Akari Takaishi plays the heroine in the NHK Asadora drama "Bakebake" (Monday to Saturday, 8:00 AM and other times). Episodes 53 (broadcast December 10th) and 54 (broadcast December 11th) depicted Heaven's (Tommy Bastow) past. We spoke to production manager Hashizume Kuniomi about how they went about crafting Heaven's painful and difficult past into a drama.
In episode 53, Rio (Kana Kita Kana) confesses her feelings to Heaven at a party celebrating her recovery. Heaven is shocked, but before she can respond, she begins to talk about her past. She reveals that she became a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati, USA, and was doing well at her job. She also reveals that she fell in love with a black woman, Martha (Misha Brooks), and married her.
However, in episode 54, Heaven, who married a black man, was fired from her company, and Martha stabbed her landlord with a razor and was arrested by the police. Life with Martha, who had become desperate, continued to go wrong, and Heaven confessed, "I gave up the place I wanted to stay forever with my own hands."
Hashizume said, "We had to depict Heaven's past somewhere," and explained, "It's very difficult to explain his upbringing. There are many stories about the model, Yakumo Koizumi, such as his religion and his birth, but it's not possible to depict everything in the drama, so we depicted the story of his time in Cincinnati, which gives a good understanding of his personality."
In the past part of Heaven, there were lines from Nishikori (Ryo Yoshizawa Ryo)'s interpreter at the introduction of episode 53 and at the end of episode 54, but the entire episode was almost entirely subtitled.
"From the start of making this drama, I decided not to use dubbing, but to use the original voices. The amount of English is so much more than you'd expect from a Japanese TV drama or even a Asadora, and it's endlessly subtitled, so it might be difficult to watch during busy morning hours. But the ways of watching are becoming more diverse, and more than anything, I thought that Tommy's acting would be ruined if it were dubbed. I wanted to really bring out the importance of acting, so I took the plunge and did the entire thing with subtitles."
