Mertseger

Your review was fun as usual. Are you diving into Ranman next? I've got a couple of other things to finish up before even beginning that, and am in the middle of a very bizarre and lengthy review of Welcome Home, Monet which I'll push out on my old blog.

Heh, it's good to know that I can avoid that one, but that it will, therefore, be the next on NHK's list to put on Netflix.

Kudos for doing the subs. The machine translation from 4 years ago was pretty rough.

Condolences. May your sanity survive intact. I'll be looking forward to your review.

I found out years later that YouTuber Sharmeleon (now Chris Broad's wife) was her English coach for the film, and was, like, you should never ever had let anyone know.

She does so as well in My Family. Not perfect pronunciation, but still way better than Ishihara's in Shin Godzilla, IMO.

I encountered Kawai in Extremely Inappropriate! (now on Netflix) for which she won Best Supporting actress, but her current best to date IMO is My Family also on Netflix - I posted a review because anything I can do to get more people to know about that series, the better.

I'll put this under a spoiler tag, but they give Rin no less than 4 suitors after she becomes a nurse with one REALLY obvious OTP, and then disrupt that relationship and put like an 8-year time leap before they meet again, and the relationship still goes nowhere. I'm guessing that the production did not want to "sully" the reputation of this real historical figure or, rather, spark any negative comments from the watchers who might idolize the real nurse. But at the same time they had no problem reinventing Naomi as an orphan, which is cool, but also had zero basis in the life of the real person. And so what level of reinvention is okay, NHK? I think Carnation did a much better job of portraying the protagonist's possible relationship after the death of her husband, but there was probably a real historical basis for that relationship. Kawai Yuumi's asadora in 2028 will be historical too, and reading the Wikipedia page for the person makes the story look utterly dire, but it's Kawai and so the performance if nothing else should be great.

The story follows the order in which they were released: the three movies and then the series. But there is very little continuity that matters between any of them, and all four are scattered across various legal streaming services right now. And so, as I say in the review, if you've got HBO Max and don't have easy access to the other services, dive right in: you'll be fine and you can always go back to the movies if you enjoyed this series.

Another thorough and fun review!

I completely agree about Eliza. We're supposed to believe she steamered all the way from the US just to yell at Otoki because Heavin wrote a book for a younger audience?! But I decided not to bring it up in my review. I have enjoyed Fox in other things as well, and I think she handled the part as well as one could, but, yes, her character was done pretty dirty by the script.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DamLkA7CeQD The Netflix thing was just a hopeful joke, but S2 is nevertheless set for this fall.

Season 2 has been announced: https://www.instagram.com/p/DamLkA7CeQD.

Another couple good Japanese time travel series are JIN (2009) and JIN 2 (2011) both of which are currently on Netflix.

And, of course, there was a great Japanese time travel film called 1st Kiss last year though it ends up being much more like Groundhog Day with better knives to stab your heart. Unfortunately, right now you have to hit the high seas to find it.

A couple of lesser time travel series are Ashi Girl (2017) and Jikuu Tantei Oyu (2019). The former is pitched towards tweens and teens, but was pretty fun. I can't remember much about the latter other than a moment back in the Edo period where a crate full of drugs from China was labeled in English.

Sadly, Netflix could not afford the Rolling Stones' music for this international release. Seek out the series in that other place that otaku who are into drama go, if you care and want a slight upgrade for episode 8.

Welcome all the new Netflix viewers to this amazing series.

"How much did the writes changed his real story? In this story was he married, I think two times? Did he lived in New Orleans?"

I'm no expert, and have not read any of his works, but my Wikipedia understanding is that he married twice: once to the previously enslaved woman, Mattie Foley, and then as we see in this series Koizumi Setsuko (Toki here).

The writers abbreviated his time in Cincinnati and his marriage to Mattie in a particularly racist way. In 1875 he was indeed fired from his newspaper when his relationship to Mattie was discovered, but he then just went to the other paper in town. When his writing boosted the circulation at the other newspaper the first one tried to hire him back to which Hearn essentially reacted, "Fuck you and the horse you road in on." His marriage to Mattie dissolved some two years later: "Hearn and Foley separated, but attempted reconciliation several times before divorcing in 1877." It should be noted that the marriage was explicitly illegal under Ohio's laws at the time, but there is zero zip and nada evidence that the marriage fell apart because Mattie attacked her boss with a razor.

From Cincinnati he did indeed move to New Orleans after his marriage fell apart and worked there as a journalist for the next ten years. There is no evidence he left a flame there, and indeed he spent two years after that in the Caribbean working on a couple other books before he set off for Japan.

Back when I wrote the review it would have been on an unlicensed site which used the Dramacool databases. But Dramacool was thoroughly shut down well over a year ago now. Various sites have tried to preserve the old links and at least episode 1 is working right now at asiaflix dot net. If later episodes don't work, the best resource for finding unlicensed sites right now seems to be everythingmoe dot com: just scroll down and down to "Asian Dramas" for a list of sites with unlicensed content.

Pretty much a perfect headline there.

Excellent review. I'd encourage you to post it to the review section as well.

I used machine translation to create English subs for this special, and then thoroughly edited them. I chose to use she/her pronouns for Yone because I felt that those are what an English speaker of the time would have used. The subtitle file is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zd0KF2pZzXfahytOVR9gevdjt3TEg7dZ/view?usp=drive_link.