Kanna Hashimoto’s Omusubi: NHK Asadora Shifts Focus to Disasters

The story skips six years without touching on the heroine’s growth process

The NHK morning drama Omusubi, starring Kanna Hashimoto (26), has entered its final stage. However, since it has not portrayed the essential heroine’s growth story, criticism has flooded social media. With less than two months remaining, the show risks becoming a black mark in the history of morning dramas.

This series is a Heisei youth graffiti depicting a heroine born in the first year of Heisei, who forges ahead without losing her gyaru spirit. From Week 18, the story focuses on the heroine, Yui (played by Hashimoto), working as a registered dietitian at a general hospital in Osaka.

“The story shockingly skips six years without showing her struggles balancing child-rearing and studying for her dietitian qualification, nor does it depict her growth as a rookie dietitian. In a morning drama that is supposed to portray a woman’s life journey, leaving out the heroine’s struggles in parenting and work is highly unusual. This may be one of the rarest cases in morning drama history,” said a television industry insider.

Meanwhile, speculation has arisen regarding the fact that Yui, now 29, is living in the year 2018.

“The year Omusubi airs, 2025, marks the 30th anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. With that sense of duty, the show has prominently featured past disasters, including the Hanshin and Great East Japan Earthquakes. Now, as the storyline is set in 2018, people online are already curious about how the drama will depict the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck two years later,” said a television network source.

It seems that Omusubi is more focused on how it portrays disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic rather than the heroine’s growth. However, even the depiction of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in Week 5 drew criticism.

 

Even if the drama depicts the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to believe it will resonate with viewers

“In Week 4, during the Itoshima Festival, Yui performs a para-para dance as a member of the ‘Hagyalen’ (Hakata Gal Union). Later, Shoya (Hayato Sano), who would become her husband, asks her, ‘You looked so happy up there. Why do you always seem so lonely?’ This prompts a flashback to her experience during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake nine years earlier. But was this really the right approach?” (Production company director)

The production team likely wanted to convey that while some victims moved forward the day after the disaster, others are still unable to escape the sorrow of losing loved ones. Even among survivors, grief is not easily shared.

However, attempting to portray such profound sorrow through a flashback right after a para-para dance performance was fundamentally flawed.

And now, four years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as memories of it fade, how exactly do they plan to depict the crisis, presumably in a hospital setting? No matter how they attempt to rewrite the chaotic reality that was widely reported at the time, it is unlikely to resonate with viewers.

How will the production team respond to these criticisms?

Screenwriter Nonji Nemoto and the rest of the team chose to focus on COVID-19 rather than depicting Yui’s journey as a new mother or her growth as a rookie nutritionist. What kind of scenes will they deliver? At this point, failure is not an option.