"Tetsu Ota Michiko, 2 Man Kiro" drama, episode two recap

 

 Air Dates: January 8th until March 26, 2022 on TV Tokyo, Saturday nights at 12:52 pm

 Also goes by the title Tetsu Ota Michiko, 20,000 kilometers

Episodes are 24 minutes in length and subs were done by aoinousagi at DA

Main Cast: Tina is in 100% of the scenes so she's the only character, if any guest stars have a decent amount of screen time will add their names in for that episode.

 Tina Tamashiro as Michiko Ogane.... Woman about 25 in age who works as a sales rep for a very prestigious furniture company in Tokyo and appears to be doing very well at it. Michiko's passion is trains and that's where the title of the drama comes from, Tetsu Ota can mean a train otaku or huge fan of railways. Have only viewed the two shows so will need to update this bio but it seems Michiko will be spending all of her free time in these shows travelling to different locations in Japan on a train and she really knows the history of Japan's railway system.

 Railroad lingo: Here's a few words or acronyms that we've seen so far and think they'll be in future shows too, will probably be adding to this list.

JNR- Stands for the Japanese National Railway system which was in operation from 1949 to 1987.

DECMO- Diesel Electric Car with Motors, aka H100.

Ekiben- Boxed lunches(Bento) which are sold at railway stations.

Tetsu Ota- As mentioned it refers to someone being a complete railroad fanatic.

 

 You probably would never see dramas like this in America as I doubt there's any of these unique trains or routes, possibly in some remote region out West? There is a spinoff from this series called "Tetsu Ota Nozomi" and that's the name of an Michiko sends her travel photos to. We haven't met Nozomi after two shows but if she has a spinoff series then would presume we would sooner or later. That first show Michiko took a trip to a remote region of Hokkaido but least there were a few people around, didn't think there was one other soul until halfway through this episode.

 Episode title: Ojika Kogen Station

 The location in this show was the city of Nikko which isn't too small with a population of 80,000. But it's huge area wise so there's some very desolate areas and one of them is where Michiko has decided to take her next uneventful journey. The city is in the prefecture of Tochigi which is north of Tokyo and just about a hundred miles away, much closer than travelling to Hokkaido as this will just be a one day trip for Michiko and there's still been no mention of her employment which is as a sales rep.

 The name of the station is Ojika Kogen and it has a unique trivia fact that was even written about in a recent book about the Japanese rail history. The station has the least amount of passengers who visit the place as less than a hundred people a year depart from the train when it stops there. Makes you wonder why there's even a station there and later on when Michiko did a bit of scouting around there was virtually nothing in the area. But it's stations and rail lines like this which interest Michiko the most as they kind of have their own 'identity' and least the scenery was nice to look at. In the fourth screenshot above is a man named Norio on the left. He's an editor of the travel magazine Michiko sends her photos to and he's also a railway fanatic.

 Trains do go by this station every two hours and what a small place it was, most people's bedrooms could be larger. So after a brief stroll around it was lunchtime for Michiko who it seems will always have an interesting Ekiben aka railway station lunch. She got that at her previous stop and while enjoying her meal what should take place but another person passing through the station. It was a younger girl who you can see above and below, checked so many sites but no clue on who played the character whose name is Karen. She appeared to be about sixteen in age and was taking so many photos of the train tracks, station and other interesting things in the area.

 Michiko began to follow this girl around the area as it was still another hour until the next train would arrive. To her surprise this Karen was also a railways enthusiast and they struck up a friendship immediately, like Michiko Karen also lives in Tokyo. Karen seemed much more interested in the remote area than Michiko was and as she said later on there really are so many of these remote areas in Japan even though it's such a tiny country. On their stroll through the small village they finally met a person who is above, it was an older woman who ran a cafe and grocery store which can't get much business and the pair stopped for a while so this woman would have one person to talk to that day!

 There was a bit more dialogue the last ten minutes but what I've noticed in these two shows there will be long stretches when zero is said. It's back to Tokyo for the two 'Tetsu Ota's' and at sixteen Karen seemed a bit young to be such a fanatic about trains. But like Michiko she knows so much and during their trip back to Tokyo they talked non stop about the city's train system, new routes, stations and many other things to do with railways. And of course as you can see above they also had to get some stamp books from stations they rarely visit. This may be the only time we see Karen in this series and hope we have more interesting guest characters in future shows.

 For this trip to the city of Nikko Karen had slipped out of her house as her parents had forbidden her from going on trains until her exams were done. She was supposed to be in cram school that weekend but the allure of taking a train trip to a remote area was too much to pass up! So this show ended with Karen waiting for her parents and Michiko did say she would talk with them if there were any problems. She did get Karen's contact number so perhaps we will hear from this young girl once again. That wraps up this mini recap and kind of glad they are shorter as I've got 3-4 other dramas that are about to be started and recapped. Have done another series which Aoinousagi has subbed and they're quick about doing them so the next pair of posts for this series should be in less than two weeks.