Tengoku no Daisuke e / 天国のダイスケへ

To Daisuke in Heaven ~ Hakone Ekiden ga Musunda Kizuna ~



2003 Japanese movie based on the real-life dilemma of a college student on a relay track team whose promising future is cut short by leukemia.

The movie, however, is based on the personal life of an arrogant reporter who covered his sports career and who ended up changing his outlook on life as a result of his having met the young boy with such spirit and drive.

Sato Daisuke (Oguri Shun) is the determined twenty-three year old on the track team who wants desperately to win a relay marathon their school hasn't participated in in over thirteen years.

Yohei Iida, (Fukuyama Masaharu), is the cynical and selfish reporter for a prominent newspaper read around the country, and because he refuses to accept the help of his co-workers, he ends up making a huge mistake that costs him is Political Reporter position at the paper, thus relegating him to the 'useless' and 'unworthy of being called news' sports department.

Iida's first assignment is at Takushoku University, where he is asked to cover the relay marathon race, and it isn't long after he first meets Daisuke that the stiff reporter begins to come undone.

He has a boat-load of life lessons to learn at his age, and it isn't, entirely ironic that a majority of those lessons are learned from a boy ten years his junior.

Stories like this make me wonder if it isn't, perhaps true that God actually selects certain people to a call to greatness through another, less fortunate soul.

I mean - why can't stuff like this happen to everyone who needs it?

Wouldn't that make this a better world in which to live?

Like, why only Iida and not someone else if he isn't the only pathetic soul wandering around at a total loss and clueless to the reality that is his actual existence?

Anyhow, this movie was heart-wrenching while not being overly dramatic about it, and it was an interesting story about interesting characters without it being in-your-face lecture series about the contrasts of right versus wrong.

I liked it, and I love Oguri Shun, too.