). Also, Momoe Yamaguchi is clearly a cutie and I'll keep on listening to her albums happily. Watch once for historical purposes and then move on something else. As usual, thank GEO9875 for his work on providing the subs for this series, this series might not have been the best watching experience ever but he deserves all the credits to bring to other people stuff it wouldn't be known in the first place outside the restricted japanese archipelago area. Check out his dreamwith blog if you want to give this and other Akai series a go.