Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Kimi ha Petto
(きみはペット / Kimi ha Petto / You’re My Pet)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

When I first heard of this story, I wasn’t sure whether to watch it because it sounded kind of weird – a woman keeping a younger man as a ‘pet’… I mean, what should I be imagining there?
However, this drama was recommended to me by a friend who is a huge MatsuJun fan and she told I just HAD to watch it so I guess that’s why it was on my list. I was a bit anxious for it to be really old and cringy because it’s from 2003… but it actually gave me the real golden oldie good J-Drama feeling. I finished it in two days, because as the usual J-Drama goes, it was only 10 episodes.

Let’s start with a summary. The story is about 29-year old journalist Iwaya Sumire (played by Matsuyama Koyuki), a career woman with a cold exterior. She hasn’t loved anyone as much as she loved the dog she owned when she was a kid, and her length and her focus on career rather than expressing her emotions has led many of her boyfriends feeling inferior to her. The drama starts with Sumire talking to a psychologist about her lack of emotions and the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her – actually he also knocked up the girl with whom he was cheating on her. After this, she also gets degraded to another department at work.
When she comes home one night, she finds a cardboard box in front of the mansion she lives in. When she peeks inside, she sees a young boy curled up, pretty beaten up. Not sure what she should do, she drags the cardboard box up to her apartment and takes care of the boy, fully expecting him to be gone the next day when she comes home from work. Yet, he is still there, in front of the TV, saying he has nowhere else to go and needs a place to stay. And he’s willing to do anything. In an attempt to scare him off, Sumire suggests then she’ll take him in as her pet; and treat him like an actual pet. To her astonishment, he instantly agrees. She decides to call him Momo, after her old dog, not aware of who he really is at all.
His real name is Goda Takeshi (played by Matsumoto Jun), 21 years old and actually a talented ballet dancer striving to go to Germany for an education in dance. He’s currently involved in a modern dance group where he volunteers as a kind of special guest performer.
‘Momo’ and Sumire find a special kind of comfort in one another, without it leading to a romantic relationship, but how long will this last? And when Sumire suddenly meets her old crush and senpai Hasumi Shigehito (played by Tanabe Seiichi) and things start developing quickly, how will they keep their peculiar companionship a secret? How do you explain something that feels good for the two of you but will definitely sound crazy to other people?

In the end, the story is about two people that are pulled to one another but can’t really pinpoint what their connection is and set off on a whole new kind of relationship. It was really nice to see a different kind of intimate relationship that wasn’t purely based on romance or lust.
It certainly is a peculiar relationship. The only one on Sumire’s side who knows about it is her best (and only) friend Shirotae Yuri (played by Suzuki Sarina), a stay-at-home mom with a young daughter. She constantly tries to encourage Sumire to put herself out there, but Sumire is too withdrawn to ever take the leap.

Let me say something about the casting and the characters first before I go on in more detail about what I thought about the story and the deeper meanings.
I had never seen Koyuki in any drama before (when searching I found that she’s married to Matsuyama Kenichi whom I do know), but I think she was a good choice for the role. She fit the role description really well, she was this tall, beautiful person but at the same time her personality can’t be more different from her looks. She might look like all that, but she’s actually very socially awkward. When people are nice to her, she freezes and it looks like she’s really upset but actually she just doesn’t know how to respond to compliments. I think she nailed the combination of the way Sumire wants to look to the outside versus how she really is inside. I think her character is very interesting because of these layers. She’s not like the typical drama heroine who has her act together and stands up for the weak and knows exactly what she wants. Her awkwardness makes her really humane. She can’t express herself well, when it comes to people she likes she tends to become the person others want her to be rather than accepting who she is on the inside. She’s called things like ‘android’, ‘Noh-mask’ and ‘kokeshi’ (google it) because she can’t express her emotions in front of other people. Home is the only place she feels safe and after she meets Momo, he becomes part of that safe place. After she starts to keep Momo, she realizes how much she misses coming home to someone. Having someone wait for her at home, someone saying ‘welcome home’ who is genuinely happy she’s back. Momo becomes the one Sumire comes home to and that brings her a lot of happiness and strength. She’s always happy to come home to him, because at home with Momo she doesn’t have to hold herself back anymore.
Honestly, I’ve not seen Matsumoto Jun in any other role than Domyouji in Hana Yori Dango, so I always feel a bit weird watching him play any other role. However, seeing him as Momo in this drama really surprised me in a good way. He performed really well. He created a great balance between ‘Momo’, the happy but selfish pet that always flew towards Sumire as soon as she came home, and ‘Takeshi’, the whimsical young boy who wasn’t used to staying in one place for long and had a bit of a mysterious vibe around him. Most of the time he would act cheerful, but you could always feel there was something behind it. And he played out those layers really well.
While Sumire gets her kicks out of having someone at home waiting for her to return, Momo on the other hand gets a feeling of value and necessity from Sumire. He grew up in a rich family so he didn’t actually get to properly live in a house by himself (he usually crashes at people’s places and lives off them for a while until he moves out to find someplace else). He’s clumsy at household chores, he can’t cook, he can’t even properly wash his own hair in the bath – and with Sumire, that’s all okay and taken care of without judgement. He’s happy that Sumire only cries in front of him, that he’s the only one to see that side of her and more. But of course this starts to get in the way at some point, when his feelings become more than just affection as a pet towards its owner (it feels weird even writing this about two humans). In any case, he’s not used to being relied on or providing someone with a feeling of need, and he gets hooked on this feeling.

