The NHK Taiga drama “Doesuru Ieyasu” (Sunday, 20:00) will finally kick off on the 8th, in which Arashi’s Jun Matsumoto will play Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo shogunate. After the previous work “Seiten wo Tsuke” (with Ryo Yoshizawa) and the previous work “13 people in Kamakura-dono” (with Shun Oguri), Sports Hochi and NHK staff will share the thoughts of the cast and other production teams , and program highlights and so on.
The drama follows the life of Tokugawa Ieyasu, whom everyone knows, from a different perspective. In Japan’s history, pioneering countries, such as the Oshu-Fujiwara clan in the Middle Ages and the Shimazu clan in the Azuchi-Momoyama period, have few points of contact with enemy countries and can easily amass power. However, Mikawa Province (present-day eastern Aichi Prefecture) in the late Muromachi period was different. Surrounded by big names like Yoshimoto Imagawa (Mansai Nomura), Shingen Takeda (Hiroshi Abe) and Nobunaga Oda (Junichi Okada), tomorrow’s fate is also uncertain. Who to trust, who to bond with, who to fight with, you are always forced to make the ultimate choice.
The first subtitle is “What to do with Okehazama”. One of the famous battle, “Battle of Okehazama” in 1560 is depicted. Ieyasu (at this point Motoyasu Matsudaira) fought in the front lines of the Imagawa army. If “something” happens to the General during that period, what is the correct way to behave? Start with a heavy scene.
In an interview the other day, Matsumoto rated Matsudaira’s army, including himself, as “a useless prince and a bunch of trash.” Tadatsugu Sakai (Nao Omori), Kazumasa Ishikawa (Yutaka Matsushige), Tadayo Okubo (Shinya Kote) and other veteran samurai Mikawa are playful rural samurai in the early stages. Certainly, when I imagine those days, the vassals of Okazaki (the stronghold of the Matsudaira clan) may have felt no different as peasants than the warriors of Sunpu, the great city ruled by Imagawa. If you stop to think about it, you will feel that the world and setting of this work is “maybe like this”.
Attention should be paid to audience trends. “Seiten”, which used Ieyasu Tokugawa (Kinya Kitaoji) as a navigation player and explained modern times in an easy-to-understand way in the tea house, boasted a high rating from the domestic audience. “Kamakura-dono”, which comically depicts the darkness of human beings with high-level conversational drama and repeated conspiracies, has shown a record of careless distribution and stability that is not affected by any counterprogram.
The function appears in the first transmission. From the beginning of “Seiten-“, “Good evening, I’m Ieyasu Tokugawa”. In “Kamakura-dono”, Hojo Tokimasa (Bando Yajuro) threw a modern word “Kubichompa” and became a hot topic on SNS. Looking back on it later, I realize it was a scene that epitomized the whole play.
This work is likely to have a lot of chanbara among idols that are popular among women, as it is a pattern of the times. I can’t wait to see how conditions that weren’t there in the previous two works affect it.
(NHK, Masaki Uramoto)
