This is up there on the peculiar list

This has got to be one of the most peculiar J-Drama I've seen in awhile; It doesn't seem traditionally structured like a normal 4ep drama would be (eg. Friends 2002) but it also isn't avant garde enough for it to get a pass, it just seems like a indie film project that was for some reason split up into 4 episodes instead of just a movie.
The plot itself seems strange. Because I am no where near fluent in Japanese, the more minor nuances of the story were more or less missed at first, but I managed to somewhat get it in the end: ML suspects his girlfriend of cheating, and in typical liberal arts student fashion, he begins something unexpected in response, a documentary of the timeline. Despite it being only 4 episodes long, 23 minutes each, there is a lot of jumping back to the past when they first met and present day, though from all I could tell, most of the past is just his good memories and completely irrelevant to the story (kinda annoying when they could take up 1/3rd+ of the episode). Characters were written in attempt to be deep/thought provoking I feel, but failed. FL just seems manipulative and ML a naive pushover (which was practically pointed out by the tritagonist in ep4).
Technical aspects were good, think I'm gonna stop pointing out how 'good' newer J-Drama are at lighting and all that since that seems uniform in all of them.
Acting I personally think was alright, seemed again like an amateur film project so picking actresses and actors with little experience fit it (not saying they were bad, they all did very well)

Overall I recommend this to people doing Japanese immersion, otherwise don't bother

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Good for Japanese immersion, bad for entertainment.

Saying this without meaning anything negative, I usually have pretty low standards for modern J-Drama, that is because from what I find, they are ALWAYS poorly made in many categories, including story, but still manage to be logical enough and/or funny enough for me to enjoy it (ex. NekoKare, Super no Kago, etc.), this one couldn't manage even that.

Inu to Kuzu is a short drama that by going off of purely the description: appears to be about adultery between a man and his best friends wife.
This is partially true, the part about a "relationship" between the wife and man, not the adultery because the friend is dead! (Wow big spoiler, it plays a very minor part in the story who cares).
The true story is that there is none, I'm writing this on episode 7 and I STILL don't know, ML and his past with the friend and wife get established and that's it, suddenly they're living together too Yada Yada Yada FL is apparently pregnant, ML lost a VERY SPECIFIC part of his memory in an unimaginable way (and managed to not have any hints in his mind about leading up and from it, very convenient) yeah you get the point.
If anything we can sort of see the story build in ep7, as they introduce an important character for the very first time 💀.
Everything in the story reeks plot convenience too, like a little bit here and there is good, yk to get the ball rolling, but how on God's green earth can you have 90% of every happening in this show be so coincidental (I will not list them because that would go on forever, but some are FL and ML's first encounter, FLs wealth, the crazy Yandere happening to work at ML's work, etc.) Like I'd first believe Densha Otoko being a true story than people thinning this drama was realistic 😭
I won't speak more about the story because I've practically spoiled all of it.

Beyond that, everything was pretty good, Acting was really good, surprised the FL is a year older than me but so good at acting already, others were alright too, ML was so pushoverlike (his character) that I genuinely disliked him. The friend was the only really bad character, not from acting but because they purposely wrote him to be so dislikable that it's obvious he's supposed to be the villain.

Technical aspects were great, lighting, sound, cinematography, etc. All on point.


TL;DR skip this crap, watch only for Japanese immersion as even though I disliked it, I understood 85% of the Japanese (wirh subtitles), usually it would be less for bad content.

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Perfect, Until the End

Prefacing this by saying that I watched this with 0 subs of anykind, though I was able to understand ~70% of the words alone (intuition fills the gaps).

Star no Koi was genuinely an amazing watch, a true diamond in the rough, nearly everything about it was unique about it for the time and even now (especially the camera work, very similar to IWGP) and was on track to getting a 9.5 (10 is reserved in my rating scheme) all the way until the final ~4 episodes.

