Asian Drama

Kitamura Kazuki and Hamada Gaku will be co-leads in the upcoming BS Sky Perfect! drama series "Hamon" which will be shown from 9 January at 9pm on Fridays. The drama which is based on the 51st Naoki Award winning novel by Kurokawa Hiroyuki, features Kitamura as a smart and well-built gangster who works together with a consultant at a construction company (Hamada) to expose the evil deeds of bad people in Osaka. As the story will not be a replica of the novel, Kurokawa expressed great anticipation in that the drama will be very interesting since it is produced by Sky Perfect and will have a larger degree of freedom.

Adapted from the 2014 novel "Hamon (Yakubyō-gami Series)" by Kurokawa Hiroyuki.

In the fictional town of Mahoro on the outskirts of Tokyo is Tada Benriken, a small business which does odd jobs. Its owner is the solemn and level-headed Tada Keisuke (Eita), and his unexpected guest, the easygoing but vague Gyoten Haruhiko (Matsuda Ryuhei), a former junior high school classmate who showed up one day and started to sponge on him. The two of them get on like oil and water, and yet are somehow inseparable. They receive queer, dubious incoming odd job requests which they accept, and what comes into view are the friendship between them as well as the backgrounds of their clients.

Shun (Fukuda Saki), who has tattoos and piercings all over her body, is the third generation descendant of a Japanese orphan left behind in China during World War II. Takeru (Matsushita Yuya) is a lonely and reckless hooligan whose family was murdered when he was a child. Shun, Takeru and Kasumi (Watanabe Natsuna) with an equally troubled past and background, become collaborators after being hired by Kuchinawa (Kamikawa Tamaya) in police undercover operations in the city of 'Midori', a neighbourhood for illegal residents. They infiltrate a criminal gang to investigate, and find illicit human drug experiments and slave treatment staring them in the face. They grow to trust one another and mature through this experience.

Yokai are major figures of Japanese folklore, spirits that occupy virtually everything in the world around us. Some, such as the turtle-like Kappa, are relatively well known, but there are hundreds of others, maybe even thousands. They are the spiritual element of everything in the world around us, and as such they deserve to be treated with respect. But humanity isn't much good at respect. We consume, destroy, wear out and discard with no thought to anything but ourselves, a situation very distressing to the yokai, so distressing that the villainous Kato - accompanied by his deadly assistant Agi, played by Battle Royale and Kill Bill's Chiaki Kuriyama - has concocted an extreme response. Kato is gathering up yokai of all sorts, preying upon the harmless and the weak, and forcibly fusing them with discarded metallic junk to create vicious killing machines that he plans to unleash on humanity. And who must stop Kato's evil plot? Young Tadashi, a pre-teen boy gone to live in the country following his parents' divorce. Tadashi is crowned the Kirin Rider at a local festival, a title everyone assumes is honourary until it turns out no, it falls to Tadashi to travel to find the Great Goblin and retrieve the magical sword that is the only hope of defeating Kato.

The 42nd NHK Taiga Drama is MUSASHI. Many Japanese history buffs are familiar with The Book of Five Rings written by Miyamoto Musashi in the 17th century. Musashi's treatise on strategy and the way to lead instantly became the business executive's bible when the translated version hit the bookstores more than three hundred years later.

In 2003, the story of this legendary swordsman-philosopher-painter comes to life in the NHK Taiga Drama MUSASHI. Based on the famous biography written by Yoshikawa Eiji, this taiga drama boasts a list of stars that reads like a Who's Who of screen and television.

Orphaned before he was ten years old, Musashi (his real name is Takezo, so you'll hear his childhood friends call him by that name) grows up skilled in the martial arts. During the Battle of Sekigahara, he fights on the side of the losing Toyotomi forces, but eludes the enemy as they hunt down the vanquished soldiers. He then spends years wandering the countryside mastering the sword, becoming a stronger samurai. As his fame spreads throughout the nation, men seek him out to test their skills against him--most notably Sasaki Kojiro who faces Musashi in the ultimate Duel at Ganryujima.