Sunday Theatre & the Payback Drama
On the night of 22 September 2013, it is sometimes said, this country’s television watched the same thing together for the last time. The final episode of Hanzawa Naoki drew 42.2% (Video Research, Kanto region, household ratings). At nine on a Sunday evening, four in ten households were watching a banker answer back to his boss.
What makes this form interesting is that the stage is not a battlefield or outer space but a company. The unreasonable boss, the head office that pushes responsibility downward, personnel decisions no one can see inside. In a place everyone knows and no one beats, the hero alone answers back to their face. “Bai-gaeshi” — pay it back double — became a buzzword not because the phrase was new, but probably because so many people had never been able to answer back. That year’s New Words and Buzzwords Awards, Japan’s annual buzzword poll, exceptionally gave four annual Grand Prizes, and two of them came from drama: “bai-gaeshi”, and “je je je” from the asadora Amachan. In 2013 drama stood on that stage twice.
On the source novels, there is one surprise. The novel behind the drama is not called Hanzawa Naoki. Episodes 1 to 5 come from Oretachi Bubble Nyukogumi (2004), and from episode 6 on, Oretachi Hana no Bubble-gumi (2008). After the drama landed, the novels came to be called by the hero’s name. The author, Jun Ikeido, is a former banker — he joined in 1988 and left in 1995. You would think he wrote his experience down as it was, but he flatly denies it: “Writing my experience as it is, or researching thoroughly and then writing — I almost never do that.” He also says he cannot write “a character I do not understand”. The aim was not a record but “an action piece in which people move vividly inside a bank”. The source of the reality, then, lies in the shaping of the characters rather than the volume of research. He has also said there is no model for a banker whose motto is paying it back double.
And this current is also the last chapter in the story of numbers in Japanese drama. Video Research changed the basis of its weekly ranking from household ratings to individual ratings on 4 April 2022. The era when a hit could be described as forty percent ends around this show. The final episode of VIVANT in 2023 — same slot, same lead, same directing team — was announced as 12.9% individual / 19.6% household. The numbers did not disappear; the way of counting changed. The festival did not end; the measure of the festival became the single person.
The myth, corrected
The 42.2% for Hanzawa Naoki was the highest rating any Japanese drama has had since 1989
That figure comes from Video Research's table of highest household ratings for drama, and the table states plainly that NHK's morning serials and its year-long historical epics are excluded. In the company's separate table for the morning serials, four titles from the same era sit above 42.2% — Onna wa Dokyo at 45.4%, Ee Nyobo at 44.5%, Seishun Kazoku at 44.2% and Hirari at 42.9% (Kanto region, household, highest programme average). So the accurate phrasing is: the highest since 1989 among general dramas, once the morning serial and the historical epic are set aside. Fifteen minutes every morning had quietly been climbing higher.