Initially, Sumire can’t be happier that her senpai whom she’s had a crush on since years before finally returns to her company and shows interest in her from the get-go. Their relationship progresses quite fast, all within less than two months (because I think when Momo eventually leaves Sumire thanks him for the ‘last one and a half month’? So it happens in-between there?), and Hasumi-senpai is so eager he even proposes to her before the end of the series, so convinced is he in their relationship. By this time, Sumire is kind of confused because she’s had multiple situations in which Momo has ‘misbehaved’ and even kissed her, so she feels like she can’t say yes without any mixed feelings. Even though she does like him a lot, it didn’t seem to me like it was completely mutual. It was very obvious from Hasumi-senpai’s side, but Sumire was still really stiff around him, constantly apologizing and still not able to fully express herself. She couldn’t even bring herself to tell him she liked him to his face – whereas in the case of Momo, she could say it like it was no issue at all.
Of course, the main thing we learn from dramas is that people are eventually drawn to the person they feel most comfortable with and with whom they can feel like themselves the most. It’s quite obvious that Sumire feels more at ease around Momo, but she still won’t admit to her feelings for him. Even at the very end of the series, she won’t define it as a romantic relationship. She won’t define herself and Momo as ‘lovers’, because it’s still a bit different from that.

What I liked about their relationship is the fact that it’s different. People around them might need an explanation, it needs to be defined as something, but for the two of them it’s enough to just be together and care for each other. It’s something that makes sense to just the two of them and I think it’s admirable to have something that might make no sense to others but it doesn’t matter because all that matters is how the two people in the relationship experience it. Asian dramas are always such sticklers to ‘proper relationships’, so I think it’s actually a nice change. I like to watch a relationship that kind of boils under the surface for a long time until it bursts out in one way or another and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for it. There’s always too much talking about ‘why’ and ‘how’, while sometimes feelings can’t be categorized. Everyone feels differently. Although this drama is from 2003, I think the idea behind it is quite contemporary to current times. Nowadays there are so many different kind of relationships, I mean, just simple dating isn’t even mainstream anymore. And while of course in the beginning I couldn’t help but frown while watching Momo be treated like a dog, but soon after I just smiled whenever they were spending time together at home. Watching it, it didn’t feel weird at all. Something only becomes weird when people make it weird themselves. I just felt like dropping that here for a moment.

Of course, as is usual in dramas, there is always an evil female bitch character that tries to screw up everyone’s relationships for her own greed. In this case, this was Fukushima Shiori (played by Sakai Wakana), one of Sumire’s colleagues at work. She’s the typical acts-cute-at-the-office-but-will-spit-in-your-coffee-behind-your-back kind of girl. Talking in an annoyingly fake high-pitched voice, her true nature only came out to Sumire when they met in the bathroom to powder their noses. Shiori is after Hasumi-senpai and – pretty much like Nomura-san in Minami-kun no Koibito – repeatedly tries to force herself on him, luckily to no effect whatsoever. She can’t take a hint even after Hasumi-senpai tells her like three times that he likes Sumire. One thing I really couldn’t understand was that she later asks Momo for help and she literally says ‘I don’t want anything serious, I just want Hasumi-senpai right now’. As in, you’re willing to get yourself involved in people’s relationships and break people apart for something you’re not even serious about? What the hell is your problem? This is the kind of female character that I dislike the most in drama series; the kind that seems to have no self-worth at all since she only wants to have sex with the guy and still tries to butt into everybody’s business for no reason. Even when she told her background story that explained her greed for attention (something about being the last child in her family and never getting any attention, so now she would do anything to get what she wanted), I didn’t feel anything for her but dislike.
She literally says to Hasumi-senpai ‘I don’t care that you don’t like me, I can’t give up on you so please just one time, sleep with me’. Like, ho? Do you want people to think you’re cheap? You’re actually asking him to sleep with you because you want him to feel sorry for you? In the end she even stalks him all the way to Rio de Janeiro. Poor Hasumi-senpai.

