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Konkatsu (Marriage Activity)
A romantic comedy starring Nakai Masahiro (one of the SMAP boy band members) and my favorite actress Ueto Aya in a relatively straight role (for her). The story starts with a flashback sequence introducing all the main actors as neighborhood children playing and growing up together. The story then jumps to the present as Nakai the main character, loses his job at a large company. He desperately looks for a job and is eventually hired as a clerk at the district ward municipal office. He is hired with the proviso that he be married, RIGHT AWAY. To which he has a big problem: He doesn’t have a girlfriend, much less ANY prospects for marriage. To keep his job, Nakai starts konkatsu. Don’t look this up in your Japanese dictionary – it’s made up. In the first episode, it’s explained that the word is a contraction of two words kekkon (marriage) and katsudou (activity) – konkatsu. (Many also accept that it’s a combination of konyaku (engagement) and katsudou). Ueto Aya plays Nakai’s childhood friend. Ueto has secretly loved Nakai for years but has been too shy to tell him; and of course, Nakai is too dense to figure it out for himself. The rest of the series follows Nakai as he attends one Konkatsu party after another for his prospective bride, all the while not realizing his ideal mate has always by his side.
The English captioning was inconsistent: The first episode was well done, with fairly good translations, so the story is easy to follow. The later episodes however, the captioning was inaccurate and when dealing with technical language concerning societal, political and cultural words, the captions were completely wrong. The sentence structures were illogical with nonexistent words. And then, in even later episodes, the captions improved and the story could be followed. My wife and I enjoyed this series. Although it required effort on my part to translate when the English captions were problematic, the insight we gained into the Japanese cultural phenomenon regarding Konkatsu was VERY interesting.
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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