Another Child Abduction Drama…With A Twist! “Yukai ni Hi”

Child kidnapping seem to be ALL the rage in J-dramas lately, with the stellar Keiko Kitagawa “Anata wo Ubatta Sono Hi kara” (Since the Day I Took You Away) recently wrapping up, and now we have Yukai No Hi (The Day of the Kidnapping)!

Masamune Shinjo (Takumi Saito) is a man who has a young daughter in need of a serious and expensive surgery to save her life, and without funds or a future, plots with his estranged wife Shiori (Yumi Adachi) to kidnap the Hospital Director’s daughter and hold her for ransom to get the money for the operation.

While very passionate about his daughter, Masamune is admittedly not very bright, and it is up to his wife to orchestrate the entire kidnaping via phone instruction. She finds the Director’s home, maps out the getaway routes, and guides Shinjo through the dark night streets to the house, where they expect the girl to be asleep and easy for stealing away.

Though nervous, things seem to be going according to plan, however just as Masamune arrives at the house, a dazed girl steps out on front of his car and he narrowly avoids hitting her. She slumps down to the ground, and when he goes to check on her, he finds that it is the girl he was meant to kidnap!

Confused about why she would appear outside of the house in the middle of the night, he nonetheless accepts it as a bit of luck on his side, and he takes the unconscious child and spirits her away to his hideout just as they’d originally planned!

The next morning when she awakens, Masamune considers tying her up until he realizes that she has amnesia and cannot remember what has happened or even who she is! Seizing the chance, Masamune tells her he is her FATHER, and that this is her home!

He hopes she will buy this lie, but this is no ordinary girl. Her name is Rin Nanase (Yuno Nagao) and she is nothing short of a genius! Possessing a hyper-intelligent brain, she immediately pieces together that something is wrong about the situation, but until her mind can clear, is content with “playing along” with the ruse.

In the meantime, Masamune has been calling and calling the house to give the parents his demands, but they never pick up. Eventually , a confused Masamune goes back to the house to see what the holdup is…and is STUNNED to find that both the Director and his wife have been MURDERED! WHAAA!!!

Masamune has NO IDEA how to deal with this turn of events- he now has no parents to blackmail for ransom and is stuck with a kidnapped child! He calls Shiori in a panic, but they msut sit tight til they can get more information about what is going on! In the meantime, he must continue his charade as Father to young Rin!

Police Detective Tsukasa Sunouchi (Yosuke Eguchi) is assigned to the murder case, and they quickly realize that Rin is missing and possibly kidnapped. But the mystery grows when, searching the house, they discover a secret laboratory in the basement where it looks like strange experiments have been going on! Who IS this family, and what has been going on here?

Looking over the security cameras, the cops get their first look at the hapless Masamune picking Rin up off the ground and taking her away, and he immediately becomes their number one suspect for not only the abduction...but for the DOUBLE HOMICIDE as well!

Msasamune is forced to go on the run with his fake daughter in tow as an all points bulletin is put out for him, and if that weren’t bad enough, a sinister organization led by the mysterious  Yukiko Mizuhara (Yuki Uchida) is ALSO after the young girl, and they’ll stop and NOTHING to get her!

It’s time for Masamune to come clean about who he really is to the young Rin, and once they realize it’s them against everyone else, have to team up to stay one step ahead of the enemy’s clutches! And with Masamune’s energy and passion and Rin’s amazing intellect, they may get out of this yet!

Oh man, this is an exciting and FUN one- Yukai no Hi is full of twists and turns and I breezed through the first four episodes in one crack! We are now up to episode 7 and things are really ratcheting up!

Takumi Saito and Yuno Nagao are great as the sham Father and Daughter, this could be the set-up for a Disney style ongoing series with the way they keep getting in and out of sticky situations! As you may remember, Yuno played the younger version of Sakura Ando in the excellent “Brush Up Life” and she continues her streak of charming kid-friendly shenanigans! 

Posted by zdorama @zdoramaagain.blogspot.com

Keiko Through The Years

Our Keitan circa 2005 and 2025!

 Instagram site Japanstarworld has this wonderful series where they show celebritiy timelines via photos and morphing effect, and I really loved their take on Keiko Kitagawa’s career- It’s things like this that remind me not only of how much she’s changed over the years, but that I’ve always been right along with her!

Ever since first seeing her in 2007 with her charming MOP GIRL drama, I’ve been a steadfast fan of Keitan and her work, a love that continues as strong as it did back then!

Happy Birthday, Keiko!!!

Keeping Tabs on FOGDOG

 Just wanted to drop a quick note to express how much I’m enjoying the fun crime comedy FOGDOG- I’m a huge fan of actress Yuna Taira and her take on the quirky and spazzy Kiri Inukai is simply brilliant, so cute and instantly likable that she charms in every scene she’s in!

Ryuhei Maruyama plays the perfect foil with the brash yankee mouthed Saruwatari, watching the two of them bounce off each other is well worth the price of admission! And Shodai Fukuyama as Kiri's jealous childhood friend Masato makes for a very merry set-up each episode!!

Subber Hpriest has warned that they might not continue with this series, but so far they've been releasing subs pretty regularly... I do hope they'll stick with Fogdog, been really loving this one!!!

Translators Just Can’t Handle “Dai”

 Hololive legend Korone, famous for her whimsical and carefree gaming platform, is also quite well known for her limited and hilarious use of the English Language, created yet another classic meme when, during a live game stream of “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” (where the team must use clues to disarm a ticking bomb), simply gives up and says “I’m Die, Thank You Forever!” before the bomb blows, causing the whole group to crack up laughing!

It became a viral meme, and the internet would blow up with snippets of this glorious scene!

Even the animated series "Cultural Exchange with Game Center Girl" had one of the characters SAYING the line in an episode! But looking over the clip, however, fans were quick to notice that Crunchyroll had heard Korone’s “DIE” as “Dai”, and thus, instead of "I'm Die", they translated it as “I’m BIG” LOLOL!

“Dai”(大) in Japanese means Huge or Big and I guess the translators didn’t count of Korone’s bad english trying to say she’s dead, hahaha! Die, Dai, it all sounds the same!

This reminded me of another classic “Dai” blunder from back in my childhood, as a youngster watching the classic “Kikaider” Tokusatsu series on TV. As a rule, Kikaider’s monsters were usually a color/animal (example Grey Rhino, Green Mantis, Orange Ant, Blue Buffalo, etc.).

But when they got to episode 25, there was a snail monster and, instead of a color, the subtitles told us he was called “Great Snail". GREAT? Why wasn’t it a color, we wondered, but left it at that, just assuming those KIKU translators knew what they were talking about!

It was only as an adult, talking to a fellow Kikaider fan, that I found out the truth! I mentioned to him “Hey, isn’t it weird that Great Snail isn’t a color?”, to which he pointed out that in FACT, his name WAS a color: ORANGE. WHAAAAT!

His name, as he explained, was ORANGE Snail, but the word they used for “orange” was “Daidai” (橙 or ダイダイ), named from the citrus orange fruit, and I guess the KIKU translators didn’t know such a slangy term for the color and assumed he was named 大大 DAI DAI. i,e, BIG BIG, or “Great” hence the change of name! 

I was mindblow, having thought it was GREAT Snail all my life, and, even though I was relieved to know the monster DID in fact conform to the color/animal blueprint of the show, it was too late, my mind was imprinted and I will ALWAYS think of that monster as Great Snail now! Sigh.