Zenkai Girl aka Full-Throttle Girl

Yui Aragaki has finally achieved her first lead female role in a J-TV Series. After playing a series of high school sweeties, and ingenues, “Gakki’ has finally been tabbed for a starring role. The series is called Zenkai Girl or Full-Throttle Girl. As we meet her in the opening scenes, she has just graduated from law school and has landed a job at an international law firm.

Yui is cast as Wakaba Ayukawa, and she’s good at everything she does – she graduated at the top of her class, she’s multi-lingual, and she has what is takes to become an ace lawyer. Only her first assignment is to baby-sit her boss’s five year old daughter, who is five going on 30, or so it seems.

Wakaba is driven because as child she grew up in rather desperate circumstances – her father was in debt from gambling to the Yakuza loan-sharks.

Little Wakaba got them out from under this by studying and then filing a motion and getting a decree for Voluntary Bankruptcy. That set her on her path of wanting to be lawyer and for seeing anything that she took on to its finish. In her own personal lexicon, there was no such thing as not finishing anything to the best of her ability.

But she hadn’t counted on taking a smart-ass five year old girl to pre-school every day. However everything was not all bad. At the law firm every once in a while she got to do a project, or a report, or a translation of a law-brief, and people took notice of her skills. At the pre-school she ran into a single parent Dad whose step-son also attended this school. This was Ryo Nishido as Sota Yamada , a would-be chef.

His story was no picnic either. He married a dancer who came with a son, another precocious 5 year old. But that marriage ended with a divorce after his wife ran off to New York with another guy, leaving Sota with her son. He currently worked as a short-order cook in a little hole-in-the-wall neighborhood restaurant. Sota had formerly worked at the internationally acclaimed, world class restaurant, Paul Bocuse, in Tokyo – but had given that up to raise his step-son.

Wakaba tells little Hinata: "I hate children"

Hanamizuki

Hanamizuki [Flowering Dogwood - and tag-lined: May your love bloom for 100 years] will mostly likely not last 100 months in your memory. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch and enjoy it for what it is – a sweet drama with appealing actors and actresses in situations that we all can identify with.

The star of the film is Yui Aragaki who is affectionately known as ‘Gakki‘ by her legion of fans. In this film she’s the central character. As the film opens it is in the early 1980′s and a small Japanese girl is reaching upward to the blossoms on the tree. Flash forward to 2005, and we find ourselves tracking a bus as it drives along the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada.

It is then, on this bus, that we meet Gakki as the now adult Sae Hirisawa. An English speaking young girl ask Sae some questions and we find out that she is headed for a lighthouse where she says, “… I am meant to be…”. The camera pans down and we see a framed photo in her hands.