Hi, this time I’m back with some drama recommendation after some weeks with movie recommendations only. Hhe For previous drama and movie recommendation, you can try to find it here.
As for today, here are some drama recommendation 🙂
1. Watashitachi wa Douka Shiteiru (There’s something wrong with us)
I really love this drama. My baby actors, Yokohama Ryusei and Hamabe Minami, starred in this drama. Well, this is actually the first drama of Yokohama Ryusei that I watched after I realized I loved him. Haha I mean, it took me some movies of him before I declared myself his fan 😁🙈🥰😍 so yes, I was looking forward to this drama at that time. And, also, I’ve loved Hamabe Minami for quite a while too. So I was really happy to know when they were paired together in this drama. Well, I love them so much, individually and as a pair 😍❤️❤️❤️🥰
So, what is this drama about? Well, it’s a mix of mistery, confectionary, and romance. I love not only the cast and also the story. The flow, the plot twists. They were simply amazing! I remember getting impatient waiting for the next episodes that I ended up watching some of it without subtitles. I even managed to read the manga (i.e. comic) in Japanese. That’s how so interesting it is! (Well, mostly I skimmed and scanned the dialogs, and focused only on the pics. I read the writings only when it was necessary to understand the story. Still, with my low Japanese proficiency, I was actually amazed at myself for being able to understand it. The power of love? Dang, was I just flexing? LoL My apologies 🙈✌🏼)
But, anyway, synopsis (spoilers?): There was a famous confectionary store. Tsubaki was the son of the owner. Then, Nao’s Mom worked there. Tsubaki n Nao formed a beautiful relationship as a kid. (Well, maybe we can say sth like puppy love? First love? 🙈 I don’t know, but they liked each other). However, somehow, Tsubaki’s Dad got killed, and Nao’s Mom was accused as the murderer and died while waiting for her procecution. And Nao had to leave the place. Years passed, Nao and Tsubaki grew without getting in touch with each other. Somehow Tsubaki grew to hate Nao. But, he accidentally asked Nao to marry him after a confectionary-making competition as he could not recognize her, i.e. he thought he was someone else. Nao accepted because she wanted to find the truth behind her Mom’s murder accusation. Then things got really really interesting there. Well, you might guess that they fell in love with each other. Yes, they did, but there were some conflicts, internal and external, testing their love. How did they end up? Well, I’d suggest you watch it yourself 😂🙈✌🏼✌🏼✌🏼 I mean, it’s really great. The plot twists were quite surprising too. There’s no disappointment. I just wish there were another season for this drama because I want to see how their life continues after the ending 😍🥰❤️😊
So, if you will, please give it a watch. I highly recommend this drama. Even I managed to get my Japanese friend whom I knew in HelloTalk app to watch this drama. And she ended up watching and loving it as well. Indeed, we talked about it weekly. She would update me about the summary of each episode before I got to watch that eps with English subtitle. Thank God I don’t hate spoilers 😁✌🏼
2. Oyabaka Seishun Hakusho (Doting Parent Youth White Paper)
This drama is…hmmm I don’t quite know how to put it. It’s interesting but personally I wasn’t really into it. I mean, I wasn’t as excited for this drama as I was for the previous drama I mentioned. It’s still entertaining, though. Especially if you love Nakagawa Taishi and Nagano Mei, you might want to watch this drama because they starred in this drama and their characters are hilarious. Both were too innocent. LoL
Well, ok, what was the story about? Well, as the title indicates, it’s about a doting parent, a father that was so protective about his daughter that he decided to go to the same college as a student. He even went as far as screening any student clubs she planned to join or any activities with her friends for that matter.
