Karei-naru Ichizoku / 華麗なる一族

The Grand Family


2007, 10-episode melodrama that stars Kimura Takuya AND Nakamura Toru and is loosely based on a novel about the real-life story of Manpyo Daisuke; a banker at the time of Japan's reorganization period in the late 1960s.

The drama, however, delves into the life of Daisuke's son, Teppei - played by Kimura-san.

Remember when I said I was getting bored with the sameness of the characters Kimura-kun tended to portray onscreen?

Forget it.

THIS was what I was searching for, and I haven't had this much fun watching a JDorama in a good, long time, either.

What a magnificently portrayed rendition of an amazing family struggle!

Corruption, greed, thoughtlessness, and power all converge on this household and tear it apart slowly but surely, until all that is left to do but to weep - and, weep I did.

Teppei is the first-born son of Daisuke and his high-born wife, whose family ran into trouble early in their marriage; thus relegating her to 'nothing' by societies over-bearing standards.

Daisuke takes a mistress, whom he invites into the Manpyo household and beds right under his wife and the kid's noses.

He also has a second son and two daughters - the eldest daughter being married to the head of finance ministry in Parliament (Mima Ataru is Nakamura Toru) and Teppei being married to the daughter of another Parliamentary figure.

It is the mistress who arranged the marriages with the intention of helping to secure power in the Manpyo household.

Teppei was in love with another woman, but once married, became a devoted and loving husband to his pretty wife and a great father to his adorable, little boy.

Grandfather Manpyo had instilled in young Teppei the benefits and value of becoming a steel man, so when he grew up, Teppei studied metalurgy in college and ended up running a steel mill once owned by his grandfather, who also started a small bank that Daisuke quickly inherited and made it larger and more powerful in the circle of financial things in Japan after the war.

The steel mill is doing well, and Teppei's special metals are garnering interest from companies in the United States while the banking business is taking a hard hit from the government, who are in the planning stages of merging all but the four, most powerful banks in the entire country under the guise of it being more of a help to Japan's economy in the global arena.

Naturally, I don't get it and didn't, really care, but it was a major catalyst in this story, so watch it yourself to better understand that aspect since I am hopelessly inept at explaining such matters with any amount of clarity.

Daisuke doesn't like Teppei, and Teppei is well-aware of the animosity his father has toward him, and this situation comes to a head in the drama, where the father works behind the son's back to take him down with deliberate and hateful calm, destroying Teppei's livelihood as much as his life.

The struggles our poor, innocent Teppei went through on account of his father tore at my heart and made me shed tears while also hating his father even knowing that the poor, old man had as legitimate a reason to behave as he did as anyone else would under the strangely disgusting yet unproved circumstances that led to his despising his first-born to begin with.

Daisuke is determined to jump from position 11 to position 3 in the banking realm with the aid of his dastardly but handsome son-in-law Mima-san, who sees and knows what is going on inside the Manpyo household yet doesn't, seem to care, even as his Manpyo wife grows more and more suspicious and angry with what she sees and hears between husband and father.

In the end, Daisuke gets everything that he set out to devour, including the 3rd place position of his bank and the destruction of Teppei's steel mill - but, as things go, fate had a strange and more perverse way of intervening at the eleventh hour - and it is Mima-san who triumphs, of all people.

The story took place in the late half of the 1960s, and it was funny to note the laptops, printers, and cell phones - but, only in the first episode, and then the continuity people probably got reemed big-time for their lack of ... well, continuity, I guess, and for the rest of the show, it resembled Japan in 1968-69.

(pay attention to the scene where Daisuke peers through a window above the ground-floor action of his bank - it's funny stuff)

LOVED the streetcars!

Teppei Manpyo also had built on his father's property the coolest, most welcoming Frank Lloyd Wright home ever, too - absolutely thrilled to bits about the way the house was decorated from within.

The Grand Family was SO worth the time, and I highly recommend you watch this if you haven't already.

WAY thumbs up on this one, and not just because of Taku-san, either (or Nakamura-san for that matter).

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エンジン / Engine

2005 JDorama that stars Kimura Takuya as a washed-up Formula-1 racer who returns from the European circuit and tries his best to start over again with his original team, though that doesn't go quite so well as Kanzaki Jiro would like.

His widowed father now runs an orphanage for kids who are abandoned by their parents, and despite his aloof nature, Jiro uses his own brand of coping with the new members of his family, which happens to go against the grain of the learned positions of the two, opposite aids who work there.