It was a real mature choice of Sumire to finally tell Hasumi the truth. It took a lot of courage, she knew the outcome and did it anyway because she couldn’t just get married to him without letting him know. He reacted like any outsider would – confused and kind of disgusted – but in the end he still came back to her to make amends. However, during their talk he changes his mind after all. He didn’t have the intention of breaking up with her, but he still realized she cared a lot about Momo and this relationship was not something he could get in-between. I couldn’t dislike his character, even though sometimes I was a bit thrown off by how he semi-forced himself onto Sumire a couple of times. In the end he was a good guy, a bit dense (especially when it came to Shiori’s attempts to get into his pants), but a good guy. And he genuinely liked Sumire, even her awkward sides. But the fact that she never fully opened up to him was a problem.
The thing is, it’s not easy to just open up to people when they ask you to. It’s something that happens automatically when you’re surrounded by the right people, sometimes you can’t control that. You can’t fake feeling comfortable around someone you don’t truly feel comfortable with. And I’ve seen it in many dramas before, there’s a difference between the feelings you get with a person you’re crushing on like crazy (you become stiff, you don’t what to say etc.) and a person that feels like family and with whom you don’t feel any boundaries to be yourself around.
Momo felt like home. Even though he is a complete stranger, from day one on she’s able to cuddle him and pet him and press him to her chest as if he’s her own child because she is reflecting her feelings for her old dog onto him. I don’t know how she does it, but she seems able to ignore the fact that he’s a random stranger she doesn’t know anything about.
For Momo at first it’s just a good opportunity since he needs a place to stay until he has to leave for Germany, but he starts to get greedy. Greedy for the feeling to be needed. Greedy for the fact that only he knows the true Sumire. And he eventually lets that part of his feelings out, causing new strains on this already unusual relationship.

One character that ultimately was pretty important I think, even though he started out as a kind of comical character, was the psychologist Sumire was seeing. He ends up working as an office psych at Sumire’s office and they occasionally meet in the elevator where he gives her some speech about the relationship between humans compared to humans’ relationship with their pets. He carries a little dog with him all the time which he gives another name every day. He claims that he is only able to love his pet, not any other person, and when Sumire visits him to talk about her ‘pet’ Momo-chan (and he naturally thinks she’s talking about a dog), he starts feeling like he and Sumire share a common ground. However, he too grows, as he gets closer to a girl from the coffee house downstairs. Their relationship is also peculiar in its own way, because we don’t really see what happens between them, but they still really seem to connect.
In the end, Momo is about to leave for Germany and the psych and his girlfriend also happen to be at the airport. Through something Momo carries with his luggage (a Noh-mask) and something he says in passing, Mr. psych suddenly realizes that he is the Momo Sumire has been talking about and he calls out to him and gives him a speech that makes Momo realize his home is with Sumire and he decides to stay anyway.
Through all of his weird speeches, the psych is finally able to connect the dots and encourage the right person to do the right thing.

One thing I can’t forget to mention is that I had no idea that Satomi-chan was in this drama!! Ishihara Satomi is my favorite Japanese actress and to see her here as a 16-year old girl was so amazing! She played Takeshi’s ex-girlfriend and fellow dance group member Shibusawa Rumi, the typical jealous ex-girlfriend who was still really in love with Takeshi. Looking at her roles nowadays, I’d say she’s advanced a lot. Takeshi’s other friend and fellow dance member Horibe Junpei was played by Eita, whom I also like. It was really cool to see some familiar actors that I know from more recent dramas who looked really young here! That was a nice extra for me, haha.

