Since The Day I Took You Away~ Anata wo Ubatta Sono Hi Kara

Psychological drama Anata wo Ubatta Sono Hi Kara (Since The Day I Took You Away) tells the story of a woman named Hiromi Nakagoshi (Keiko Kitagawa), and when we first meet up with her, she is a wife with seemingly no culinary talents chatting it up with a single father in a cooking class. Nicking her finger with a knife, she confides to the man that she is here to brush up on her skills to get her kids to eat. The man, Asahi Yuuki (Nao Omori) sympathizes, saying that his kids are fussy eaters too! A friendship of sorts is made as the two continue their lessons.

When we check in on Hiromi later in the restroom, however, we are to find that this cheerful and friendly persona of hers is all a lie. This facade of being a helpless Mom has all been a ruse to get closer to the man Yuuki Asahi- and the reason we will learn is a very dark one indeed.

Once upon a time, Hiromi Nakagoshi was a happily married woman with a husband named Keigo and a young daughter named Akari. On her 3rd birthday, Akari wanted corn pizza as part of her birthday meal from a local pastry store.

As Akari is allergic to shellfish, Hiromi diligently checks the ingredients and, seeing it clear of any problems, decides it is OK for her, and allows her daughter to have it for her dessert.

But that evening, while celebrating her birthday, Akari begins to feel unwell after eating the corn pizza, and when she develops a severe allergic reaction, the terrified parents rush her to the hospital.

The doctors do their best, but they are too late and Akari passes away. And despite Hiromi’s efforts to check and double check things, they are horrified to learn find she has died from a reaction to shellfish. Somehow despite the label's list of ingredients, the substance was in the pizza.

The pastry shop is brought up on charges of mislabelling their goods and negligent in the itemizing of their ingredients for their products. The president of the shop, however, denies any wrongdoing and insists there has been no error on their part. The President is the aforementioned Asahi Yuuki, and he says he understands the importance of correct procedures. But when he seems to suggest that it is ultimately the adults responsibility what a child eats, the media take it as him blaming the parents of the deceased child, enraging the public and infuriating Hiromi and her husband.

From that moment Hiromi has had only dark thoughts about this man, and when the case is dismissed and he is let go, she reaches despair. Her life becomes a shadow of its former self, and even her marriage gets dissolved. When she learns that Yuuki has moved on with his life with seemingly no remorse, she begins to entertain ideas of violent revenge against him.

Stalking him  in his fine abode with a seemingly happy family with his two daughters, Hiromi cannot stand the injustice of someone who has taken everything from her and yet gets to live his life in luxury. 

With murder in mind and knife in hand, she goes to Yuuki’s house with the intention of extracting her revenge on him, but when she is seen approaching the house by the family's tutor, she comes to her senses, and running away, ends up tossing the weapon into the river.

Getting back to her car, she races back home in shock at how close she came to doing the deed. But she is FURTHER shocked when who should appear in the back seat of her car but Yuuki's youngest daughter! In a strange twist of fate, while Hiromi was at the Yuuki household, little Moe managed to sneak into the car while playing a game of hide and seek (which no one in the house appeared to be paying attention to).

Realizing the opportunity that has dropped into her lap, her first feverish thought is to end Moe’s life in the same way Yuuki had inadvertently done to her daughter. But when little Moe sings a song Akari had once sung, she cannot do the deed- and instead comes up with a new plan- to steal Moe away and raise her as her OWN daughter!

By the time Yuuki and the family have noticed Moe has disappeared, both she and Hiromi are long gone and miles away… The authorities are called in and a different kind of hide-and-seek begins, with Hiromi and Moe on one end and the law on the other. And thus begins our drama.

And there’s also a savvy news investigator named Sawa Azumi (Sawa Niimura) who has taken a keen interest in the case and may be the only one who senses just exactly what may be transpiring here….

MAN, I’ve been highly anticipating this drama since its announcement months back- as you all know, I love Keiko Kitagawa, and not only is she amazing here, this plotline harkens back to thrillers like MOTHER with Yasuko Matsuyuki or  Youkami no Semi (the Cicada's Eighth Day), that Rei Dan child abduction drama which is still one of my ALL-TIME favorites.

The preview for next week's Anata wo Ubatta Sono Hi Kara already looks chock full of intriguing developments and I can’t WAIT to see MORE- Should be a GREAT drama!

Hiroshi Abe and Mei Nagano in "Caster"

 Hiroshi Abe is back, this time as a maverick newscaster named Soichi Shindo hired to shake things up in a failing news program NEWS GATE, where he immediately butts heads with his unorthodox style in an effort to revamp the show into something new.