The story was genuinely interesting through and through, I REALLY liked how Sosuke's work life wasn't immediately cast to the background in favour of the more "special" person (we see this all the time, the higher profile person gets more screen time for their profession, which in turn makes it less "special") and despite it being so average of a job, it was genuinely interesting, same can be said for his workmates who had depth.
This isn't to say Hikaruko's work lacked depth, her profession was equally televised and people like her bodyguard had good character depth.
The thing that immediately caught my eye though was the camera work. Out of all the J-Drama and other Asian dramas I've seen, only ONE, has had a similar out of the ordinary camera work (previously mentioned IWGP) that really added life and uniqueness to the entire experience.

Now for the thing I disliked: the unexplained drama. As far as I know this could be just a discrepancy in my Japanese knowledge, but I really doubt that. First we have the mandatory love triangle, in anime I'm fine with that, not live action, partly because it's more unrealistic, but mainly because it's hardly done right, and this is no exception. Tsubomi all of a sudden fears competition and decides to really pursuit Sosuke after being in the company for x amount of years, yeah ok, and naturally of course she has to state the obvious that suddenly makes the ML reconsider and allow the way for more drama to ensue. Because I'm so used to this trope by now it alone doesn't bother me, but this time it did because of the fact that Sosuke SITS on that fact and misses signals that are more blinding than staring at a solar eclipse, and when practically confronted with it, he somehow manages to gaslight himself into believing otherwise. Doing this made it so painfully obvious they had to pad for time, especially considering this all occurred 2 episodes before the finale. Update after finishing the show: Yeah got even more annoying in the final 2 episodes, because both reasons are related to the climax I won't spoil it, but this one more happening alone dropped its score even more.

Regardless of that, I still think this is a 8.5, the technical aspects of the show saved it (music, top tier acting, camera work, etc.) Along with my general interest in it prior to the final arc and the genuinely funny comedic moments throughout.
If you can understand Japanese then I 100% recommend this show to you.

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Not the best, but still entertaining

prefacing this by saying that out of the 6 episodes, I properly watched 1-4, and 6.

Going into this drama knowing it was only 6 episodes, I wasn't expecting much, and I got exactly that. Though, I will say that it still managed to disappoint me.
The story started off rather promising if I'm being honest; the leads meet, and they create an app, so naturally I thought that app would end up being the focus of the show with the drama stemming off from that, but I was wrong.
maybe 2-3 episodes in, the whole app concept thing is practically left in the dust as it now focuses on some murder and other relationships that didn't nearly have enough backstory for it to justify their significant presence.
I won't go into much detail as to what else made me annoyed as that would spoil too much, but to summarise, 8/10 situations could have been solved using common sense and survival instincts.

Acting was alright, I've only seen 2 other T-Dramas prior so I don't have the right to judge much, but it did feel exaggerated at times.
minor elements such as cinematography and sound we're all good, J-Drama has something to learn from them haha.

TL;DR it's an alright show for killing time.

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Love knows no bounds.

What a rare spectacle it is seeing a J-Drama so far removed from the norm; a short story about the chance encounter and eventual love between a Japanese and a Korean despite neither knowing the other's language (nor a common ground language such as English).
I relate somewhat personally to this drama as it reminds me of how my parents met (Mom is Canadian, dad is Swedish, email pen pals for the longest time before meeting) so seeing all this in a drama format was really nice.
As I mentioned above, this is a very rare format, I've hardly seen any J-Drama where they leave Japan, let alone have true foreign actors/actresses (meaning not speaking Japanese), it as genuinely really cool to see this drama share practically half of it's screen time with a Korean setting and a Korean cast (who many of you probably know are all rather famous themselves). I like the themes presented in the show too, really gave me a proper grasp on just how bad the Korean Economy was at the time compared to the also poorly performing Japanese (I won't over explain any of it but yes I know the Japanese were MUCH better off still) along with the still present cultural resentment towards the Japanese.
I enjoyed the acting very much, I found the way Tomoko and Ji Hoon communicated through the language barrier very realistic and rather sweet at times.

Overall a very good short drama, I recommend this to absolutely everyone (especially Japanese learners, for obvious reasons, Tomoko uses pretty easy to understand Japanese most of the time)

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Easy Watch

TL;DR for those who watched S1 or like the manga: Same kind of comedic adventures as S1, much more comedic than the Manga. Also has an original ending (source is ongoing).

