The Age of the Screenwriter
This map has a hemisphere for the world and a hemisphere for Japan. Placed side by side, the clearest difference turns out to be this: whose name a drama is called by.
The English-speaking world has a job title, showrunner — a writer who is also the person in overall charge, and the work is spoken of under that person’s name. Japan has no such title. What it has instead is the screenwriter’s name.
This is not an impression; it is written into an institution. The Kuniko Mukoda Award, given for television drama scripts, was established in 1982 and has continued for more than forty years. It is organized by the publisher of a broadcasting magazine. And three names from this current stand on its list of winners: Yuji Sakamoto (26th, Watashitachi no Kyokasho), Kankuro Kudo (29th, Unubore Deka), Akiko Nogi (37th, Kemono ni Narenai Watashitachi). Not the director, not the lead — a country where an award to the person who wrote it has come round every year for forty years. That is this hemisphere.
Listen to the writers and the substance of the culture appears. Akiko Nogi explains how she makes dialogue: “Put it into spoken language. I act it out alone as I write, checking that no line sounds unnatural.” And: “Beyond that, do not explain too much in words. Television does need writing that most people can follow, but putting every feeling into words, explaining one through ten — I do not think that is what being easy to follow means.” It is a statement that being easy to follow and explaining everything are two different things.
Her way of talking about adaptations is interesting too. “Work from an original is the ultimate derivative work. The original comes first, so even if there is a better development for the screen, you must not step outside the original.” In a country where so much comes from manga and novels, that one line holds how a screenwriter places her own job.
Yuji Sakamoto talks about the texture of what he writes. Asked why he made the final episode of one drama an episode in which the characters simply keep walking: “In my own life too, rather than the big events, it is the ordinary walks spent chatting that I strangely remember.” From his own side, that confirms his reputation as a writer of small talk rather than incident.
If the antihero current overseas (→ The Age of the Antihero) invented the time in which a person changes, what this current refined was how to write the time in which nothing happens. In the same vessel called television, quite different things are growing.