The Town's Children

A Japanese bank is being targeted by Horizon, an American financial group that takes advantage of weak and struggling firms. Horizon sends the Japanese financier Masahiko Washizu to do the job with only one instruction: buy them cheap and sell them high.

Satoru Matsudo moves to Tokyo in hopes of becoming an actor. He has trouble breaking into the industry, but his luck begins to change when he finds an airplane ticket belonging to a talent agency CEO. Time passes, and Satoru makes a name for himself as an actor. He gets a call from America. Hoping it is a Hollywood offer, he instead hears about his estranged older brother.

Based on four of the six short stories compiled in Murakami Haruki's anthology, After the Quake explores the complex aftermath of Japan’s earthquakes and other global crises. (Movie version of the TV drama).

Traces Japan’s history with the Olympic games and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics for viewers before Tokyo hosts the event again in 2020. The first half tells the story of marathon runner Kanakuri Shiso, who became one of the first Japanese nationals to participate in the Olympics in Stockholm in 1912. The second half features Tabata Masaji, the coach who laid the foundations of Japanese swimming and helped bring the games to Tokyo for the first time in 1964.

This year marks thirty years since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and four stories that are based on Murakami Haruki’s exquisite short series about the people ‘after the quake’ are adapted into dramas featuring star-studded casts.

In 2002 (Heisei 14), public relations officer Mikami Yoshinobu of D Prefectural Police, is having an intense confrontation with the correspondents’ club, over the issue of the anonymity of a perpetrator in a traffic accident that caused serious injuries. Meanwhile, the public relations office is informed by the top brass that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department commissioner’s visit to the home of the family of the victim in “64”, an important unsolved case with its statute of limitation about to run out, has been decided one week later. The case which the police refer to internally as “64” is the kidnapping and murder of Shoko-chan which took place in just seven days in January 1989 (Showa 64). It was the worst in D Prefectural Police’s history. Mikami is under strict orders to obtain the family’s consent as well as to give the reporters’ questions beforehand. The visit is meant to emphasise the police’s resolve to put all effort into solving the case. However, the victim’s father, Amemiya Yoshio, rejects the commissioner’s visit and the correspondents’ club refuses to cooperate for the commissioner’s press conference. Mikami is torn between the top brass, which operates on organisational principles, and the correspondents’ club. The club denounces the complete change in Mikami’s attitude which had been open until then. In fact, Mikami has a big problem at home. His only daughter, Ayumi, has been missing since several months ago…

On TOKYO MX’s 30th anniversary night, a live information show runs a stunt where a couple stamps a divorce form on air, until the producer’s own wife appears, sending the broadcast into chaos in this one-hour real-time comedy.