The Taiga Epic
With Hana no Shogai (the first Taiga drama) in 1963, the form began: one person's life told over a year, on Sunday evenings. As a rule, one work a year, 45 minutes an episode, around 50 episodes across the year. The 2026 work will be the 65th.
The peak of the numbers lay between the 1960s and the 1980s. The highest rating for a single episode is the 53.0% of Ako Roshi (the 1964 season), the story of the loyal retainers of Ako. The highest average across a whole work is the 39.7% of Dokuganryu Masamune (the 1987 season), on the one-eyed dragon, Date Masamune. For six months to a year, four households in ten with the set on every Sunday evening — a scene that is hard to picture now.
So has the Taiga drama fallen? It is not that simple. As this map keeps finding, part of what changed is the counting. Look at the Video Research tables and you see that works from the 2020 season onward carry household ratings and individual ratings side by side. The 13 Lords of the Shogun (the 2022 season) averaged 12.7% household across its run, and 7.6% individual. The same programme, measured with two different rulers. And Video Research itself states that the method for calculating the run average differs before 1988 and from 1989 onward. The all-time rankings are better read as a record of strata than as a strict comparison.
The most interesting thing about the form, I think, is that the same history gets rewritten again and again. The Sengoku wars, the end of the shogunate — every few decades another writer retells them with another protagonist at the centre. Koki Mitani brought the breath of ensemble drama and comedy into history across three works: Shinsengumi! (2004), Sanadamaru (2016), and The 13 Lords of the Shogun (2022). Dear Radiance, in 2024, chose the Heian court, where there are no battles. Depending on who is placed at the centre, the same country's history looks entirely different. Once a year, this band is the place where that gets tried.
One work a year is not, incidentally, an unbroken record. Between 1993 and 1994 there was a period when it was split into units of six to nine months, and it returned to one work a year in 1995.