At first, I was like, “Oh, my. If it were me, I don’t think I’d be able to cope with it.” I mean, you know how much I love my freedom, right? So it’s really appalling to think that I can have no say for my own life. How am I supposed to learn and grow like that, right? He even got in the way of her daughter’s romance, not allowing any guy to get close to her because he believed she was too good for any guy. Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I mean, they say “men are trash”, right? 🙈 Just kidding ✌🏼
But no worries, it wasn’t that bad. I understand that the father just wanted the best for her daughter, most probably also because he’s promised her late mother to protect their only daughter. So, there is that; i.e. he was just trying to protect her. And, he wasn’t really bad. He even made friends with her daughter’s friends. He managed to share some life advice and lessons with them. Being wise, he actually helped to solve their problems somehow. Besides, her daughter got to date with the guy who loved her and whom she loved too so it made me kinda happy 🙈✌🏼
3. Watashi no Ojisan: Wataoji
This drama is about a “fairy” in the form of ojiisan (old man). Well, usually a fairy is portrayed as a beautiful female with wings and magic stick, but in this drama, it’s just an old man. However, like other fairies, this old man is visible only to the person he’s trying to help. Only them can see, hear, and communicate with him. Actually I skipped some episodes in this drama ‘cause I was kinda not in the mood to watch it. Somehow I felt like I could kinda guess how it would be like, the repetition and such, so I wasn’t really interested in watching each eps, and ended up watching only the first episode and then jumping to the last episode. It seems, however, that the old-man fairy helped not only one person but also many other people, except that everyone thinks only they could see him and that he’s a secret lifesaver especially for them. Well, looks like he wasn’t. But it’s not bad, though. Sometimes we do need to feel special, don’t we? ^^
Nevertheless, even though I didn’t watch all of the episodes, I feel like this drama was trying to give positive vibes and good messages. I still remember in the first episode where the girl was feeling so hopeless and kinda thought it was useless for her to try so hard because nobody would appreciate her enough anyway. Then, the Ojiisan fairy said something like this: “You know how much people love television, right? But do people ask, know, or appreciate who made the screws in it? Nobody, right? But imagine what would happen if only one screw was missing in that product? It would be a mess. It won’t be the same. And it won’t be better. But, do people who made the screws complain about it?” Somehow it hit me hard. I mean, I have been writing about how many of us want to be appreciated but sometimes it is also okay just to be a part of something bigger, right? (You can read it here, btw). Being a smaller part doesn’t make us any less important. And sometimes, we do get rewarded for what we do, albeit perhaps in a different way from what we have expected. And the people who made screws for the television, maybe they just feel rewarded enough for doing what they can (or what they love). People might know them, and knowing that what they made can make people happy is maybe a reward itself for them. I don’t know.
Well, I know some people might see this as a form of toxic positivity. But everything is toxic only if you see it from a wrong perspective at a wrong time, right? I mean, sure we are allowed to complain and feel down too. No one should invalidate that. But other times, we do really need some encouragement and see another perspective to help us get back up on our feet and try harder. I mean, to endure the pain… And I think this is what this drama was trying to convey: Life is hard, yes, but hang in there. 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼
4. This Guy is the Biggest Mistake in My Life (Kono Otoko wa Jinsei Saidai no Ayamachi Desu; この男は人生最大の過ちです)
This is just another drama that I dropped watching. I kinda fast forward watching through the episodes. Maybe at that time I was really not in the mood. What do we call it? A collapse? A time when u’re simply not interested in something u might be interested in other times? I don’t know. It could be that but it could also be that I could kinda guess how the story would unfold so I wasn’t really excited about the details.
I mean, the story was about a very rich man who fell for his employee. He was kinda a freak and asked to be her slave. Yes, he didn’t ask her to be his slave; he asked her to let him be her slave. (Because nobody treated him harshly before so he was kinda surprised and loved it that the girl scolded him even though when she first did it, she was drunk and didn’t realize that it was her boss). Cliche? Creepy? But you could kinda guess how it would be, right?
But if you like comedy, go ahead and watch it because it has lots of hilarious scenes. I mean, he acts like a fool and crazy with her but so cool and strict with his other employees. Personally I find it creepy in a funny way or funny in a creepy way. I don’t know. You really have to watch it yourself. Haha But, oh my, as you might expect, the girl wasn’t really crazy about money. She was, in fact, felt uncomfortable sometimes because, you see, many people came to be afraid of doing something wrong to her in fear that the boss would make them take the consequences, and she didn’t like to be treated specially like that.
