Yamashita Tomohisa’s new drama started recently just 2 weeks ago!
Also known as YamaPi by his fans, he’s one of those up and coming J entertainers. He’s the leader of NewS (Johnny’s entertainment), now on hiatus, and has done a couple of dramas most notably Nobuta wo Produce which I really loved.
Anyway I just watched the first episode today. Thanks to Kioku-LS fansubs for subbing this!
Okay so basically Kurosagi is a drama about a conman (Yamapi) who only cons other conmen. And then he gives the proceeds to the original victims. Basically a bit like Robin Hood.
Warning, spoilers ahead.
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The first episode starts off with a short animation sequence introducing the different types of conmen - Shirosagi (white swindler) lies and cheats people out of their money. Akasagi (red swindler) uses affections and feelings to cheat. And Kurosagi only eats Shirosagi and Akasagi.
The story moves on to Kurosaki who calls himself Kurosagi because 1. the name is similar 2. it’s what he’s doing anyway 3. to protect his identity. He gets a new mission - to destroy this Shirosagi named Shinkawa who is into financial swindling.
After that, he coincidentally meets the victim of Shinkawa (hmmmm unlikely coincidence?), who is about to commit suicide because he’s been cheated and he thinks its the only way out (jeez, what is it with Japanese and suicide…). Kurosaki saves the man, but in the resulting hulla balloo, the man’s niece or something or other (haven’t figured out relationship), Tsurara, gets pushed off the platform onto the path of an oncoming train. She gets saved by Kurosagi too.
Anyway, the long and short of it is (short, because I got tired of recounting the episode, go watch it yourself) that Kurosaki offers to swindle back the money from Shinkawa, the man in indecisive, his son is suffering, and Tsurara is an annoying busy body who constantly tries to lecture Kurosaki on the wrongness of swindling, even if it’s swindling swindlers.
Oh yeah, and Kurosaki’s background appears to be that his father was swindled too a couple of years ago, so he decides to kill his whole family (??!!), but somehow Kurosagi escapes death and now he’s vowed revenge on the swindler. But Kurosagi is currently buying information to cheat other swindlers from the original Shirosagi who swindled his father.
Impression
Yamapi’s back to the stoic cool acting, which personally I hate. Nothing against him doing it in particular, I just hate that sort of character in general. Unfortunately that sort of character seems to crop up pretty often in Jdramas. It’s good that with Kurosagi he has to play lots of different characters, so at least he doesn’t stay faux cool all the time. I think he’s a good actor and he can handle all the different sorts of roles though, and he handled the slightly geeky salaryman character reasonably well. It was cute, and reminded me of Akira in Nobuta.
The plot seemed a bit unrealistic in Ep 1 though. Just a few pointers:
The villian says “give me 10million, and I can loan you 5 times that amount interest free because it’s a Japanese government grant”. The victim says okay, doesn’t get the money, business disappears, police says they can’t do anything.
Problem 1. What victim is going be so stupid as to do that. You should always seek independant financial/legal advice.
Problem 2. Who says the police can’t do anything. This is fraud right? It is square in the middle of criminal law! Either that or Japanese police are useless. If the way they are portrayed in dramas, anime, manga and movies is any indication though…maybe Japanese police *are* really that crap. Australia’s Federal Police has a fraud squad by the way.
Problem 3. you could always conduct your own private investigation to find the swindler (since it looks like the woman is operating a big thingo…and employing lots of people) then sue her socks off. Very hard to follow the trail of money, and lawyers are expensive too, but it’s something you could always try if you’re out for revenge.
The second issue I had with the series was the law. Nobuta Tsurara is a law student and in one scene (as I’m sure she’ll do a lot in other eps) she discusses this swindling situation with her classmates. A sempai says that swindling is an area with the most amount of loopholes. What the…huh? Totally vague statement. Also, it’s not hard to prosecute or sue a person who swindled you, per se. It’s getting any damages/compensation that is the problem. Even if you find the swindler, often the money would have disappeared. So it would be like suing a “man of straw”.
Oh yeah, in one scene Shinkawa can’t believe Kurosagi is offering to invest 200 million in her company (when he’s doing his swindle), and she checks his compay. She finds out that it has been around for 10 years, and has a healthy bank balance, and is satisfied with that alone. How careless. That is certainly not enough!! If she checked properly, she would have found out that the company itself was already closed down/bankrupt, and only the name remained.
Anyway. Loopholes in plot aside, this is probably the sole drama series I’ll be following for now. It would be interesting to watch Tsurara’s discussions with the other law students - it would be nice to see what Japanese law is like. Hopefully I’ll be getting an accurate picture. Along with Dragon Sakura, I wonder if Japan is going to do more legal in-sort-of flavour shows? That would be fun. A Japanese Ally McBeal? Or The Practice? Wooooo…..
