luna_rainbow

It's interesting you think that, because I thought the opposite. I saw it as a interesting role reversal, because she's the one having the high-achieving, round-the-clock, busy job in a leadership position, while he's in the domestic stay-home spouse role. She's busy working late, he calls her to pick up groceries, and she gets the wrong items. It was a cute but perfectly reversed view of what traditional gender roles have been in Japan.

I wonder if you would still think it's misogynist if there isn't the age difference there? Please don't take this to be an argument, because I'm genuinely curious as to why you thought it was misogynist. She essentially had her happy ending of not needing to change her way of living at all after marriage, and personally I think that's the perfect dream for a lot of working women.

My thoughts exactly. I understand creative license and all that, but my issue with this drama is that it purports to acknowledge the important role pharmacists play in healthcare. What it does instead is to undermine them by saying that the ideal pharmacist essentially has to do a doctor's job (and apparently a nurse's job too) to be good. Other valid criticisms I've seen are that what she does for one patient is so time-consuming and impractical that in real life it would impact on so many other patients, her colleagues, the hospital system, and her and her colleague's mental health. I know people say "this is a drama of course it's not realistic", but that doesn't mean it's not problematic. And I feel Japan, of all countries, really doesn't need any more romanticisations of this sort of unhealthy work culture.

And I haven't even started on how inappropriate, dangerous and actually unhelpful it is in healthcare - unlike any other job perhaps - it is for someone to go above and beyond their level of training.

Unpopular opinion.

Ishihara Satomi's acting is the only thing holding this drama up. Please do NOT watch this drama expecting to learn about what hospital pharmacists do. I'm not sure what the manga is like, but I'm guessing the scriptwriter added a lot of things because at times it would be quite realistic (counselling patients about their medications and picking up inconsistencies in diagnoses), then swing to wildly ridiculous: being on the front line in resuscitation and going off your job to search someone's home while that person is peri-arrest. It tries to paint the main character as capable by portraying other health professionals (medical and nursing) as completely incompetent at their own jobs. I've stopped watching, but I've seen Japanese commentators talk about the pharmacist giving the diagnosis and treatment plan for cancer in episode 5, which if true is way beyond her expertise and would get her into so much trouble in real life.

Just like with Radiation House, one wonders why they didn't just write the main character into a medical doctor if they're actually doing the doctor's job (and not their own job), and apparently doing a better job than all the other doctors in the script. Pharmacists are extremely valuable to the hospital team, and it's disappointing that a drama about pharmacists thinks it will be more "interesting" or "exciting" by getting them to do doctoring work.

Completely agree. The first season and the second season are miles apart in terms of story. The first season was really focused on the idea of "ie" (home) and what that means to different people. The second season had all these plot lines that went nowhere and thought of itself as funny, when it was just tiresome. Very disappointing.