Takane no Hana San 2 is a continuation of the prior season just this time following the gang through their HOP project and other trials.
Can't really say much about the story beyond that, it's just a good comfort watch haha.

Characters are the same, all funny with their own quirks.
Audio is still anime like, and if you don't know what I possibly mean, it's the overuse of sound effects. Not a bad thing considering the story, just very out of the J-Drama norm haha.

Overall, heartwarming. Despite there being no JP subtitles, I recommend this to Japanese learners, the language used is easy enough for pure raw.

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The worst definition of episodic

Just gonna preface this and say I watched 11 of the episodes in a row, then GAVE UP for like an entire month until I got to 12. I wrote 99.9% of this review after ep9 though so it's not based on fuzzy memory.

Being straight up, I was naive thinking this, a non shounen manga origin, would actually focus on motorbikes for more than 2 seconds, but I would have liked for it to be AT LEAST more of an element than throwing everything else at us.
To say this straight up, I lost 70% of interest by episode 6, not because of them seemingly always throwing some random seemingly heavy topic at us then IMMEDIETLY forgetting about it, no, but because the ML was cringe lmao. Like ofc I know Japanese guys aren't that flaky irl, but gawd damn this is challenging my knowledge and confidence haha.
Anyways story was crap, like I said earlier they literally glossed over every single important sounding event in 20 minutes or somehow wrote it in a way that made it sound like something would happen, but nothing happens. Like one episode we meet the FL's new boss, awkward guy, he did give 'incel' vibes at first but whatever yk maybe he's just really awkward. 3 minutes before the end of the episode another character comes in and tells everyone he's a serial peeper/molester and was arrested after they found hard drives filled with it, literally haven't heard anything since about it, this happens EVERY EPISODE.
Characters are lackluster. yk what I feel about the ML already but the FL is no better, she seems like a 'yes man' type of character, just somehow actually doesn't mind "hey I know I just met you 3 days ago and I know I'm your boss that you dislike but can I perhaps have sex with you?" "yeah sure why not" (exaggerated interaction she had with her boss) so sad. every other character is 100% forgettable. And that really sucks because the ML and FL performers are really good, I hope they get cast for better roles in the near future.

TL;DR unless you're like me and watching stuff for Japanese immersion, avoid this, literally nothing is good about it.

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ML's actor ruined it

The premise was interesting, but as soon as I saw the ML's real age, I knew literally nothing substantial would come of this show.
If you're reading this review, you've probably read the synopsis, so I won't repeat it. Nekokare is, I suppose, what you could call a guilty pleasure, or at least in premise. In execution, it's just boring puppy love because everything is being legally limited by one factor: the ML's real age. (He was born in 2007, so he was 16 during filming.)

Now, I won't delve into the political/ethical issues this story presents. If you can learn to separate reality from fiction, you can get a pretty good story out of it. Look at Chūgakusei Nikki. for example. The main tween that and this show, though, is that the ML in that show WAS of age during filming, while this one isn't. Considering it's a ROMANCE drama with a 30-year-old year old FL, it closes practically every single door of opportunity. So, all we the viewers are left with is an attractive face and a very awkward viewing experience. literally should have just picked an actor from like 2005. and I bet you it would have been a much better romance.

Anyway, besides that KILLING the show, the story itself was actually kinda bad bad, haha. These kinds of large age gap dramas usually only when both characters (mainly the older one) are troubled people, We see this in Kōkō Kyōshi and Chūgakusei Nikki. But here, the FL has NOTHING WRONG with her life. Even the ML's problems are extremely minor, so for them to actually develop mutual feelings doesn't feel right.

The acting was alright, no one stood out as great, though the ML was particularly annoying. Maybe it's because he's still rather new in the industry, or maybe it's just how they wrote his character. But I swear he had the same annoyed/depressed demeanor the ENTIRE SHOW. I don't want to get canceled, so all I'll just say is that he looks and acts like a pushover, kinda of annoying.