Jiro's adopted father is a kind-hearted man unable to help a darling, two-year-old girl learn how to adjust to her new surroundings as he carries the girl around with the help of a gunny sack strapped to his back.

She was given up by her still-in-high school parents.

There is an adorable kindergarten boy who sits beside Jiro at the large dining table every night - where the only rule of the house is that no one eats unless all are present.

The female aid worker is trying way, too hard to make everyone like her while the male aid has a more stern and completely by-the-book way of dealing with the children.

Neither is able to see beyond their own ideals, and it is Jiro who ends up helping each of them to cope with the loss of their families while also teaching them how to deal with the hand they were given without losing hope of a brighter tomorrow.

There are high school children among them, which leads to hormonal issues that cause the snooty neighbors to come down hard on the 'home'; eventually forcing them to have to go away.

Meanwhile, Jiro is bussing the kids to and from school in a rickety, white van donated by the local church while also working as a mechanic for the racing team he once led to glory.


I know - but, still, it's funny

Coach Ichinose wants Jiro to learn some valuable life lessons before he'll permit the brash racer to don a uniform again, and it takes all of the 11 episodes for Jiro to finally figure out what that most valuable lesson actually is, too.

To be honest, I didn't, quite catch the lesson myself - but that doesn't mean it wasn't implied in the show, just that I may have been momentarily distracted by Kimura-san, I don't know.

The kids were adorable, the story was interesting, and as usual, Kimura-kun knocked it out of the park again with his brilliantly laid-back performance.

He does, finally get to race, and what happens to him made me cry, but I won't spoil the fun for those who have yet to see this wonderful drama.

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グッドラック！！ / Good Luck!!

Yes, I would get on this plane and fall asleep without worry knowing my pilot, Shinkai Hajime, is at the helm!

If you can't tell, I have a fear of flying on aircraft, though I do it on occasion, and while watching this 10-episode, 2003 JDorama, it made me wonder if knowing that the pilot or co-pilot were handsome, that it might, somehow help me to relax.

I doubt it, but then again, I can't be too sure, since it is usually the moment when the pilot or co-pilot comes over the pa system to announce the fact that we are now at 30,000+ feet above the ground, and that the weather seems favorable for an eventless flight that I become even more aware of my helplessness and tend to panic further - so, if I heard a silky-smooth voice at that moment and could envision it being KIMURA TAKUYA speaking to me, I'd probably exhale almost immediately and forget everything else going on just then.

HOWEVER ~ I think if I heard him say 'Good Luck!', I'd unfasten my seatbelt and demand to be let off the craft.

Enough about me, though, and more about the charismatic star of the show - Shinkai Hajime!

He's trying really hard to earn that coveted, fourth stripe on his sleeve and become a full-fledged pilot - which is what this show is all about.

Right away, he bumps into mechanic Ogawa Ayumi and the two don't, quite hit it off.

She works alongside Abe Takayuki (Kaname Jun), who has a secret crush on her, but because of her stand-offish nature, it is virtually impossible for him, Hajime, or anyone else to get very close.

Just when things seem to start looking up for Hajime, along comes prune-face senpai Tsutsumi Shinichi as Koda Kazuki - a hard-nosed veteran with more than twelve-years experience as a pilot, but who is now in charge of pilot performance.

Right away, he gets rid of a veteran who has flown more miles than anyone else in the industry because he took over when it seemed that Hajime might, not know what to do under foul weather conditions - 'lacks teamwork skills'.

No one likes Kazuki, save a pretty but aging flight attendant who also ends up in the line of fire on occasion, though she seems to understand his harsh ways a bit better than everyone else at the airline.

As you can imagine, every episode takes us on a new and exciting journey not only in the sky, but on the ground with someone falling in or out of love with someone else, and the personal lives of the players making the spotlight for the duration.

It wasn't so much about the inner workings of what it takes to become a pilot, or detailed analysis of the mechanics of a plane, either, but more about Hajime's personal affairs both in the cockpit and outside the plane.

I kept thinking how fun it would have been to be an extra for this drama, since a majority of the time we watched as unruly or terrified passengers went through one ordeal after the other high above the ground - only to have our dashing hero come to the rescue time and again.

There were a few love stories intertwined, but like all Japanese dramas I've seen up to this point, this also was sorely lacking in the emotional/physical department - with most everything about love, sex, and intimacy left to the imagination.

