"Career" Opportunities

Miori Takimoto and Hiroshi Tamaki in CAREER

Just started watching the highly entertaining detective drama “Career” starring Tamaki Hiroshi as a newly appointed Chief-of-Police named Kinshiro Toyama. Unlike what you might expect from a police chief, however, Kinshiro is a down to earth, “man of the people” who truly cares about the town and the people in it.

Perhaps, he says, it's because of his name (Kin Toyama), that he likens himself to Toyama No Kin-San , the legendary sakura-tatooed shogunate samurai, and like Kin-san, likes to dress down as a common person and do his detective work among the civilians. This works out because the average person, while not keen on cooperating with the forceful and intimidating police, are much more eager to share what they know to the kind and friendly Toyama. 
As you might expect, Toyama’s ways aren’t everyone else’s cup of tea, and he immediately finds himself butting heads with Minami Yozo (Takashima Masahiro), the head detective of the station. This is a by-the-book hard-as-nails character who feels Toyama’s soft spoken and out-of-the-box ways are a hindrance more than an advantage.

When Minami is assigning his team to work on a serious murder case, it grates him to hear the new chief of police asking them to focus on the town’s graffiti problem. Graffiti? There’s a murderer running around! But Toyama is convinced that everything in the town is linked together and the best way to deal with problems is where they start- with little things like graffiti.

On Minami’s team is a young girl detective named Misato Aikawa (Miori Takimoto) whom has not only met Toyama at an earlier crime scene, but has unwittingly tried to arrest him as well!

It seems she thought this man was obstructing her policework as they tackled a would-be terrorist, but she is in for the surprise of her life when she sees him at the station and finds that this guy is the station’s new Chief of Police!!!

 Because of her failure during an as-yet undisclosed case, Misato isn’t looked upon very favorably by her teammates, and it’s not surprising, when Toyama asks Head Detective Minami to spare some men for his graffiti project, that the person Minami gives him is Misato.

Poor Misato- she has so much to prove to redeem herself, but she feels she can’t show the head detective what she can do if she’s spending all her time cleaning off graffiti with Toyama each day! But as the two work together, she realizes what a caring and hard working man he is, how he connects with the townspeople, and HEY…it looks like the graffiti may even actually be important to solving the ongoing murder case after all!

At the end of the episode, when an undercover Toyama and Misato have brought in the perpetrators of the graffiti case, the perp’s father, a high-ranking politician, comes in and threatens Toyama, demanding him to bring in his chief of Police and he’ll have the accusations dropped, it’s here that Toyama performs his final Kin-san adage, dramatically whipping out his Chief of Police Badge JUST like Kin-san revealing his cherry-blossom tattooed arm, making the perp and his father buckle is disbelief:”This Shleppy guy is the CHIEF OF POLICE?!”  AHAHAHA! Too funny!

Really enjoying this drama, so entertaining, and with Tamaki Hiroshi as affable as ever and Miori Takimoto doing her best Juri Ueno, this show could be described as “Nodame Cantabile Meets Aibo”!

Posted by zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com