Underwear

Good to see content from Japan. Great production values.

I found the musical score intrusive and too 'on the nose'. Signaling what you should be feeling now in case you can't figure it out from the script - determination, inspiration, sadness etc. Lush, redundant and mostly saccharine. Especially that damn piano! Coincidentally just having rewatched The Birds which has no musical score at all. Wish there was a separate mute for the music.

Subtitles in yellow often lost on a light background.

A weirdly depopulated Ginza and too-blue sky over Tokyo. The distraction of anime-looking characters thanks to cosmetic surgery especially among the young actresses.

The melodramatic line readings and swelling music when someone said something like, I will make...bras that I like! The simpering overacting and fumbling by the doe Kiritani in the early episodes.

Male characters mostly emasculated or evil. What was up with the coffee guy? Poor schmuck.

Not crazy about the stereotypical work-life imbalance, would like to have seen some of the characters' lives outside of work.

Other than Kiritani, a great cast. In particular could watch Mao Daichi sew and drink coffee all day. Without music and maybe without that Anna Wintour haircut. Her 'regal bearing' is an inspiration, as is her enunciation which is great for students of the language.

This show (also named Atelier on Netflix) was recommended to me as I'm slowly improving my Japanese. The topic (fashion) seemed interesting to me so I started watching it and ended up falling in love with it. The characters are all pretty interesting. The story is well-written and delivered. And as a bonus, the type of conversations as well as the delivery is great for someone that's trying to learn the language like me. Highly recommend it!

Years ago there was a local PBS channel that was leased for Japanese broadcasts in its off-hours, and I saw so many great Japanese TV series. So I thought I'd check this out.

This silly show is about a young, eager woman who goes to work for a prickly lingerie fashion designer. The young woman is very passionate about textiles, and makes a number of speeches in the first episode about how wonderful some are, and the whole series portrays the creation of bras as this amazing, noble thing, and it's all rather odd.

Outside of the first meeting between the girl and her boss, who offers the wit and presence lacking from the rest of the series, there was nothing in the first episode that made me want to watch a second. It's not terrible, but it's a far cry from those series I saw in the 90s like Kagayaku Toki no Naka de or Furuhata Ninzaburō. I know there's good Japanese TV out there, but outside of anime it's hard to find.

My wife started watching this show, but I got hooked shorlty. I believe the values presentes in the script are one of its best features and production is very good. It really makes you appreciate the effort on lingerie creation.

I'm currently learning Japanese and the type of conversations taken on this show are perfect to get the feel of normal Japanese people (unlike anime) and tune the ear for the languaje. The respect and candor of the characters is just like many Japanese persons I met on a recent trip. Worth watching !

I found this to be unexpectedly interesting, and was seduced into almost binge watching it on Netflix. Who knew lingerie was a secret affirmation of a woman's essence. Well maybe you did, but I didn't. Many little esoteric philosophical droppings along the way in this otherwise enchanting little story about a girl in a high end lingerie shop. I was quite willing to forgive the lapses into sentimentality. The acting was uniformly excellent although the lead girl was perhaps provided with a somewhat banal and underwritten script. For a westerner it was a nice contrast to see the thought patterns of the Japanese, whose politeness seemed interwoven with surprising directness and honesty. No slang, clichés, double entendres, sleaziness even among the nasty corporate brutes encountered along the way. For me a refreshing change of pace. Highly recommended.