The Detective Action Era

Taiyo ni Hoero! ran from 1972 to 1986, 718 episodes in all. The setting was the First Investigative Section of the Nanamagari precinct. What the programme did was make being a detective not a profession but a youth. Two devices were at work. One was nicknames. Each young detective who joined was given one, taken from his looks or a stock phrase — Macaroni, Jeans, Texas, Bon, Rocky. Being called by a nickname rather than a character name puts the viewer at a familiar, almost family distance from the start. The other was death in the line of duty. Most of the young detectives, after a stretch of episodes, were written out by dying on the job; very few simply transferred away. Someone who came every week stops coming back. More than an action set piece, this was a device for making the audience live through partings. In an era when serial drama still kept to the same every week, this one programme kept losing people. The detective drama went on to become the deepest current in Japan, but its first soil was made of running young men and their farewells.