Blog Matsuri: Over-Complex Drama Organigrams

This is my entry for the July 2009 issue of Japan Blog Matsuri.  The theme this month is “What do you find most unusual, crazy or strange about Japan?”

I rarely watch dramas, in any language.  They are complicated, exagerated, unrealistic, hard-to-follow, and frankly, pointless.  Nonetheless, there are a few Japanese series that caught my attention for their light-hearted storylines and traces of comedy.  “Great Teacher Onizuka” and “Taiho Shichauzo” (“You’re Under Arrest”), both based on series of anime and manga, are some of my favourites, also liked by many addicts of Japanese dramas.

Each drama has its own official Web site, with more information about the episodes, cast, and characters.  One thing that always gets my attention on those sites are the “correlation charts.”  I don’t know if any country other than Japan does this.  Instead of publishing a simple list of actors with the name and the description of the character they each play, they use correlation charts to describe the relationships of the characters before you even see the drama.

A typical chart will have large photos of the main characters and smaller photos of the secondary or irregular characters.  Each photo has the name and the age of the character, with arrows pointing to other characters tagged with a description of their relationships.  Those descriptions could be direct like “married” or “family”, or trying to give you a hint of what may happen between them during the series, “Are they in love with each other?”  Despite all the suspence trying to be depicted by those charts, at first glance, they all look like boring corporate organigrams.  Take a look at the correlation chart pictured above of the drama “Haruka 17,” you’ll see what I mean.

So much complexity for so little.  At the end, most dramas in Japan only last one season of around 10 to 14 episodes.