Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 50

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Popular Culture Review

Another police series. Lullaby Detective (Rarabi Keiji) has a
much lighter touch. It features an assistant section chief in a police
department who is a woman. Even though she has the strong backing
of her male superior, she has to deal with the adolescent sexist
pranks and the run-of-the-mill locker-room talk of her male
subordinates. However, at the conclusion of every episode, she
always gains the respect and admiration of her detractors.
A number of other programs also feature women in nontraditional roles. News Woman Tachibana Kiyoko is a 10-part mini
series featuring a TV anchorwoman's courage and determination in
exposing political corruption, in spite of her father's involvement in
the scandal. Lemon Color Clinic (Shinsatsu-shitsu Remon Iro) is a
light-hearted situation comedy focusing on a company that is run by a
woman. She ordered the bucho (department head) and the kacho
(section chief) to find a gay doctor for the in-house medical clinic.
Both the bucho and kacho are men and are portrayed as clumsy and
incompetent. In explaining her reasons to the bucho, the president of
the company proclaimed, "Romance is the number one enemy of career
women." She believed a gay doctor would prevent possible office
dalliance in her almost exclusively female company. Obviously, she
did not consider her bucho and kacho to be "manly" enough to cause
trouble.
Career Women (Onna Tachi no Tenkin) tells the stories of
three women in the high powered business world. In spite of some
initial conflicts with their private lives -- boyfriend, husband and
ex-husband problems — they achieved professional success without
sacrificing their personal relationships. In a role reversal, one of the
women, a top executive of a large real estate development company,
was betrayed by one of her male subordinates. He stole her computer
file for a rival company, while charming her with his culinary skills
in her apartment.
The most unorthodox television drama of the '90s, however,
is Woman Prosecutor Shimo Yuko (Onna Kensatsu Shimo Yuko). This
show makes reversal of the traditional gender roles the centerpiece.
The heroine is married to a Buddhist monk (permissible and common
in Japanese Buddhism), a mild mannered, boyish type of man who
stays at home, dresses in a kimono, prays at the shrine and takes care
of their six-grader son, while she works in a modern government
office building and always dresses in contemporary western business