News Flash: Shosuke Tanihara is Everywhere

Tanihara Shosuke is Ubiquitous Defined

I first saw actor Shosuke Tanihara in MOP GIRL, or so I thought. Though part of me thought he was a bit old for lead Kitagawa Keiko, I really liked his character and when I saw him next in LOVE SHUFFLE, I regarded him as a pretty good actor I could count on for a few laughs!


Watching Love Shuffle with my friend Car, I said, “Hey, this guy is from Mop Girl”, to which she replied, “Well , we’ve seen him in a LOT of other dramas before, though, right?” She then cited both SHIAWASE NI NARITAI, EDISON NO HAHA and OTOUSAN as shows we’d seen him in earlier, and I have to say, I was pretty amazed, as those characters were nothing like the Tanihara I was seeing now. So he’d been around for a while! From there, I saw Tanihara in movies like the MAGIC HOUR and THE HANDSOME SUIT as well as the awesome crime drama TRIANGLE. He even showed up in FUURIN KAZAN...Suddenly, I was seeing him everywhere!


But the dawning of realization began creeping up when I started watching both REAL CLOTHES and YAMA ONNA KABE ONNA at the same time. Not only were both shows about huge department stores, both focused on the “fashion” aspect of the business, and both, of course, featured Tanihara. It was so similar that I actually got the two different Tanihara roles mixed up, thinking, “How come last episode he was just a shoemaker, now he’s the general Manager…oh wait, that was the other drama” D’OH!


From there I next saw him in both TRIANGLE and MAGERARENAI ONNA, by the time I saw him in RYOKITEKI NA KANOJYO, I was like, “Huh! Shosuke Tanihara…AGAIN!” It soon became a running gag with Car and I that every drama we watched, he’d somehow turn up!


MIOKA, REINORYOKUSHA ODAGIRI KYOKO NO USO, etc, it always seemed like out of the handful of dramas I watched each month, he was in half of them! When watching the NHK Taiga Drama RYOMADEN and they introduced Katsura, there he was! When Akiko Yada announced her brother was coming home to visit in KOI NO CHIKARA, I wasn’t that surprised when Shosuke Tanihara was the one who showed up! When he even appeared as the fiancée of a suspect in SHINZANMONO, that was when I finally jumped up and declared, HOLY CRAP, SHOSUKE TANIHARA IS APPEARING IN EVERY DRAMA EVER MADE!!!”


Okay, Okay, He hasn’t quite reached Youichi Nukumizu levels yet (now THERE’S a guy who’s REALLY been in everything!), but the fact that I’m even mentioning them in the same sentence should serve as a timely warning! AHAHAHA!


EDIT: So I finished writing this entry, and after looking it over, decide that maybe I was being a bit too harsh on Tanihara-san, and decide to sit on the essay for a while. HOWEVER, later that day, I remembered that I was going to watch the Yumiko Shaku movie SKY HIGH when I had the chance, and popped the movie in. Not THREE MINUTES had gone by when WHO SHOULD APPEAR ON THE SCREEN BUT MY GOOD BUDDY HIMSELF!!!! I thought to myself; O MY GOD, THAT DOES IT, SHOSUKE TANIHARA IS EVERYWHERE, HE’S FOLLOWING ME, I CAN’T ESCAPE, I’M POSTING UP THAT ENTRY NOW!!!!!! AHAHAHAHAHA!!