At least in a Korean drama they show couples in bed before or after the fact - but never in a Japanese drama (save Anego, which shocked the heck out of me) - but, most JDoramas show the one-night-stand set-up and nothing more - which I presume is meant to constantly imply that true love is pure and childish.

Funny thing is, after watching so, many of these shows, I have this distorted impression of the sex lives of Asians - which is weird since a majority of them live together almost as soon as they meet, and most always with the intention of marriage, though that doesn't, always occur.

What are all these living-together couples doing, then, if there is no sex?

Whatever ... I enjoyed watching KimuTaku fly a plane, deal with a hard-headed senpai, and make it impossible for the equally stubborn mechanic chick NOT to fall in love with him.

Good Luck! was a winner, and I highly recommend it if you haven't, already watched.

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Love Generation / ラブジェネレーション

Rabu Jenerēshon



KIMURA TAKUYA is 38 this week!

Happy Birthday, hotty!

(I wonder if he's still single - cause he's REALLY close to me in age - just kidding.
I know, he's married with 2 kids.)

This JDorama goes all the way back to 1997, and it stars one of my all-time favorite, Japanese actors, too.

At the beginning, his character, Katagiri Teppei, has this glorious mane of long, thick, and wavy brown hair that made me wish I could just slide my fingers through it, grab hold at the sides of his gorgeous face, and stick my tongue down his throat.

sorry ...

Anyway, the story starts out where he's kind of hanging out at or near a bus stop when a girl who just got into a fight with her fiance is dumped at the curb.



Aloof Teppei pretends not to notice anything until she starts to walk away, and then he invites her to sit beside him and even offers her a smoke - which she accepts and then proceeds to choke on after the first drag.

He nonchalantly invites her to entertain him at a nearby 'love' hotel, and while it seems as if she intends to oblige him, she ends up singing karaoke until the wee hours of the morning instead.

Undaunted, Teppei tries encouraging her to get in the mood, and she suggests that he shower first.

When he leaves the bathroom wearing nothing but black Calvins (sigh - wait a sec - I need a moment to simmer down from THAT delightful memory) he dives onto the bed only to discover that our heartbroken girl is fast asleep.

They part ways, but it isn't long before the two, mismatched strangers are thrust upon one another yet again at the office - where cocky Teppei is removed from the design department at an ad agency and forced to work in the Business Department unless he wants to resign instead.

He's not happy, of course, and he looks as out-of-place in a business suit as he feels about having to wear the stuffy garments.

He's at least pushed back his glorious mane in a ponytail, but the head of the department informs him right away that long hair is NOT acceptable and that he must conform by looking exactly like all the other men in the department - unless he chooses to resign instead.

Poor Teppei.



The girl he tried to shag the night before ends up being the OL whose desk is directly beside his, and when, after a few days, Teppei still sports the ponytail, the chick takes a pair of scissors and ... GASP!

No! You horrid, wicked, evil BITCH!

Yes, she did do that - she cut that ponytail right off his head, and I think I threw something at the computer screen, too, I was so angry.

Okay, whatever ... so, this is the story of a few love situations that all converge.

Teppei is still in love with his high school sweetheart, who turns out to be his older brothers fiance, and the OL he spent a loveless night with at the 'love' hotel still has feelings for the man who eventually dumps her for another woman.

Teppei also has a cute friend who has a crush on the OL, and she has a friend who wants to get busy with Teppei.


Whatever - of the 27,791 total views at aznv.tv, a majority of them gave this a 5 out of 5 points, and even as old as this thing is, I have to agree.

Yes, it was predictable, but even without my shallow observations about Kimura's super-fine ass being the biggest draw, he is an amazingly versatile actor who effortlessly draws you in and makes you believe in whatever character he portrays on screen.

There are a lot of issues personal and otherwise that need to be worked out in order for our destined pair to finally come together, and even then - Teppei's past keeps creeping in and messing things up for the budding romance.

I LOVE THIS GUY!

I liked watching Love Generation, too.

Again, it seems inevitable that the two, quarrelsome strangers will eventually come together in the drama, but the in-between stuff that occurs in the eleven episodes were nothing to complain about, trust me.

There were a few times when Teppei said something to make the girls laugh, and his delivery was so right-on that even I giggled like an idiot while staring at his smirking expression as he asked the laughing chick beside him, "What - was I funny?"

I know it's an oldie, but if you haven't watched this yet, I strongly suggest that you do - if anything (and like me) for a chance to drool over Kimura and his charismatic ways.

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