Where it all started — 徳山大五郎を誰が殺したか？

You know, the original purpose of this site was a casual blog about J-Pop; now I’m not even sure where the blog section has gone off to. The site’s turned into a place to submit my translation practice assignments, which is a good thing in its own right (for me anyway), but I have been wanting to actually blog a bit, too.

I made a bunch of topic drafts, and started to feel like I needed to do some background research on each one, find some nice graphics, etc. Well, that’s even more time that I don’t have, so instead I’ll just go with what I have off the top of my head.

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This is where it all started – the mad descent into J-Pop and J-Idols. When I decided to start learning Japanese again after a long break, I began with a search for subbed shows available online. I figured dramas would be a good way to get used to hearing conversational Japanese, and maybe help my comprehension along the way.

With an Amazon Prime account, I thought I would be able to uncover some good shows pretty quickly. Or maybe Netflix would have the best selection. Or even scrobble something off of YouTube. However, it proved surprisingly hard to find shows, mostly because the search tools at the time made if surprisingly frustrating to sort by Japanese language programs. After various attempts, I finally got the suggestion from Amazon: WHO KILLED DAIGORO TOKUYAMA? (徳山大五郎を誰が殺したか？) Well, ok, points for an intriguing title. Knowing nothing more than that, I fired up the first episode.

I won’t spoil anything, but suffice it to say the show has a ridiculous premise. It is trying to answer the titular question via 90’s prime-time sitcom levels of silly, but with a interestingly morbid tone.

I watched the first episode, loved it, and got my wife into it, too. We breezed through the season in a couple weeks, and the title theme really got stuck in my head. At some point along the line I decided to see what the song’s name was, and if it was available for purchase on iTunes or the like.

Naturally, I soon thereafter discovered not only the name of the song, 世界には愛しかない (sekai ni wa ai shika nai), but that it was performed by Keyakizaka46. Oh, and that the main actresses in this drama actually consisted of all the members of Keyaki. Thanks to the hard work of subbing groups like GEES and DepressingSubs, I soon found myself watching all of their variety shows and music videos, and falling deep into the fandom.

As for Daigoro, I was really impressed with how well these rank amateurs pulled it off (apparently partially due to a merciless director), and thoroughly enjoyed it to the end. Now that time has passed, and I know so much more about every member, I’ve been meaning to go back and watch it again. I’ll let you know if it holds up.