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Hajimemashite minna san....welcome to my site on my fave Japanese Pop Culture likes such as dramas, movies, magazine scans, promo events etc. Mainly concentrate on my faves...Risa Watanabe... Kyoko Saito... Yui Kobayashi....Miyuki Watanabe.... Nene Shida.... if you're a fan at all of any of them then you've come to the right place(!) but many others are featured here besides them. Do mainly quick reviews on things I've watched, try to make the reviews brief, quick to read through with not too many spoilers, just whether they're good or bad and why I thought so plus whether you may find them enjoyable. Many, many screenshots are included from everything I've watched plus any video trailers if they're available. Hope you find something that interests you, don't hesitate to comment, arigato gozaimasu!

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Sunday, January 19, 2020

Yuki Kashiwagi: "Tagarin" drama, episode's one to three recap


 Air Dates: April 13 to June 22, 2013 on Fuji-TV, eleven episodes that only ran for a total of 56 minutes. Link to the Rakuten site which has them on video though not subbed:

 Main Cast:

Yuki Kashiwagi as Ejima Chihiro.... new traffic cop at the North Kaizuka police department and has been assigned to investigate cases the chief doesn't want to make public

Yu Sawabe as Minoru Otagawa.... Detective and Ejima's bumbling immediate superior who works on the case with her. Keya fans should know him from co-hosting the 'Keyakitte' show

Kinako Kobayashi as Maki Kadomatsu... traffic cop who is Ejima's Senpai

Ikkei Watanabe as Hiromi Kuribayashi.... inept assistant professor

 Few others in the cast but very difficult to find out info as there's no Wiki page plus the Fuji site has been taken down.






 I enjoy Yuki dramas as I've watched three others she's had the lead role in plus of course a few other AKB series where she's had a large role. Was looking forward to this show and it was a decent watch but there was one major problem.... the episodes were only 4 1/2 minutes long!!!! The final show was close to thirteen minutes but overall the show just had a running time of 56 minutes and one episode of a Korean drama is even longer.
 But did find this to be a fun show and at least with the episodes being so short it means these recaps will also be. Have three episodes per recap which don't even total fourteen minutes but did take about forty screenshots for the trio so least there will be plenty of pics of Yuki. This series was a takeoff of the "Galileo" drama that aired in 2007, there was also a second season in 2103. There's just one case that will be the focus of this show which has a second title of 'Killing Curse'.

 Yuki is the main star and she plays the character of Ejima Chihiro who is a rookie traffic cop. We'll get to know her much better in a few minutes but first let's start off with an event that opened the show and will be the storyline for all eleven episodes. The location is Kaiei girls high school which is a very elite and strict institution. There we witnessed the seventeen year old student Mai Nakanishi alone in her room slightly after 10:00 pm about to watch a DVD with her headphones, there's a curfew at that time where students aren't allowed to use their computers.
 Mai takes out a video and in shades of 'Ringu' it's titled as a cursed DVD. We can't see what she watches but it terrified her to no end, Mai couldn't take watching it any more and struggled to her room's balcony. There the pain of what she viewed was too much for her and to relieve her pain Mai jumped off the balcony to her death. There was a security guard who witnessed the act and swore that the girl jumped of her own accord. Assigned to the case was detective Otagawa who figured it's an open and shut case of a suicide and was prepared to leave it as that. Didn't work out that way for Otagawa as the following morning he was confronted by a trio of female traffic cops.





 That's Otagawa in the bottom screenshot, the title of the show comes from that group of students giving him the nickname of 'Tagarin'. But before that scene he had been confronted by the female traffic cops who were led by the rookie Ejima. She had just met with the station's chief who wants her to lead secret investigations on crimes he doesn't want to be aired publicly. Her first case is the death of Mai Nakanishi and to Ejima it's not a true suicide but a death caused by watching a cursed video. Otagawa thinks she's full of it but Ejima's two mates believe her too and eventually enlist Otagawa to help them out on the case.
 First line of activity is to visit Kaiei high school to interview Mai's friends and to find out if it truly was a video that caused her to jump to her death. If not could there have been a murderer who remained hidden from the security guard? The trio searched Mai's room and were able to locate the 'cursed' video and Ejima volunteered to view it. Otagawa would hear nothing of it as being their leader it's up to him to view the video and later on he did tell the trio that he did watch it. But nothing has happened to him so the video must not be cursed but as all know it takes seven days for the curse to take effect.
 Otagawa wouldn't tell Ejima what was on the video and to solve the case she figured that her watching it would be very beneficial. Which is what she did though we didn't see too much of what she viewed but we do see more of it towards the end of the series. Not a gruesome video but we did see a person dressed in white who was covered a bit in blood, wasn't too horrifying but it did sent shivers through Ejima. Later on when she asked Otagawa about the video he confessed to not watching it!
 No wonder he was still alive as it had been over seven days since Otagawa said he viewed it. Ejima was a bit mad about his lie but is actually more scared for herself as does it mean she has less than a week to live? With that we've come to the end of the third episode, did stretch it out a bit as the entire length of them was just 13 1/2 minutes. It is an enjoyable show and have already watched every episode but do wish they were just a bit longer, next three posts are for episodes four to thirteen. Still found a way to take many screenshots which should help a bit in following the story but didn't leave any major details outs.
































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