Japanese Female Protagonists to Shine
The Nippon Television Network and Hulu.jp released a drama in this year named “Fictitious Girl’s Diary” which has a female protagonist to lead a story in order to expand female roles in the screen.
Japanese TV is planning to create female protagonists into screens in such a role that leading a story and being a strong person because most of Japanese actresses are stereotyped that they have to be mothers or daughters with domestic tasks, or victims that need saviours. Therefore, the Nippon Television Network and Hulu.jp released a drama in this year named “Fictitious Girl’s Diary” which has a female protagonist to lead and narrate the story.
This drama focuses on an office lady writes her daily feelings toward her work from her attitude, and humans around her into a diary. Besides, this drama based on a blog of Baka Rhythm , who plays as Hidetomo Masuno in this drama between 2006 and 2009 where he had posted as an office lady nicknamed Kakuu Masuno. Some audiences might think that this drama is might be a boring drama to watch and perceive only atmosphere about the female protagonist, but there is no one can ensure that this drama is fun or not until people watch it.
Even if there are some popular movies or dramas which leaded by female protagonists such as Wonder Woman (Movie) or Orange is a New Black (Netflix’s drama), some audiences are not pleased to watch them because the movies or dramas focus too much on female protagonists, so it makes them get bored easily.
“Many of my movies have strong female leads-brave and self-sufficient girls that do not think twice about fighting for what they believe in with all their heart. They will need a friend supporter, but never a saviour. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man,” Hayao Miyazaki, who is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and co-founder of Studio Ghibli said.
In other words, Miyazaki wants female protagonists to have equal rights to do whatever they want like any men in any roles and he also wants to emphasise that not every female protagonist has to be the victim or weaker to wait for helps by other characters, especially male characters.
Even though there are some Japanese dramas or movies which are led by the female protagonists, they are not attractive or interesting enough to attract all the Japanese audiences.
For example, Limit (drama), Switch Girl (drama) , etc. Ratings of these dramas were not more than 6.8% of 10% . Even though these dramas almost had a high rating , but not all of Japanese audiences recognise them.
The Nippon Television Network and Hulu.jp seem to get risk to do this project , but let’s open our heart to watch their drama first and then deciding later whether to keep watching or stop watching it. Furthermore, let’s watch something new like this drama which the audiences have ever watched from Japanese TV.
Source
The hard news from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/07/05/tv/japanese-tv-making-progress-writing-broader-female-roles/#.WfeQfqNh2fQ
The quote of Hayao Miyazaki from https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliapugachevsky/amazingly-profound-quotes-from-hayao-miyazaki?utm_term=.uylrNANKZ#.ek8aP4PwJ
Rating of Switch Girls’s drama from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2118413/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Rating of Limit’s drama from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2889734/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3