Mei Nagano stars as Hana Sakikubo, a frustrated program director tasked with overseeing Shindo  and reining in his wild methods as he disregards protocol and social niceties to get the the seeming ‘real” truth. 

And in the field, Shindo DOES seem to have a taste for the real cutthroat shenanigans going on in the political world and  seems to be one step ahead of everyone else when it comes down to nailing his subject. But we will learn that both he AND Nagano’s character have secret pasts which hide the real motivations that dictate their choices and decisions...some of which may not be so valiant.

with Shunsuke Michieda

Kinya Kataoji

Kanato Tsukishiro

Well, this is certainly a formula we’ve seen time and time again with a multitude of News-based dramas and I’m not sure if this one will be any different from the rest…. Will continue to watch to see if Nagano’s character evolves into more of a partner  than a frustrated reactionary character...

Childhood Mysteries: That DENON Label on my Kikaider Records

ANY kid growing up in Hawaii during the great Tokusatsu boom of the 70’s is familiar with the bright orange DENON labels adorning all the Japanese Superhero albums and singles as they were the company that put out all the theme songs and LPs of the Toei line of heroes.
Kikaider, Kikaider 0-1, Kamen Rider V3, Five Rangers, even Inazuman and ROBOCON, ALL of them came on this particular line, and over time we even began to think of DENON as exclusively attached to Kikaider and his cohorts, and even the fancy design with the name DENON made of these “power dots” made us think of Kikaider 0-1!

But therre was one thing that always puzzled the more curious of us, and it’s the fact that the DENON logo was STICKERED onto the 45 record’s label. As nosey as we were, of course we couldn’t help trying to peel the DENON stickers off (as you can see by my failed childhood handiwork on my Goranger, Robocon and Kamen Rider V3 singles below), 

...but besides ruining our records, we were more confused when there was only a COLUMBIA label underneath. Why Did My Kikaider Records have a DENON sticker coving the Columbia Label? Why were they trying to “hide” it?  

Well, we just had no idea, and for years as I grew up around tokusatsu fans, I’d ask around but NO ONE seemed to have any real idea- that is until a conversation on reddit about (of all things) a vintage Denon/Columbia LP set of WWII songs, where the subject of the DENON label came up and redditor mawnk informed:

The Denon logo on the labels is a ring-shaped sticker. The albums are actually on Columbia, but they weren't allowed to sell them as Columbia in the US, because Columbia is Columbia in the US - hence the sticker.
You'll see the same thing on imported Japanese Victor records - a sticker that changes the company name to either Nivico (Nippon Victor Company) or JVC (Japanese Victor Company).
Record company names got licensed to separate companies all over the world in the early years of the industry, creating chaos and confusion that continues to this day. We have our own example here in the US in the form of Decca, which was originally a partially-owned subsidiary of Decca Record Company in England, but got spun off as a separate company because of WWII. When Decca England decided to reenter the American market, they had to do it under the name London, even though Decca was their name originally.
Going the other way, in the UK CBS is Columbia, and Columbia is (er, was) EMI. And HMV has RCA's logo (or vice-versa), but it isn't RCA.

VERY interesting and informative and SUCH a weight off the eight year old boy inside of me who had continued to wonder about it even into adulthood!
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PS: Ya gotta love those YUSHA RAIDEEN stickers I stuck all over my Goranger singles! What a crafty kid I was!

You would have thought I'd have stuck it on my Raideen single, however, the Yusha Raideen 45 was one of those thin plastic flexidisc singles that came with a book...not suitable for stickers!

NOW, it’s time to listen to some of these songs again!

Your Monthly Keiko For April 2025

Kietan looks ahead for what's coming up in April 2025, and in just a few weeks, her suspense thriller "Anata wo Ubatta Sono Hi kara" will be airing its first episode!

Crossing fingers that some lovely subbing team will pick this one up or that this will be one of the lucky shows that NETFLIX decides to air!!

The "Tinkerbell Office" Makes an Appearance in EYE SEE

The Office Tinkerbell House made yet another of its many apperances, this time in an episode of the Haru crime drama EYE SEE! Yep, any time the director needs to show a person of interest in an  affluent neighborhood, that abode I first saw in Hanbun Aoi is always used!

They even made it up the stairs to show the famous exterior of the house and its swimming pool!

This time the gang (Haru, Koji Yamamoto, Shintaro Morimoto) even ventured a bit of a ways down the street, giving us more details of the surrounding homes...

The Office Tinkerbell Office...where will it appear next!