Asian Drama

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Episodes: 20

Duration: 54 min.

Aired On: Wednesday

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Inspector Sugishita Ukyo from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Special Missions Unit makes brilliant deductions and cracks difficult cases with his partner Kaburagi Wataru who used to be a career bureaucrat from the Ministry of Justice.

Kenji Amo is a 2nd generation Japanese-American. He was born in America but went to school in Japan. He returned to America to study at UCLA. Now, Kenji Amo works as a reporter for a newspaper in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles.

Charlie Tamiya also studied at UCLA with Kenji Amo. Charlie Tamiya has feelings for Nagiko who works with Kenji Amo at the same newspaper company. Knowing that, Kenji Amo holds complicated feelings. At this time, Nagiko's friend Emi Hatanaka asks Kenji Amo to marry her. He accepts her proposal, but the Pacific War begins. Circumstances surrounding Kenji Amo changes.

Sato Tomoko leads an ordinary life as a 40-year-old wife and mother with a part-time hourly job to supplement the household income. One day, she defies an unfair rule at her customer service job because she wants to help the customer, and is fired on the same day her husband loses his job. Tomoko is a high school dropout due to her family background, and has no certifications. How is she to get a secure job that pays enough to provide decent meals for Shun, her 5-year-old son? After her husband mentions find the high salary of city council members, Tomoko researches it on the Internet and learns that winning a seat on the council has a higher probability than getting a secure salary job. Inspired by the desire to earn a good salary, Tomoko decides and convinces her husband to withdraw their savings so she can run in the current election. While her rivals are endorsed by current politicians or come from families with elite backgrounds, Tomoko isn't intimidated for long, and decides she can be a voice for struggling working class families and fight the status quo that makes it difficult for Japanese women to work after becoming mothers. Todo Makoto, who comes from a long line of politicians and is also running for a seat on the council, hears her speech and is impressed. So is Hirata Kazumi, a former star political journalist at a newspaper whose daughter attends the same nursery school as Shun, is inspired by her energy and ability to unify people, and becomes her campaign manager.

A mysterious international crime organization makes a demand of 900 million yen from the Japanese government for the release of hostages. The group then targets a victory parade of a world sports game to commit indiscriminate terror.

The new season begins with a special case that leads the duo to the Consulate-General of Japan in Hong Kong. It’s the first time for ‘Aibou’ to expand its setting to a foreign location since they went to London in the second season. Mizutani commented that it perfectly suits inspector Sugishita Ukyo, since Hong Kong used to be a British colony and Ukyo is interested in everything British. His new partner is called ‘Kai Toru’. He’s played by Narimiya Hiroki and is going to breath new life into the series. More details about him can be found here and here, but we will have to wait until the first episode to find out how they end up as partners.

At the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Headquarters, the core of the Japanese Police, an unprecedented hostage situation in the history of MPD breaks out. The hostages are 12 top executives of the MPD: Superintendent-General Tamaru, Deputy Supt-Gen Hasegawa and bureau chiefs. The conference room, where the perpetrator and the executives are held hostage, is completely surrounded by Riot Police Squad and Special Investigation Team (SIT). The perpetrator’s motives are unknown and he makes no demands.

Meanwhile, two gunshots echo from the conference room. Ignoring Sugishita’s strong opposition, Nakazono orders Riot Squad and SIT to storm the conference room. What they find there is Yaegashi, shot and dead. Gunpowder residue is found on all the hostages, but who fired the gun? This cannot be determined. While released from captivity, all 12 hostages become suspects.

In response to Supervisor Okouchi’s questioning, all the hostages give ambivalent testimonies that the gun went off while they struggled to neutralize the perpetrator, and that they do not know who pulled the trigger. Concerning Yaegashi’s demands, all remain silent. Becoming strongly suspicious of this, Sugishita and Kanbe gains cooperation of Chief Kakuta and others, and undertake their own question of the executives, who were taken hostage.

On the other hand, receiving the report of the hostage case, National Police Agency Director Onoda, along with National Police Agency Commissioner Kaneko, begins to make disturbing moves.

Kanbe Takeru chooses to remain in the Special Missions Division, but he seems to continue to keep a distance from his direct superior, Sugishita Ukyo. One day, the dead body of the popular female novelist, Mizumoto Shoko, is found in her own home. The possibility of murder fuelled by a grudge is high from the situation at the crime scene, and a male stalker emerges in the line of investigation. However, Ukyo focuses his attention on a missing section from a document package for a new book that Shoko was working on. It is eventually determined that Shoko was attempting to write a novel with an environmental theme which is completely different from her style of writing so far. Ukyo and Kanbe try to get information from the employees at a trading conglomerate that Shoko had interviewed.

Inspector Sugishita Ukyo, head of the Special Missions Division, returns from London and goes home in the sports car of Assistant Inspector Kanbe Takeru, who has come to meet him at Narita Airport even though Ukyo did not ask him to. However, on the way home, Ukyo notices police officers from the Metropolitan Police Department conducting a crackdown outside the agency’s jurisdiction in Chiba Prefecture and gets suspicious. The police officers that Ukyo had seen were riding motorcycles. He lies in wait in a street with a dead end, but the motorcycle police have vanished into thin air. Ukyo is mystified and begins a thorough investigation. The Head of the National Police Agency’s Secretariat, Onoda Koken, appears before Ukyo, who has a bad feeling about what is going on. He tells Ukyo that Honda Atsuto, a revolutionist and senior leader of the leftist radicals “Red Canary”, has secretly returned to Japan.

The Special Mission Task Team is not considered as important as it might sound. It's positioned in the lowest section of the Metropolitan Police Department and headed by Ukyo Sugishita. Together with his partner, Kaoru Kameyama, this team is Japan’s version of The Odd Couple, solving clueless cases in original and outrageous ways.