Papa to Musume no Nanokakan

(Televiews, Daily Yomiuri, Wm. Penn, July 20, 2007): It's all in your perspective. Walk a day in another's shoes and the world can look like a very different place. Spend seven days in your parent's shoes or your kids' sneakers and the experience can change your world.

That's the theme of Papa to Musume no Nanokakan (Sundays, 9 p.m., TBS), an adaptation of the 2006 book of the same name by Takahisa Igarashi.

The series, which debuted July 1, just may be this season's best offering. Hold on to your hats, folks. I'm about to devote a whole column to liberal praise for a Japanese drama. Now that is something I have not done in a very long time. The dialogue in this generation- and gender-gap tale is intelligent, carefully crafted and will make you grin.
Hiroshi Tachi, best known for his macho detective roles, plays Kawahara, a 47-year-old disillusioned dad. He loves his 16-year-old daughter, Koume (Yui Aragaki), but she has refused to talk to him for almost two years. She is busy with her friends and her crush on a senior on the high school soccer team, who finally asks her for a date.
Life is not so good for Dad. He watches old videos of her childhood when she loved him and told him so. He gets nervous just thinking about whether this awkward communications stalemate will ever end. His life is a dead-end job at a cosmetic company, a long commute and a 25-minute walk home to a house with a 35-year loan.

His wife assures him he need not worry. If he dies, the house will be paid off by his life insurance policy.

These are the roles Tachi and Arakagi played for the first 30 minutes. Then, en route home from a family gathering in the countryside, a major earthquake causes their train to crash and sends them hurtling about, crashing into each other and switching identities in the process. They wake up in a hospital in each other's bodies.

This, of course, is the plot of the famed 1982 movie Tenkosei directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, in which a pair of teens fall down a flight of steps with the same result. Dad remembers the movie and suggests they, too, tumble down a flight of steps to reverse the curse, but they merely end up with more bumps and bruises, not their old identities. And so the reeducation begins. This naturally creates a need to talk with each other, and their wife/mother observes they seem like different people after the accident. They know they are!

The pair must learn each other's habits and the intimate details of their lives. There are a few silly moments. Koume makes dad take a bath in a blindfold so he doesn't get a look at her body while she has to climb into bed with mom and worry when her unsuspecting mother gets amorous.

Mother doesn't seem to have a clue, but her conversations with her husband and daughter in their reversed roles helps them both understand and appreciate each other more.

The Tenkosei concept has been used successfully in several other TV dramas. The scenario is particularly well attuned to a culture such as Japan's, where male and female language, gestures and behavior are so distinctly different and codified. Almost all the jokes work, but it is on the linguistic and emotional side that the story shines.
Several of his workmates and her classmates are written into the script, but the best supporting actor roles definitely go to their respective cell phones. The gadgets are used cleverly as an emergency means of secret communication as they stumble through each other's day.

He feels caged in at her school. She feels like she's living in a TV drama at his office. The scenes where Tachi squints over Koume's beaded pink cell phone are quite amusing. At the end of the day, they trade cell phones and use them to return reassuringly to their own worlds for a few moments.

It is not hard to see where the writers are going with this script. Father and daughter are both going to make the other's life better. As Dad, Koume educates a sexist client on what sexual harassment really means while Dad counsels the boyfriend of Koume's classmate, who mistakenly thinks she is pregnant. As Episode 1 ends, Dad is preparing to go on his daughter's first date for her.

Worth tuning in. Four stars. Perhaps I'm being a bit generous but, oh well, it's Tanabata, a very starry night.

If your midsummer night's dream is to become a star, you might want to check out www.tbs.co.jp/extra-boshu, where TBS recruits extras for their various dramas. The Web site is in Japanese.

STARRING: Aragaki Yui
DURATION:
NETWORK: TBS
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