Actually the best ever law-related show I have ever watched was called “Murphy’s Law”, and Australian production, and the most realistic legal drama I’ve seen. Too bad it was cut short so quickly!!
14 Comments
Hmmm interesting synopsis. ill look into it… been looking for a good jdrama
btw just so you know, the template isnt showing up right in IE 6.0 (its ry’s lappy)..i think its a CSS problem because MSIE is stupid and isnt W3C compliant. At home i have 7.0, which is supposed to be compliant, and it seems to show up right though. funny thing is, the old modified template u had showed up correctly (kinda..or at least better than this one) in IE60. I think its because the bar is on the left now.. sidebar is pushed to the bottom is the problem. just fyi.
Edit –uhm.. interesting. its damn weird. so on the first load of the page, it doesnt show right, but if i hit F5 (refresh) enough times it eventually gets it right usually the 2nd or 3rd refresh. …wth…
Edit 2 — more interesting stuff. the behavior as described above with the refreshing only works with the comments displayed. if it is hidden, as it initially is, then sidebar will never show up in IE6. …..heh.
IE is a stupid piece of shit >.< I have IE7 at home and it doesn't work correctly there either.
I reverted back to original template because I thought it would work on all browsers :@ :@
Now I've lost the original CSS file so I can't do anything about it though >.< Go use opera/firefox~~
Heheh, hopefully the synopsis was helpful to you. Actually I banged it out while half asleep and half exhausted from trying not to throw up a the same time…
not trying to throw up? *eyebrow*
yeah…i’ve been sick for the last week!! arggggggh.
it turns out it was acute gastroenteritis. and i feel very very horrible. not to mention my backlog of work >_______<
oo you like law series?! okay to tell you the truth this series doesnt really have much of that legal stuff… just alot of swindling… hey maybe you should try watching this kdrama called Love Story in Harvard? its got lots of this legal entanglement in it and most of the story takes place in the US they speak english somtimes (not too good but they do).
SakuraSatoshi> I guess I like Kurosagi because I don’t know of any series that talk about Japanese law >_<
I wonder if Love Story in Harvard is about Korean law then? If it’s American law I don’t wanna know XD
Hey i didnt say i didnt like Kurosagi its awesome! and bout LSIH actually its like haf and half because half the series takes place in Harvard Law School then they go back to Korea i think.
Oh no I didn’t mean Kurosagi was bad or anything, I just meant that despite it’s not-very-legal nature I still like it ^_^”
LSIH –> I might check it out one day then. After I finish downloading My Name is Kim Sam Soon >.< [so much to download, so little bandwidth...]
Oh my god !!
I LOVE this drama..
it’s sooooo coooooooooool !!
if you didn’t watch it.. then do RIGHT NOW !!!
majoodah> heh. I did indeed finish watching it sometime ago.
I don’t love it enough to keep on blogging about it though
Well problem 1 is no problem at all. Surely you’re familiar with the Nigerian scam? They wouldn’t churn them out in all their countless variations if there weren’t people naive enough to fall for them. That part is entirely realistic. And the Japanese are far less suspicious than Americans and Australians. They do a lot more handshake business. As for problem 2, consumer protection laws are much weaker in Japan than most first world nations and there’s no agency vested with enforcing them. Even when someone is doing a clearly illegal swindle and gets caught, white collar criminals in Japan rarely see any jail time as long as they are willing to confess and apologise. The importance of confession in the Japanese legal system is huge. And as for problem 3, civil suits disturb the wa. In Japan people are about 20 times less likely to file a civil suit than an American and ten times less likely than someone from Britain.
David > thank you for your considered comment!
Unlike Nigerian scams these actually involves going out physically and approaching alot of people to find just one gullible person, at the same time having the risk of raising someone’s suspicions and attracting the attention of the authorities. I don’t know about Japanese being far less suspicious though. Perhaps my Chinese/Malaysian/Western background makes me rather untrusting.
2. This is why I find Japanese law so interesting. It’s like a whole different beast altogether. It could never work in a Western system; but Japanese society doesn’t seem on the verge on breakdown even though they have, in the eyes of the West, inadequate laws. I should read up on this sometime.
3. Maybe it’s because access to justice is so difficult, and lawyers are considered to be unapproachably expensive? I doubt the victim would decide not to get back at the swindler through legal means because it wasn’t “nice”. I’m not talking about a business deal gone sour here, where you may want to do repeat games with the same players in the future and have to keep relationships good. This is straight swindling. From the drama, I get the feeling the victim is overwhelmed by his helplessness and lack of a way out more than anything else.
I suppose this is all of a muchness though. I need to go wiki the Japanese legal system before I do another Kurosagi review
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