Honestly, after watching Minami-kun no Koibito before this I started doubting why I ever liked Japanese dramas, (my Arashi fan friend told me that the old version of Minami-kun no Koibito -the one with Nino- is way better than the 2015 version, so maybe I’ll try and watch it sometime to feel better. I hope I just watched the wrong version), but after watching this I realized. This. This is why.
It had the nostalgic J-Drama feel to it, the nostalgic Hana Yori Dango type drama feeling. The acting was natural, the characters were all well-layered and fun to watch and it portrayed an unusual but still mature and interesting relationship.
Although the whole keeping-a-human-as-a-pet-thing was a bit weird, but the story still played out really realistically. The main characters dealt with their embarassment about the situation and came to a conclusion about their relationship together as adults.
This drama finally made me realize that it’s not that I don’t like Japanese dramas anymore. I LOVE Japanese dramas that are about adults facing social problems and relationships. I’m just really over high school dramas with wannabe cute girls and awkward boys and ‘relationships’ that don’t go further than holding hands because both parties are too embarrassed. Thank you for this! I really enjoyed it and I found new motivation to keep watching Japanese dramas in the future.

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Minami-kun no Koibito
( 南くんの恋人 / Minamikun no Koibito / Minami-kun’s Lover)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello! Back with another review, this time I watched another short Japanese drama. I watch very few Japanese dramas these days; when you are used to K-Dramas, J-Dramas suddenly seem all the more corny and innocent. This was one of those dramas that made me realize how far I’ve come with watching series. It was probably on my list because it looked cute and I used to love these kind of Japanese romantic innocent love stories, so I was curious.

Let me first start with a summary of the story. Minami-kun no Koibito follows the life of Horikiri Chiyomi (played by Yamamoto Maika), a high school girl that loves dancing and is secretly writing an online novel under the pseudoynym Moon Rabbit Michaela. She used to be really close to her neighbor, Minami Shunichi (played by Nakagawa Taishi), and as kids they even promised to stay together forever. However, when Shunichi’s father left him and his mother he started to distance himself and currently he and Chiyomi are not even on regular speaking terms as they’ve grown apart too much.
Despite this, Chiyomi still regularly thinks about how close they used to be and wonders why Shunichi suddenly started acting so cold to her (she was not aware of the circumstances surrounding his father’s departure).
One day one of Chiyomi’s best friends Takagi Riku (played by Suzuki Mirai) confesses to her and initially she’s happy, but then she sees Shunichi with the most popular girl in school Nomura Sayori (played by Nakayama Erina) and realizes that she’s still in love with him. That same night it gets really stormy and after fighting with both her parents about her future and with Shunichi in the street (he says some horrible things such as that he’s come to hate her and that’s why he ignores her now), she runs away and hides in a cave, wishing to go back to that time when they were little and still close. She passes out when lightning strikes and when she wakes up the next morning, she’s about 10 centimeters tall.
The cave she’s hiding in used to be a place where she and Shunichi used to hang out as kids a lot and Shunichi eventually figures she might’ve gone there. He finds her and keeps her with him as Chiyomi doesn’t know how to go home and explain this to her family.
As what happened to Chiyomi sounds a lot like a story they grew up with, the local legendof the ‘One-inch Princess’, they try to find a solution to get Chiyomi back to her regular size. In the meantime, spending a lot of time together Chiyomi and Shunichi gradually get closer again until eventually they both admit to their lingering feelings to each other.

To start off, I wish to say that I have some admiration for Japanese series like this that portray an utterly fictional and bizarre situation in which the people in the story act like it’s no big deal at all. I had the same feeling with Switched (read my review here); something completely crazy happens and the people deal with it like it’s just another daily obstacle they need to live with. If I were to wake up suddenly 10 cm tall I would be like ‘WTF??!!’ and not like ‘Oh, hey, look, I became the one-inch princess :D’ I mean, she actually SMILED for a second there. Also, Chiyomi handled being small really well and at a certain point I started to wonder whether she even really disliked being small, or if she even understood that what was happening to her wasn’t a joke or a dream and that she had to take some real action to get back to normal rather than get used to wearing doll clothes and dancing around between the flower pots on Shunichi’s balcony.

The story in itself is not to be taken seriously, of course. It’s fiction, it’s a cute little love story and it’s not realistic. But even in these stories I like to look for the messages and lessons that can be taken from it. For example, Chiyomi’s will to achieve her dreams. She loves to dance, she was willing to go all the way to Tokyo for a workshop – the speech she gives to her parents the night she runs away from home about her knowing what she wants was one of the most mature moments of her character. Of course, she’s only a high school student so one can debate on how much she truly already understands about what she wants. But she has the determination.
She helps her parents reconcile through the phone because she has the determination. She doesn’t give up on her feelings for Shunichi because of her determination, which in the end results in him finally opening up to her about his feelings as well. She single-handedly manages to achieve her dreams. She ends up with the guy she loves, and she is able to become a dancer while continuing her online novel writing.