From a technical standpoint, everything was up to mrn J-Drama standards: really strange colour grading, generally good lighting, good cinematography, decent music, etc.

Overall, it's not worth it. I would only recommend this show if you want to learn Japanese.

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decent time killer but nothing more

This was an alright show, nothing special about it besides the one glaringly obvious rarity (a black guy who speaks good Japanese as a main character lol).
Being 10 episodes at 45min each it was on the more average side of length, though typical with these kind of dream, the perceived length varied between episodes; some felt like 20min while others 70+ though thankfully it wasn't an increasing trend and only happened with like 3 random episodes in the show.
The story itself is obviously episodic and usually easily predictable, just thankfully there isnt any unnecessary drama thrown in. the background blot with that lead's girlfriend doesn't really show itself until the end, it was alright but again nothing to write home about.
From a technical standpoint everything was good, lighting did look washed out at times leading me to think they forgot to actually EDIT the raw footage in post 💀 but it's probably just a (bad) style. Acting is decent, what I'd expect from a drama of this caliber especially from the black guy (the japanese usually suck ass at writing foreigners ive noticed lol) also the dialouge at times was odd sounding, like the japanese was normal (im like around n3 but from what i can tell for sure is that they dont speak casual enough) but holy shit the English, you guys LITERALLY HAD A NATIVE ON SET have him proof the script, that scene in ep9 was WAAYY too hard to watch. Everything else was, you guessed it, average.

Anyways it's an alright timekiller, I watched it with Japanese subs so idk if English ones exist.

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Everyone has their reasons, but everyone has a reason.

In our world, every single human being, whether they be a newborn or someone in hospice, has their own story and reasons as to why they are in that position. But one thing is certain: all of us will find our purpose somewhere along our journey through life.

This drama, although rather short, tells us viewers the entire story of Masaharu's rather unfortunate-seeming life, along with the evolving lives of his extended family living with him. Without spoiling much, we see Masaharu go from a complete recluse to a functioning member of society who finally feels like he has meaning in life after he is exposed to and forced to deal with situations concerning his past, others' futures, or others. And although he is the main character, we do see similar developments in some of the other leads (again, I don't want to spoil much, so I won't say).

I find this style of storytelling amazing: a realistic plot with realistic characters and situations. Nothing is blown out of proportion for "drama," and no obvious plot devices are used—not even the addition of music to induce emotion is used often. All they relied on was the camerawork, acting, and story itself, which is absolutely beautiful.

From a more technical aspect, I can say that literally everything was perfect: cinematography, lighting, sound, etc. They even managed to include the rather unique element of a cross-sectional house set into the story without it feeling out of place or useless.

This J-Drama is rather peculiar to me because I'm neither used to this genre nor this level of production quality with J-Drama. Honestly, I think this surpassed many of the K-Dramas I've seen too!

Anyway, you already know I have to give this a 10/10. It's also now #2 on my list of favorite dramas—both incredible feats.
I highly recommend this to absolutely everyone.

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This sucks

This is possibly the only TV show in general that I've ever written and published a review for before finishing it but this show is just so hard to watch that I gotta take a break from watching (Not dropping, just it will take a while to finish, I will update the review when I do) but I need to get my words out there before I completely forget.
No need to summarise this show, read the synopsis and you'll understand (I'm probably stupid but I thought it was based off a real account, it isn't lol). Going into this I knew it would annoy me to some extent, but I figured Kazuma (ML) would get revenge, have development, or just something good would happen to him, but no, out of the 5 episodes I've seen Kazuma literally has zero wins, no development, and his "wife" is just getting worse and worse, like not ONCE has he stood up for himself, and his attempts at adultery (it's implied several times) never even comes close to fruition. As a western man I probably am missing some characteristics particular to Japanese families, but as a man with self pride it hurts me to see him being bullied so badly by his wife and despite all of his neighbours knowing, doing nothing to help him, and I really hate that one p***k that seemingly idolizes Sanae. I also do most certainly not like Sanae (FL) is raising their daughter, I don't think I need to explain why.
Like what someone said in the comments, it's not that funny that they wrote this drama about a very serious yet socially sensitive topic in a comedic way throughout the entire run. If you know me then you'd know I enjoy comedy as much as the next even in serious shows, but then they have to at the very least show development with said problem, in ~4 hours of TV, they've managed to not show any of that, not even accidentally.
Anyways, nothing is good about any part of this show but ironically the ONE thing most J-Drama from this period do wrong: the lighting.
The main 2 characters are bad for reasons above, everyone else is too minor to have real opinions on, though that Ryousuke guy seems to ALWAYS be the root of everyone failing their plans.
Don't watch this show, or at the very least don't binge it.


