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Ai kotoba wa Yuki [Excerpt from Daily Yomiuri, 7/12/00, Wm. Penn] Koji Yakusho returns to the small screen this summer in a comedy called Aikotoba wa Yuki starting July 6 at 10 p.m. on the Fuji TV network. He plays an out of work actor who ends up posing as a lawyer. He is so convincing that local villagers believe him and he finds himself struggling alongside them in their fight for their rights against a big bad company. The strong supporting cast includes Kyoka Suzuki and SMAP's Shingo Katori. Ai Kotoba wa Yuki (Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Fuji TV) is also realistically done despite the comedic overtones. Scriptwriter Koki Mitani, whose credits include Furuhata Ninzaburo and Osama no Restaurant, takes a look at the plight of modern-village Japan through the eyes of Oyama (Shingo Katori of SMAP), a young native son who gave up a spot in a going-nowhere rock music band in Tokyo to return home and take a secure going-nowhere job at the Tomashimura village office. He has a crush on Kyoka Suzuki, the mayor's daughter, who has never even been out of the village. This is one of the few strands of the storyline that definitely rings hollow. Rural Japan may be conservative and set in its ways but it is not living in complete Edo period isolation. Tomashimura is an innocent little village with an assortment of warm-hearted but stubborn characters steeped in hundreds of years of local history and more concerned with divisions between the north and south ends of the town than the outside world. Having reelected the same mayor (Kunie Tanaka) for 40 years, the locals show little interest in modern politics until a major problem is dumped in their laps. Like villages all over Japan being threatened by unscrupulous urban developers, dam builders and garbage dumpers, Tomashi finds itself playing host to a dioxin-burning incinerator and possibly toxic dump run by the sinister-sounding Funamushi Company and its slick city lawyer. Confronted with the new blight on the bucolic horizon, the frustrated locals are ready for violent, guerrilla tactics that the mayor, a good-hearted but incompetent fellow, realizes will get them nowhere. He manages to convince them to wait four days until he and Oyama can go off to Tokyo and bring back a slick lawyer of their own. But even Tokyo's most liberally minded lawyers are hesitant to take on the case since the prefecture has already issued a permit to the company. As one young lawyer (Toshiaki Karasawa, who has been absent from the small screen of late) puts it: the prefecture gives permission and leaves you in the lurch. Now you see how the game is played. Oyama, who is nothing if not a realist, realizes the village has become a victim of modern Japanese life. But with the folks back home waiting for results and the mayor collapsed from exhaustion in a Tokyo hospital, he is also desperate for a way to save face. When he turns on the TV and sees an actor (Koji Yakusho) giving a brilliant performance in a legal drama, he hits upon the idea of hiring him to come to Tomashi, having him pretend to be a lawyer and eloquently explain the futility of their quest to the folks back home. Starring: Yakusho
Koji, Katori Shingo and Suzuki Kyoka Copyright © 1998-2003
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