As much as I couldn’t take the story seriously, there were really amusing moments. Chiyomi keeps in touch with her family through Shunichi’s tablet on which she types messages by jumping on the keyboard keys and records video messages with one of Shunichi’s handkerchiefs as the backdrop to fool everyone into thinking she went to the workshop in Tokyo.
Also, personally I loved Shunichi’s grandmother, played by Tsunogae Kazue. She’s the one who told young Chiyomi and Shunichi the story about the One-inch Princess. At the end of the show it’s shown that she’s starting to show symptoms of dementia, mistaking Shunichi for his father and such.

However, I did find the writing of the series really disappointing. The dialogues weren’t entertaining enough for me, the urge to fix the problem was postponed and sometimes even substituted to emphasize the relationship between Chiyomi and Shunichi, even though that was the most obvious thing in the whole series. I mean, we know from episode 1 on that they’re going to end up together and the tension between them is already established sufficiently from the start. I would’ve liked to see more despair from Chiyomi’s side regarding the whole situation. To make the story more realistic, even with a strange thing happening, the character should have reacted more realistically in my opinion. When you suddenly see someone you know turned into a one-inch doll, I don’t think the first thing anyone would say is ‘Oh my god you’re so cute!’ I would be like, ‘What the freck happened to you?!?!’ The lack of realistic response is something that bothered me, because it made it even harder for me to take it seriously.
Besides the writing, the acting also wasn’t that great. This doesn’t count for everyone, because there were enough older experienced actors in it, such as the grandmother I mentioned before, but I really didn’t think Yamamoto Maika’s acting was that great, for example. How she portrayed her emotions was really basic, and as I said before in Chiyomi’s responses there were a lot of moments where I thought… man, she looks relaxed? I would be going crazy at this point? Like constantly making jokes about how she now fitted in tiny places and stuff and how she got to eat tiny plates of leftover food with a spoon. It reminded me of Kero-chan from Cardcaptor Sakura sometimes. Anyways, it didn’t feel natural to me. But that might have also been because of the bad script.

Something that bothered me as well was the sexualization of Nomura Sayori. As mentioned before, she’s the most popular girl at school, her father owns a hospital so she’s rich and her nickname at school is ‘Pheromone’ because of her feminine charms. But it got a bit out of hand in my opinion. She was written as an overbearing sexual female character, someone who’s used to wrapping guys around her finger. She’s probably used to that working, but once she falls for Shunichi, she repeatedly forces herself on to him, even to the point of deciding they’re dating without even asking for his consent. Shunichi is not used to being treated like a dominant girl like this, and she uses his innocence and inability to articulate his feelings continually as a ‘yes’ (toxic femininity?). When he ultimately gets his act together and tells her he likes Chiyomi (in a really decent and polite way) she acts like he’s a jerk who cruelly dumped her and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry, but she didn’t have any right to act pitiful. She even let herself into his house when he was sick and tried to kiss him while he was asleep and tried to kiss him multiple times after driving him into a corner etcetera… I call that sexual harassment and the girl needs to know her boundaries.
One time she lets herself into his house again and starts this whol sob-story about her mom leaving her to Shunichi’s mom and it might have been just her acting, but I didn’t buy it at all. Also, I remember one time she was amused with Shunichi’s behavior and her laughter was so incredibly fake? Like, I honestly didn’t know if this was just bad acting or it was on purpose but it was not good either way.
Nomura’s theme song was this kind of sensual saxophone music, every time she appeared this music started to play. How much of an eroticized female character did they really need in this drama? It would’ve been enough to just identify her as a competent love rival, they didn’t need all this extra seduction stuff to make her a threat to Chiyomi and Shunichi’s relationship. It made me feel really uncomfortable.

Also, Chiyomi’s little sister Asuka (played by Yoshida Riko) was way too eager as well. She kept going after guys that were close to her sister. First she was all ‘I don’t mind if it’s you that touches me, Minami-kun’ to Shunichi, and afterwards she went after Riku for some reason. I don’t know what the writers were thinking with the female characters in this series.

And the last bad thing I’m going to say about the writing is at the end, when Chiyomi tells Shunichi that they shouldn’t be together because she’ll never be able to make him happy and Shunichi is hit by a car. I don’t know how blind the people in the car were, but they could’ve seen Shunichi standing on the middle of the road from a mile away. It was just really weird that they sped on while they could see him right in front of them, and that Shunichi responded so late to the increasingly loud sound of an approaching car. Also, Chiyomi’s mother who was hiding while trying to find out what Shunichi was doing just ‘happened’ to not see or hear the car coming as well. That was just bad. It didn’t make any sense.