P.S. to dispel any of these comments:
1) I'm not suggesting for Kazuma to be overpowering and abusive and whatnot in return, I just want him to be more assertive and hold his ground like a man should. Marriage is a give and take relationship, not one or the other.
2) I although may be implying adultery is acceptable to do, i don't actually believe so. Just the other woman in Kazuma's life would be a lot more bearable for him than his current wife. The other 2 guys committing adultery is unacceptable considering their wives are what I'd say are common ideals in Japan.

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Was an alright drama.

Prefacing this with the fact that I watched this without subs as apart of my Japanese immersion, plus for reasons I imply later I lost most interest around episode 8 so my thoughts may be flawed.

This was a pretty decent drama, I found all the characters enjoyable, the setting believable, and the story decently relaxing/fun, overall good. considering this literally only came onto the internet this month (meaning it's very obscure) makes me wonder how many other good "lost" J-Dramas are out there (lost in brackets because a DVD will always exist haha) but alas I do not have money to BURN by going around and buying random 20,000¥ blu-rays weekly (university student lol) I will not think much about it, but I digress.

If you're familiar with 90s J-Drama then you seeing a 7.5 (average rating when I publish this) will indicate that it's your average developments, and you're not wrong haha. Same old same old developments with past lovers and whatnot, climaxing with something completely random happening to the side characters, etc. etc. Even the ending was predictable. Just thankfully it never felt depressing, though it did get boring around episode 8 with the relationship drama growing to a head, then just never dying down for the rest of the show. Despite me saying this all though, I still recommend it if you understand Japanese, it is funny at times and like I said before it is relaxing most of the time, a good time killer.

Acting is standard for 90s K-Drama, Asaka's in particular carried but everyone else did a great job too. Music is an easy 10/10, the opening really reminds me of early 2000s anime (which reminds me of a rather peaceful time in my life) plus 90s jpop is just good haha. Everything else is average for 90s J-Drama, lighting felt a bit better but still nothing to write home about.

Overall a good drama, I recommend it.

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Alright drama, nothing more, nothing less

First I'd like to note that the subs were out of sync 95% of the time (different sources so too much time needed to resync) and the other 5% I didn't look at them lol. so some details might be slightly mixed in my head.

It was an alright drama, been about 2 months since I've watched a proper J-Drama but from memory, this plot is pretty average. You could say it flows similarly to 29th Christmas with the kind of plot developments, but no where NEAR as annoying and melodrama filled. Nothing that good stands out with the story, because it's so average, but the bad pacing does stand out.
I really disliked the fact that Chigusa and Taketo (along with the secondary couple too) kept on having trust issues and breaking up then getting back together basically every episode until the very end. I'm surprised though how they managed to not make it overly dramatic with this kind of story lmao.
Acting and all that was good, Yoshino's (Chigusa) acting felt well above par while everyone else had the standard Japanese drama acting. Masaharu's (Taketo) acting bothered me mainly because he seemed to slur words together like every other sentence, same with his dad but I'm just gonna write this off as being an element of the Kyushu dialect (which I've never heard prior)
Etcetera etcetera standard production quality of 90s J-Drama, good music, etcetera etcetera.
Overall it was alright, good time killer if anything, but nothing unique like Koukou Kyoshi. Could have easily been 8 episodes

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Decent time killer and nothing more.

