Orange Days
I’m going to post this with the fore-knowledge that no one is going to watch it. Like I said in my last J-Drama post, I don’t expect anyone here to watch J-dramas unless that person has a prior interest in Japanese culture and language. Maybe that frees me a bit; I don’t have to worry about dropping spoilers. If you’re going to watch this drama, feel free to stop reading, watch, and then come back (One of the links was broken, so I had to watch about fifteen minutes of the last episode with Spanish subtitles. You may need some knowledge of spoken Japanese and Japanese sign language to make that 15 minutes work. 
) If you’re not going to watch this drama, feel free to read and comment–you won’t need to see it to understand the ideas. For those catching up, I’ve been checking out Japanese dramas just to get a feeling of the narrative style of Japanese TV. It’s supposed to help my writing. It’s pretty cool to see media by and about Asian people.
“Orange Days” is about a group of five college students who form a group called the Orange Society. The story focuses on two of the students, Sae Hagio (Shibasaki Kou) and Kai Yuuki (Tsumabuki Satoshi), who fall in love after a mismatched date where Kai steps in for his friend Keita. Sae is a deaf girl with an intense talent for music and a really bad temper, and Kai is a college student who is trying to find what he wants to do with his life. There’s also a side love story between Sae’s best friend Akane and Kai’s friend Shohei, who are part of the same society. The fifth member of the Orange Society is Keita, a goofy “nice guy” who likes Akane but loses out to the comparatively studlier Shohei.
I thought Orange Days was cute. It’s very rare to see this kind of “pure love” in American media, most of which is preoccupied with racier stuff like drugs and sex. I also appreciated that “Orange Days” also moves into questions over life purpose, much like Kamisama Mou Sukoshi Dake. These are questions that I don’t think I ever asked myself when I was young. Maybe I’d be further ahead in life if I had had more exposure to Japanese media.
The visuals were also great. I’m not a big fashion guy; I know little about aesthetics. This drama pushed it to another level. Shohei, Sae, and Akane push fashion to an art form. The acting was awesome. Shibasaki Kou was amazing as a deaf girl, and the last scene was as beautiful as any that I’ve seen in the media.
That being said, unlike the other Japanese dramas I’ve seen, this one really hit me hard with its Japanese-ness (if that’s a word). The dating relationships were really loose, much looser than what is typical in American dating. I found myself a bit flustered at times by the unsureness of who was dating whom and why people didn’t get assertive about being the “only one.” I was surprised by what Kai put up with from Sae. I think in general people from Japanese culture do tend to be a bit more patient than Americans, but the amount of craziness Kai absorbed was beyond anything I’d seen onscreen. Keita’s situation especially saddened me. He never became what he could’ve become in terms of his social life, and his friends weren’t helping him. Shohei pretty much snatched Akane right out of his hands, and he immediately became the double third wheel to both Sae/Kai and Akane/Shohei. The scene in which the group makes promises to the sunset was also very Japanese, both in the words they used and in the whole concept of making vows to oneself as a group.
Which brings me to my conclusion–I wonder if there is such thing as a universal story. I enjoyed this series, but many of the Japanese cultural issues were alienating. Watching it felt like seeing the human condition from another angle. I have long felt a similar feeling when reading Caucasian American literature. The stories are sometimes beautiful, but they’re also sometimes alienating. It’s not that there is anything wrong with them; it’s just that people of different ethnicities have different experiences within our respective cultures, and as a result of our experiences, we sometimes don’t see things the same way. It will be nice in the future to see more stories from people of my own culture.
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Just a random thought: Is it part of Asian culture to have sweet romance stories on TV? I was just thinking of the K-dramas and J-dramas, and I don’t think there is a Western equivalent. At least not anymore. Was there ever a Western equivalent? There are good Western romantic comedies in the theater, but I think the nature of these movies is somewhat different.
I wish my Japanese or Chinese reading skills were up to par. Then I could comment on the literature.