The 64th NHK Asadora Renzoku Drama is Churasan, a story of a young woman, Kohagura Eri, who was born in Kohamajima Island, Okinawa on May 15, 1972, the day when Okinawa was returned to Japan from the U.S. Eleven years later, Kamimura Shizuko and her two sons, Kazuya and Fumiya, come from Tokyo to stay as the guests of a small inn run by Eri’s family. Eri’s fun-loving, yet eccentric family welcomes them warmly.
However, Eri is shocked to hear one of the sons, Kazuya is terminally ill and Shizuko and her sons came to Okinawa to spend his last moment together in beautiful nature. Fumiya, Kazuya’s younger brother, and Eri promise to marry each other someday. However, after Kazuya’s death, Fumiya and his mother leave the island to go back to Tokyo. Years later, they are reunited, Eri as a nurse and Fumiya, a doctor, working at the same hospital in Tokyo.
The story's settings include Okinawa, Naha, and Tokyo.
In 30th Television Academy Awards, the Drama won awards for Best Scriptwriter, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress.
The 31st NHK Asadora Drama is Oshin. Oshin tells the story of a girl born in a very poor rural family in Japan, who through hard work and perseverance eventually triumphs over pain and adversity to achieve fame and success. Broadcast in the early 1980s when Japan had finally cast off the legacy of the post-war years and the Japanese were beginning to reap the benefits of economic development, the aim of the story was to recall the hardships the older generation had endured in order to pave the way for their children to enjoy their more affluent lifestyle. Viewers were drawn to the suffering of the main character Oshin - and then drew similarities between her story and their own home lives.
Some Japanese worried that showing Oshin abroad would give the country a bad profile - and would even be shameful because it showed the seldom glimpsed, poor, unequal side of Japan. In the event, the reverse proved true. Oshin gave viewers outside Japan - whose only image of Japan was formed by Japanese cars or electric goods, or through bitter memories of Japanese treatment during World War II - a far better understanding of the modern Japan and its people.
"High and Low" focuses on Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a powerhouse executive in the Japanese shoe industry. In the midst of an attempt to take over his company, a proposition that throws him in hock down to his own furniture, he's hit by a huge ransom demand, with a twist -- the kidnaper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) takes, not his own son, but his chauffeur's.
Adapted loosely from the novel “The King’s Ransom” by Evan Hunter.