Before I start, I delayed this post for a few days due to the high peak of work. I am sorry for it.
To compensate for this delay, I came to bring you the most recent love story from Japan with the wonderful soundtrack sung by Hikaru Utada, named First Love. The music is not recent but it was brought back to life with this Drama. As well the Love inside the Drama was connected to this music. A man and a woman retrace their memory of an unforgettable first love. They first met in the 1990’s and grew up together in the 2000’s.
[1st Love] is a Drama about finding the very first and keeping on re meeting your loved one, what are the chances of meeting your soulmate so early? The one that you can not forget and you make the ultimate sacrifice to move to another country.
Satoh Takeru, the Rurouni Kenshin movie actor, has brought us international involvement to our little drama world. He plays the character that has to see his 1st Love and soulmate continue her life, after an accident that erased all her memories and her friends.
The word sacrifice will always be a little too strong. If you really love the person, would you even call it sacrifice? I would rather call sacrifice those domestic abuse situations, where you love the person but you are unable to let them go in spite of the pain they cause you.
But that’s not the case for this Drama. There are some challenges like “if you really love them, you have to let them go and if they come back , they are yours” , I call this the ultimate belief. In this situation, the pain is caused by the act of letting go.
This Drama main action is situated in Sapporo, Hokkaido. Yae Noguchi (Hikari Mitsushima) lost her memory of her 1st Love, the one that was always connected even faraway. Namiki Harumichi, the Yae’s 1st Love. What caused the most pain in Namiki wasn’t the decision to walk out but the fact, they had their first fight and were on the phone making up, when the crash happened, in Tokyo. The fight was about her friends and university colleagues’ behavior being too harsh or direct, which Namiki calls being rude.
For the ones that don’t know , based on my research and readings, this behavior, or complaints about it, are common due to racism and discrimination against the Ainu culture descendants. Of course, this is a very old story due to the pure race beliefs from the past, which have been changing after the second World War.
For me, racism is a double tip blade, just because a person A suffers it doesn’t mean she is allowed to do the same to others. These unique situations are fed by the press and media because they sell more and none tells them they are wrong.
Back to the topic, Hokkaido, Osaka and Okinawa, are the places where you will find more racism and discrimination against Ainu, Burakumin,… etc. However, in the Drama, there is not much evidence if the characters are descendants by any unique origins. They are portrayed as normal people of Japanese society , as they should.
You may recognize the main actress from the “Death Note” movies – Hikari Mitsushima , in my eyes a very good actress.
