Satomi Achiwa

The 74th NHK Asadora Drama is Junjo Kirari, which means something along the lines of "pure-hearted Kirari." The story is set in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture in the era around the Second World War. When the story opens in 1928, the heroine, Sakurako, is a very active seven-year-old girl. Indeed, even in the first episode she exhibits her confidence and enthusiasm. But above all else, Sakurako is interested in becoming a jazz pianist, and music features extensively in the plot.

Princess Go was the youngest of the most famous three sisters in Japanese history, who each led a remarkable life in an age of turmoil and civil war. Go loses her parents in the war, marries three times, and feuds with her own sister in competing for power. Go's husband becomes the second Tokugawa Shogun and she ensures her prominence as she gives birth to a son who later becomes the third Shogun and a daughter, a wife of the Emperor. The drama describes the age of the civil war through the eyes of Princess Go, who plays a significant part in establishing the age of peace that lasts over 200 years in Japan.

Centered around typical Japanese food, a solitary salesman travelling through the country for business purposes, eats at its various establishments and experiences the various delicacies of Japanese cuisine.

Amagi Yu is a slightly eccentric detective who has been assigned to the Twelfth Section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s First Investigative Division from the Lost and Found Centre. The Twelfth Section is called the “graveyard of detectives” and ridiculed as the “banishment room where hardened detectives who cannot be fired are sent”. Its assembled detectives Samura Kosuke, Yamashita Takumi, Nagasawa Keita, Mizutani Tamaki and Katagiri Masatoshi are elite and yet oddballs. Amagi appears fixated with time which seems to have no relation with a case. Raising questions about the timelines of the perpetrator and victim derived from the estimated time of death, time of crime, time of alibi and time limit, he searches for the meaning of “blank time” which arises from this. He obsesses over the weight of every minute and second of time because of some incident.