But, boy, if it were me…having someone that rich, good-looking, and kind-hearted fall in love with me, wow… I mean, I love money! LoL He was sure weird and creepy but he wasn’t a bad guy either. In fact, he’s nice, smart, kind, and cool too. And if he wants to be my slave, then I’ll have him in the palms of my hands, right? I can teach him some lessons too. So, yeah, go ahead and shower me some money. Haha (Gosh, imagine a guy reads this, maybe this will turn him off. But, my, I’m just being honest. Education is not cheap, we’ll need money to send our kids to good schools later, right? 😌😝✌🏼) But, oh well, it’s just a fictional drama meant to entertain people 😉 I don’t think someone that rich would be stupid enough to want to be my slave. Hhe
5. Two Weeks
I watched this because the late Haruma Miura was here. I thought it was his latest drama that he starred before he died, but it wasn’t. But it’s really really really great. If you love suspense, action, and crime/detective dramas/movies, I highly recommend that you watch this drama. Every episode is intriguing. It makes you keep guessing and doubting yourself. You keep wondering about who the true villain is. (Or maybe it’s just me). But it really made me want to keep watching every episode till the end. It made me curious.
Well, of course not everything was shed into lights in this drama. At the end, we might still have some questions unanswered but it’s really besides the point and we can shrug it off. At least the main plots of the story were clear. There was a villain and there was the cause as to why they did the bad things. And I think this was what’s important in movies/dramas with such themes.
So, well, summary: a guy was framed in a murder case but he just found out that he had a daughter who needed him to be a bone-marrow donor in order for her to heal from her disease. Hence, he escaped as he tried to not be arrested until the day of her daughter’s scheduled transplant surgery. In this process, some people were involved including someone from his past. While escaping, he was also trying to clear his name and prove his innocence by revealing the true villain. Interesting, right? It kinda challenge the “adrenaline.” Hhe
And, by the way, I found that this drama was actually a remake of a Korean drama with the same title. Man, now I kinda want to watch the Korean version just to find out how different it is from the Japanese version.
6. Sixteen Syndrome
It’s an 8-eps drama, 22ish minutes each episodes. I actually didn’t mean to watch this so it was kinda accidental. At that time I didn’t know what drama to watch and I kinda wanted something light. Then I stumbled upon this drama. I saw it’s only 22ish minutes per eps, I read the synopsys and decided to watch it. It’s about friendship n gender stereotyping(?). Well, the romance was there too, but I think it’s more than that. It’s about making friends, how you care for your friends, being loyal without being too possessive and limiting(?). And, how a boyish girl is often considered cool but a girly boy is often considered lame? Have you ever thought about this? Another example of how unfair patriarchy is? Well, that’s not what I want to focus on, though. 😶✌🏼🙏🏼🙇🏽♀️
Well, actually, I was drafting this some time ago, but I was worried that someone might take it the wrong way because there was this someone who often expressed how they disliked it when their mutuals did this and that with other accounts, so I didn’t want them to think I was talking about them. But now I’m like, “Fuck it! I can’t keep letting people blame their guilty conscience on me.” I am just reviewing the drama and the characters in it anyway. If they think I’m talking about them, instead of getting upset at me, they should introspect, right? 🤔 So, well, let me write it down.
So even though I watched this quite “accidentally”, later I was curious about how the story went. I even watched some of it without subtitles ‘cause I grew impatient waiting for the subtitled version to be available. LOL But, ugh, SPOILERS: I really hated Mei in eps 3. She’s so “toxic”. Strangely, I didn’t feel that way with Ibuki when she was preventing Asada from approaching Mei. Well, Ibuki did it sincerely to protect Mei. While what Mei did was purely egocentrism. So self-centered, possessive, and selfish. She didn’t allow her friend to have fun w/ others. She guilt-tripped her friend for having fun with others. She even feigned sickness to prevent her friend from hanging out with others, making the friend seriously worried bout her. And she didn’t even know that the friend was actually sick. 最低!!! I don’t want such friends, really.
But thankfully, in the next eps, Mei realized that she was wrong and made real efforts to change for the better. Well, that’s how people should be, right? We aren’t perfect, yes, but we should be willing to admit our flaws, make amends, and improve. At the end, it’s a happy ending 🙂
Oh, how I wish some people in real life could be like that, i.e. apologize, make amends, and improve when they realize they were wrong, i.e. not make excuses and get all mad when getting told they were wrong. 🤦🏻♀️💁🏻♀️
Well, I guess that’s all for today’s drama recommendation. I hope you get to watch and love some of them. See you next time 😉