I did find it funny that in the end, the most predictable way to lift a spell (true love’s kiss) was actually the way to lift the spell. Chiyomi mentions it once in the beginning as a suggestion (‘I wonder if being kissed by a prince will turn me back to normal?’) and Shunichi brushes the idea off.
In the end, when Shunichi is in the hospital after being hit by the beforementioned car (#dramatropes) Chiyomi kisses him twice: the first time he wakes up from his coma, and the second time she turns back to her regular size.
Come to think of it, there was a lot of kissing for a typical Japanese drama. Also, more than usual, a lot of sexual tension in different situations. Japanese dramas are usually really prude when it comes to expressing these kind of feelings and sensations, so I was a bit surprised. To add this weird kind of maturity to a fantasy children’s story gave me real mixed feelings. I was confused: did they really intend to make it a cute innocent love story while adding in so much sexual innuendos? It was a bit awkward at times. It went from ‘ah it’s like a fairy tale’ to ‘wait she’s sexually assaulting him now’ to ‘ahh true love’s kiss’ to ‘they are way too young to get married’.
It’s shown that they get married right after graduation, one year after the whole incident, so they must be like 18/19 years old. I mean, I get that you made a cute childhood promise about staying together forever that you rediscovered but this… is not realistic. It simply isn’t.

The one person who showed the best acting for me in this drama was Nakagawa Taishi. I hadn’t seen him in any drama before (honestly, when I started watching I thought Fukushi Sota was the male lead). But he showed some versatility, even it was just within Chiyomi’s imaginary scenarios and dreams. Shunichi doesn’t seem to be a very challenging role but he still managed to give him layers.
Despite this, the fact that his attitude changed from ‘I hate you’ to ‘actually I never stopped loving you’ was kind of weird. I mean, it really seemed like he’d come to hate Chiyomi in the beginning, they were so far apart, and in the end he suddenly says ‘I never saw myself marrying anyone else’. And when they get Chiyomi back to her normal size he was like ‘Oh man, restraining myself was a mistake, I should’ve kissed you earlier’. I mean, how did he ACTUALLY feel about her? Did he pretend to hate her in the beginning? Or did all that just disappear once he determined his feelings for Chiyomi? Some things really weren’t written very well.

Of course, there is a big happy ending in which Chiyomi turns back to her normal size, and Shunichi proposes to her in the cave where they also made their childhood promise and they get married and Chiyomi becomes a dancing writer and Shunichi goes to his desired college and they live happily ever after.
Where Korean dramas such as Go Back Couple use a fictional event (going back in time) to let two people figure out how much they love and need each other, Minami-kun no Koibito uses this trope to make Chiyomi and Shunichi rediscover their compatibility and forcing Chiyomi into a position where she needs to stay by Shunichi’s side, they start reconnecting and opening up to each other. It needed Chiyomi turning into the one-inch princess to make them realize they needed to be together.

All in all, if you’re in for some light an comical series, it will probably be entertaining. I might be too far into dramas, I pay too much attention to logic and realisticness and good acting to be able to fully enjoy things that don’t completely. make sense. But I still think the writing wasn’t that good, the dialogues weren’t that good, the characters’ reactions to the situation were all kind of unrealistic… Which is a shame because there are some really good Japanese dramas out there. They just love their innocent love stories too much, I think.
To me it seems like this drama too focussed a lot on casting cute girls rather than talented actors and it showed a lot of stereotypical heteronormative behavior. I usually don’t really mind about that last one too much since in Asia they are not as far in that department yet as in Europe, but in this drama it really bothered me how the women were portrayed in contrast to the men. I hope to see more progressive Japanese dramas in the future.

I wish to end on a positive note: it was a funny drama, and sometimes weird funny dramas are needed. I can keep on nagging about how unrealistic it was, but that’s the whole point of the story. A magical happening resulting in two people reconnecting: that’s the most important thing.

It’s been a while for me since I watched a good Japanese drama, but I will keep adding stuff to my list that seems interesting and the next one on my list is actually also a Japanese drama, so hopefully I won’t lose hope in J-Dramas altogether. It’s kind of interesting to see the differences between J-, K-, and C-dramas and I will keep watching all kinds of series to review so please bear with me!

Until next time!