Japan: Love 2000

[Samanosuke Akechi]

Released in 2000.

[Ognyana]

The TV series (11 episodes) was released in 2000. In a nutshell, its plot runs as follows:

Two young men arrive in Japan with the purpose of killing their father. They are intercepted by the police at the airport but they escape. In the course of pursuit one of the brothers is wounded and prefers to die so as not to be captured by the police, and his brother has to help him with the suicide. We get to know that the remaining brother, Yuri Maroev, is a terrorist from some fictitious Ural Republic, and he is to assassinate his father, a prominent scientist who defected and wants to give some military secret of the Ural Republic over to the USA in order to prevent the government of the vicious totalitarian Ural Republic from carrying out its blackmail scheme. They’ve developed a virus and they want to threaten the world into making financial investment in the Ural Republic to help it fight poverty inside the country. Yuri doesn’t know all these details, he’s just told that his father is a traitor, and to save his family held hostage and to cleanse his name he is to kill his own father. In fact, he doesn’t have much choice – either his father dies (and he loves his Dad), or his remaining family (a mother, a sister and a brother) die. The plan is to monitor his father’s movements, kill him, and then start a mysterious operation to save the Ural Republic. A group of terrorists who have infiltrated Japan decides that to track the elder Maroev they are to get into some computer system in the Japanese ministry of Foreign Affairs. To do this they disguise Yuri Maroev as an office worker, and when he is working on entering the system, Miho, a Japanese system administrator enters, and unknowingly helps him to perform this task. She is in her late twenties, but lonely as can be, and the young handsome stranger intrigues her, especially when they get stuck in the lift, and he helps her get out.

Then they gradually develop a romantic feeling, and then fall in love. Yuri starts using her as a decoy and as a shield, but he is not happy about it. Then Yuri and his father get a chance to meet and Yuri hears the truth from his father. Nevertheless, his father actually presses the trigger of Yuri’s pistol committing a suicide that would look like murder, Yuri hardly escapes from this scene, gravely wounded by the pursuing police. Miho led by her logic of love finds Yuri and cures him. For a brief spell of time they both are happy, but Yuri knows their happiness is not to last. He fears framing Miho up, and leaves her, as it seems, for good.
But the plot has an unexpected turn – Miho has a younger sister who’s pregnant from a petty street idler, drug pusher, pimp and card player. She falls out with him and returns to Miho, her man trying to blackmail Miho and squeeze money out of her. Miho herself is also under the surveillance of the police because they connected her and Yuri and put two and two together. Miho is desperately fighting for her love against all odds. The police give her the news about Yuri’s family being executed in the Ural Republic as traitors. Yuri suffers a great shock – he can no longer believe his country’s officials and cannot get out of the game. The terrorists demand more and more of him threatening and molesting Miho and her sister. Gradually Yuri learns that their target is some public occasion, a tremendous explosion is planned, and Yuri decides to stay with the terrorists to prevent the attack if possible, not to carry it out. Yuri succeeds at great cost – to stop the timer that is to trigger 30 bombs in the children’s park of attractions he has to shoot through this timer box held against Miho’s body by one of the terrorists. Yuri gets shot by the anti-terrorist squad when walking to prostrate Miho. Then we get to know that Yuri’s body is sent to the Ural Republic after the coup-d-etat arranged by democratic opposition, Miho lives only long enough to give birth to his baby. The baby will be raised by Miho’s sister who lost her own baby when attacked by the terrorists.

Now to the analysis. Many details do not hold water. For example, Yuri Maroev seems to sound vaguely Russian (though the cinematographers stick to choosing nonsense names, God knows why when there’s so much info and databases on Russia available), Yuri and his father speak a stretch in Russian, and the Urals is a mountain chain dividing Europe from Asia and situated in Russia. It beats me how those supposed Russians look like the Japanese and behave like the Japanese, and nobody recognizes them as aliens in Japan. By the way, the other terrorists also look like people of clearly Japanese, Chinese or maybe Korean origin. I also don’t understand why Yuri bears a Russian name, his brother Samile (Shamil?) a Chechen Moslem name, his mother Emily Rynn – an Anglophone name, and his younger brother and sister – Japanese-sounding names, e.g. Omoru. So we are dealing with a Eurasian country speaking Russian, but not possessing population of Russian origin? How did the Japanese get to the Urals in such quantities as to create a separate state there? Why did they take up Russian and forget their mother tongue? Not to mention the fact that Russians (even quasi-Russians) again pose as bad guys, backing terrorism throughout the world. A cliché, and I won’t even mention that for people of Russia it isn’t a very pleasant and even offensive stereotype which, like every stereotype, is rather a misconception. And not to mention the fact that the country run by Russians presumably MUST be totalitarian, cruel, poor and immoral. Then, why the Ural Republic? Are the Urals no longer Russian? What’s happened to my country, may I ask? Did it disintegrate (when? I’m unaware of the fact), was it taken over by somebody else? Does it still exist?

Only the fact that Yuri turns out to be strong-willed, persevering, but amiable and loving, torn and suffering, true and noble reconciles me with the plot to some extent.

There are some episodes with too slow timing, some episodes are obviously tear squeezers, but on the whole the production is not sickeningly maudlin.

What I liked – Miho’s tenacity in defending her love and her beloved, her resilience and strength of character. Yuri played by Takeshi Kaneshiro shows a varied emotional palette, and, as I said, is lovable. He alone saves the audience from branding all Russians as immoral scum and renegade spooks of the world. By the way, he honestly struggles through several sentences in Russian (and it’s a hard task for a person with the language background entirely different from Russian), and though it’s not his fault that these sentences are ‘dead’, sterile, ‘plastic’ (no one speaks in such artificial but grammatically correct sentences), and though the intonation is entirely wrong, he demonstrates a charming accent.

What I disliked – the things already mentioned, and the fact that there’s no ‘touch of nutmeg’ in TK’s acting. He’s emotionally rich, skillful in portraying the torment of his character, but there’s not a single ‘giveaway’ thing about him – nothing prompts that for Japan he is a foreigner, no gestures, facial expressions, tilts of head, mannerisms of Russians, no ‘devil-may-care’ fire in his eyes that appears in Russian eyes when we throw everything to the wind embarking on a desperate scheme – be it love or war. No abandon, no burst of fire, where there must have been at least one. Instead he’s as impenetrable and unreadable as a native Japanese when he faces a crisis. Not so with us, our faces are more tell-tale. On the whole, he certainly has the chemistry and the magic, he’s the main attraction of the film, an eye-candy as usual, but he's capable of more.