I almost never watch movies and to my knowledge never a Japanese one plus I ended up only half watching cuz of how boring it was, so bear with me in my ramblings.
It was 1am and wanted to watch either an episode of K-Drama or a short movie, so I chose the movie (for other reasons too like Asano Atsuko), was it good? No lol. It wasn't the worst thing I've seen before it just didn't have a clear plot, too many leads and to quick of an introduction for a 100 minute film (like the 2 male romance interests seconds into the movie ALREADY get the ball moving then practically disappear like what) even though they seemed to only focus on one for the last 50 minutes. Instead of focusing on all 4 sisters and somewhat fleshing out their backstory (not really) it would have been much better if they focused on one sister for the entire film.
I can't really comment on the technical side of the movie because 1) I hardly watch movies and 2) the few movies I've seen from the era are James Bond blockbusters so its unfair, though I will say lighting is about average for 80s jdrama and same for the cinematography, sound had some oddities (Blu-ray seems to have been mastered with an audio delay lol) but not bad.
For the life of me I couldn't figure out what decade this took place in, I'd like to say the 70s-80s but idk cuz of the dated fashion seen and everything else screamed 60s. Also couldn't figure out what on earth the whole meaning of this movie was but I guess that's just because I'm trying to grade it like it's Interstellar.
Overall it's an ok time killer, if you know Japanese then just throw it on in the background while doing something else, it's ironically a more interesting watch that way.

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Irritating start, great rest of story

Just wanna say that I am probably more emotionless than most people who’ve watched (or plan to watch) this but I’ll just say that if you’ve watched other tragedy drama from the time (ex. Koukou Kyoushi 1993) then you probably won’t find it all that sad like what currently every other commend and review is hyping it up to be, still depressing don’t get me wrong, but it’s not crying gut wrenching sad, or to me at least, probably because of things I will discuss but I digress.
This was a very good watch, definitely in the current top 5 most tragic dramas I’ve watched (currently I haven’t seen many but if I include anime then still in the top 10 at least). Pretty much every single episode had some tragic happening whether that be as small as someone failing at regaining their footing in life or as big as someone dying, this drama had it all, but the way it originally set things up for the main couple (Maria and Shiro) was kinda forced in my opinion, like what person on earth would purposely take the unnecessarily hard route to leaving his old life behind instead of the simple option? I guess Shiro would. But after that arc (which was the first two episodes if memory serves me right) the happenings regarding their relationship more or less feel believable including the more irrational decisions taken by the two (don’t want to spoil it so I used a very vague word). The story had me rather invested the entire time, something that I certainly wasn’t expecting to happen in the first two episodes plus the fact that it’s very dramatic (a theme I ironically don’t enjoy much). The reason why this gets only an 8.0 though is partially related to the first two episode problem and partially related to that last point: It at times felt dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. Every last character in the story managed to at one point or another get the short end of the stick, and literally only two characters after 12 episodes managed to seem happy (Jun and Nana, will speak more later) this was a trope I identified pretty much in the first episode, so it did kinda take the joy out of watching some of the scenes because I just expected that to happen, I knew it wouldn’t turn out well.
Between the two main relationships in the show, Maria-Shido and Nana-Jun, the latter of the two I found a lot more enjoyable to watch; Nana being blind and Jun having his own legal and mental troubles somehow made their side relationship a lot more engaging than Maria-Shido’s but knowing me. This almost certainly stems from the fact that I could sense a happier ending with them but it is also probably because Nana was a lot brighter of a character (because of her disability) who never really dwelled on issues of the past and Jun just wanted happiness for her, so you could see it would be either a satisfying or happy ending. Not saying Maria-Shido’s was bad no, just it was obviously made out to be more depressing and also used more plot devices to achieve that goal (the last episode).
Technical things in the show were at the standard of 90s J-Drama: terrible lighting, decent cinematography, great music (the main theme song is up there with “Bokutachi no Shippai”), good acting and effects, etc. Only complaint isn’t related to the official production but the subs; they’re from a group that I’ve seen before, they are very lazy when it comes to timing lines and tend to drop words that they should have kept, but it didn’t really take away from the story.
Overall a good watch, I recommend this to any J-Drama enjoyer

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