Commentary:Three reasons why "Mikami Sensei" was a unique school drama

The final episode of the TBS Sunday Theatre drama " Mikami Sensei " starring Tori Matsuzaka (Sunday 9pm) was broadcast on March 23rd, bringing the drama to a grand finale. The three main characters of Mikami (Matsuzaka), a former Ministry of Education bureaucrat who becomes a teacher at the private Rintoku Academy, Yuzuru (Hotta Mayu), who commits a murder at the National Civil Service Recruitment Examination venue, and Makino ( Mayu Hotta), who works under Tsukada (Mitsuhiro Oikawa ) at the Ministry of Education, all intersect to create a hopeful ending. We looked into the reasons for the success of "Mikami Sensei," which has been talked about as an "unusual school drama," from comments made by those involved.

◇ Producer Iida, a graduate of the Faculty of Education, has strong feelings about school dramas

The drama is an original "great reversal education revival story" in which Takashi Mikami (Matsuzaka), a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology who wants to change education in Japan, teaches at a private high school and leads 18-year-old high school students living in the Reiwa era while standing up to authority. The script is written by Roba Shimori, who will be teaming up with Matsuzaka for the first time since the film "The Journalist" (2019). Kazutaka Iida, who has been in charge of popular Sunday Theater dramas such as "Anti-Hero" (2024) and "VIVANT" (2023), served as producer.

The first reason for its success is producer Iida's strong passion for school dramas.

"The idea of ​​making it a school story was brought to us by Producer Iida, who graduated from a university's faculty of education and also has a teaching qualification," revealed Shimori, who was in charge of the script.

Iida had a desire to become a school teacher after watching the episode of the fifth series of Kinpachi Sensei, in which Shunsuke Kazama plays Kenjiro Kanesue. He had been thinking about doing a school drama one day, when he came across the video of "18 Festival" (2016) by ONE OK ROCK, who wrote the theme song for this drama. He saw the video during the COVID-19 pandemic and was moved by the sight of 1,000 young people shedding tears and screaming with all their might, which led him to come up with the idea for this drama.

Iida said, "I really long for Kinpachi," and thought that if the content of the drama was a school drama set in the present day, "I wouldn't be able to surpass that longing." So he said, "I thought of a new approach with Shimori, and made her a teacher who is a bureaucrat."

As a result of this, the series moved away from the "teacher vs. student" framework of previous school dramas and broke new ground for "school stories" by showing teachers and students uniting to take on evil and social problems.

◇The script was written last year, so I was able to work backwards to play the role.

Another reason is that the script was written up to the final episode last year, so the cast was able to act by "counting backwards" from the end. This gave each character more depth.

Another advantage was that all 29 students were selected through auditions. The audition script included "scenes with Mikami (Matsuzaka) and Kanzaki (Daiken Okudaira), and scenes with Kanzaki and Jigen (Airu Kubozuka). For the female cast, there were scenes with Tominaga (Aju Makita) and Shinonome (Juri Kosaka). We also had everyone act out scenes with Kanzaki, Tominaga and Jigen, so about four different scenarios," according to Iida. After the selections were made, "we fleshed out the characters by adding the characteristics of the people chosen."

Although the role is that of an 18-year-old high school student, the 29 actors were chosen based on their acting ability and the personality that best suited the character, without being too concerned about age. This was also possible because the script was written first.

◇ Mikami Sensei guides students to "think" about a consistent theme

Another reason is that the theme was clear. "The personal is political," which Shimori says is "a fairly everyday phrase for me," has been depicted as part of the story.

The characters were faced with a series of current social issues, such as textbook screening, menstrual poverty, young carers, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Instead of giving them solutions, Mikami Sensei encouraged them to "think" and worry about the issues for themselves, leading them to grasp the problems for themselves.

The setting of Rintoku Gakuin as the prefecture's top academic high school must have helped to realistically portray the school's culture of valuing student autonomy and self-reliance, and the students' ability to "think" and take action on their own.

"Mikami Sensei" has reached its final episode, but perhaps we viewers should continue to "think" about the last words that the students of class 2 received from Mikami Sensei:"An unanswered question." This was an excellent drama that conveyed such an important message about life.