Rural chronicle a favourite in Japan

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 11

Rural chronicle a favourite in Japan

NZPA-Reuter Furano, Japan Top Japanese screenwriter, Soh Kuramoto, has found fame and money not by joining Japan’s artistic rush to Tokyo but by retreating about as far from it as you can get. Far from the congestion of Tokyo, Kuramoto has mined a motherlode of experience in the northern rural city of Furano that has turned the television series he writes into one of Japan’s most popular and longestrunning programmes. For nearly a decade, Japanese viewers have eagerly tuned into “Kita no Kuni Kara,” or “From the North Country,” Kuramoto’s saga of a divorced father and his son and daughter. The duration of the series has no precedent in Japan’s choppy world of television serials. Most weekly fiction series end in six months. “From the North Country” has provided viewers with a more serious alternative to variety shows and soap operas.

The series has chronicled the threemember family as it struggles to survive in the backwoods of Furano, located in the centre of Japan’s northern Hokkaido Island, following the

return of the father to his native village from Tokyo after his divorce. The amenities of Tokyo life — power, running water and adequate heating — dre not available. The family almost never comes near a television set in the story. “Part of it underlines an out-of-Tokyo and back, to-nature longing shared by many urban Japanese,” a spokesman for the privately owned Fiju Television Network said. “Another is the lost image of the strong father.” The series may be aired in China and Australia, starting this year, Fiji Television officials said. Chinese professors are showing pirated videos of the series, Kuramoto said. One of the secrets of its success is the visible growth of the two little children who in the original 1981 series appeared as city weaklings surprised by nature and shocked by poverty in rural Japan. Another secret of the success of the series is its pastoral setting in the wide expanse of the Furano countryside, where seasons are very distinct compared with those in Tokyo. It provides a rare glimpse of a rural life now unfamiliar to the majority of Japanese.