Ikebukuro West Gate Park

 

[From Daily Yomiuri - April 19, 2000 by Wm Penn - Televiews: IWGP] - In the first 69-minute episode of IWGP, I could find no redeeming value whatsoever. Not a few seconds of talented acting or a clever line or a hopeful moment or a bit of integrity. It offered nothing but noise, violence, corruption and debasing of other human beings.

If TBS can keep this show on the air and attempt to say with a straight face that what people watch and how they act are not related, they are the best actors in the entertainment world. The network has taken a completely amoral world and made the repulsive look acceptable. TBS did the same thing a couple of quarters back when it made the Shinjuku pimp played by Takashi Sorimachi in Cheap Love look like a hero. This time around, the TBS crime is far worse.

The star of this travesty is Makoto, played by Tomoya Nagase. He has a lovely selection of old high school pals who keep in touch. There is Takashi, "king" of the G Boys, the most powerful "team" in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Their color is yellow. Takashi's fashion statement is a sleeveless undershirt and drug-crazed grin and he loves battering an opponent's head into the concrete.

In Episode 1, we see him doing this to another old classmate of Makoto's, Doberman Yamai, who wears a chain to link the rings in his pierced ear and nose. Old Dobie got this nickname because he once bashed a Doberman to death. (We are shown this in flashback.) Saru is another old pal who is now a member of an underworld gang that calls Ikebukuro home.

Hero Makoto's mother owns a local fruit shop that he occasionally tends, but mostly he runs about Ikebukuro doing exactly what he wants and collecting extra cash as a "bowling shark," a species similar to the pool shark. He makes people who think he can't bowl fork over cash for their stupidity. Makoto wears a baseball cap with "structure" written across the front but there is little structure in his life or this script.

Makoto basically goes around extorting cash from likely prey like a 17-year-old shoplifter, Shun, who Makoto threatens to turn in if he doesn't pay up. (Za Terebijon magazine describes Shun as a young man impressed by Makoto's "otoko no miryoku," or manliness.) Shun is also a budding artist who likes to sketch beheaded and abused women but he can also do portraits, so Makoto and his bleached blond sidekick, Masa, set him up doing portraits on the street for a cut of the cash. That is how they meet a couple of female denizens of this world, Rika and Hikaru, the daughter of a Finance Ministry employee. There are also a couple of crazed cops and a top police official who turns up in a Benz that he loses to Makoto after bowling a gutter ball in a two-way competition with our hero.

I suppose IWPG could have been a comedy had it not been weighed down in such a heavy load of violence, blood and viciousness.

This was obviously a program that I could have turned off in the first five minutes but I stuck around to see how much more gruesome it intended to get. In the first 15 minutes, we were treated to a gang fight featuring Makoto refereeing a bloody head bashing on concrete, several examples of extortion, and a love hotel murder. By the end of the first 22 minutes, we were introduced to the slightly crazed and corrupt police, the shoplifting artist, some more extortion, the turning off of a convenience store surveillance camera while they pigged out on the pickings, some lock picking and a few other events I can no longer remember. I had to take a 10-minute breather at this point. I returned in time to see Makoto, who had up to then skirted the serious kind of trouble that might get him arrested, mistaken for the stalker-strangler who is killing women in Ikebukuro love hotels. This murderer eventually got Rika, who was also involved in a bit of "enjo kosai," known beyond these borders as prostitution.

Makoto and Rika were not an item, just friends. Viewers have yet to learn, but the TV Guide tells us, that Makoto has no real love life. He lost his virginity in middle school when he delivered a melon to a soapland employee and allowed her to pay for it with her services instead of cash, but no woman has been able to catch him yet.

In Episode 2, he will be released and will enlist his motley crew of companions to track down the killer themselves. I certainly won't be tuning in to see how they do. I challenge TBS to defend putting this series on air. It as low as I've ever seen Japanese TV go and still try to treat the character like a hero.

[TBS Synopsis]: Living in an area known for its juvenile crime, 21 year-old Makoto has become a member of a youth gang called the G-Boys. Known for his cool head and ability to get things done, Makoto becomes a key trouble-shooter for the gang by diffusing tense situations and keeping his friends out of harm's way. However, the death of his girlfriend and an escalating turf war with a rival gang threaten to be more than Makoto can handle.

STARRING: Nagase Tomoya, Kato Ai, Kubozuka Yosuke, Morishita Aiko, Yamashita Tomohisa, Sakaguchi Kenji, Yazawa Shin, Koyuki, Kitaro, Watanabe Ken and more.
THEME SONG:  "Boukyaku no Sora" by SADS
NETWORK: TBS
DURATION: April 14, 2000 through June 2000
REVIEWS:  

This drama has been debated.  It won the best drama for the Spring 2000 seasons but yet it was controversial.  Maybe that's why people tuned into it.  Personally, I don't think it was that great.