Is it great? Yes.
Does it hold up after 40 years? Yes.
Should you watch it? Eh...it is REALLY long, and has some other production choices that mean that it might not be worth the time investment for everybody.
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| The young Oshin played by Kobayashi Ayako |
Oshin was the 31st asadora made by NHK. “Asa” means “morning” and “dora” is short for “drama”. Like the BBC, the NHK is a national, government-supported broadcast channel which is funded through television license fees, and in 1963 they started producing serial dramas with daily 15-minute episodes that are meant to be watched by the family before heading off to work or school. The episodes ran six days a week for most series, but in 2020 they shifted to five days a week (interestingly, the decision to do so was made well before the pandemic). In the first decade of this format each series lasted a year, but in 1975 they shifted to alternating having a series produced in Tokyo for six months and then another series produced in Osaka for six months. Oshin returned to being a year-long series as a twenty-year celebration of the format, but all the subsequent series have been 6 months long as was the case in the 70s. Because of various holidays Oshin ended up having 297 episodes rather than 312.
Generally, asadoras can be divided into two types: fictionalized biographies and pure fiction. Oshin is the latter although there were reportedly a couple of people whose lives served as partial inspiration for Oshin’s writer, Hashida Sugako. Also, the series tend to have more female protagonists than male ones, and often include a coming of age story for the protagonist.
Synopsis
Oshin tells the story of a woman named Oshin who was born late in 1899 to a struggling family of sharecroppers in the north-east province of Yamagata. The framing device is Oshin at 83 in 1983 sneaking off from her family for a personal journey to visit the important places in her past. We know fairly immediately that she has been the president of a chain of 16 grocery stores, and that she disagrees with her son, the current president of the chain, and his decision to open a large flagship store as the 17th in the chain. One of her grandsons who is on spring break from college tracks her down, and joins her in the journey and hears the stories of her life as they travel around to the places where she once lived. Thus, the series Oshin is a recounting of one woman’s experiences living through nearly a century that dramatically transformed the country and its culture.
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| Oshin in her prime played by Tanaka Yuuko |
Why You Might Not Want To Watch It
At over 74 hours in length, Oshin is even longer than a typical cdrama, and so it’s understandable that one might want to know a bit more about the series before trying it.
The biggest hurdle about the series (for me, at least) was that it was clearly designed to look old. It’s not just that it was made in 1983 and that production technology and standards have improved since then. I have seen Kita no Kuni Kara from 1981, for instance, and that series does not look nearly as old as this one. The set design and character blocking and many other production choices in Oshin were made to have the series look much like a series from the 1950s or 1960s (albeit in color, of course). Part of the huge appeal of this series in Japan was that it was a look back at the bad old days, and so the production choices were undoubtedly meant to evoke a sense of old-timeyness and nostalgia.
And then there is the face-hitting. Oh, so, so much face-hitting. Young girls get hit in the face. Young women get hit in the face. Old women get hit in the face. And a few guys get hit in the face. I think the audience was supposed to think “Well, that’s just the way it was back in those days. And aren’t things much better now?” Except Oshin is still slapping her 50-year old son in 1983. There are periods in Oshin’s life when she is abused, and occasionally that abuse is physical. The tone of the series is not one of approval, but such abuse is part of what the series is about.
Sex. As is the case in all asadoras from what I can tell, all sex takes place off-screen and according to the tone of the shows is only something bad men would be interested in anyway. Asadoras are meant to be watched by the whole family, after all. If any woman ever throws up, then it means they are pregnant. That’s just the way it works. However, it should also be mentioned that sexwork is also part of the plot in a couple of instances in Oshin, and the tone is one of shame and tragedy about such work. The attitudes and norms are undoubtedly appropriate to the time and culture being depicted, but do not expect any kind of sex positivity anywhere at all in this series. When sex crops up, it is inevitably a bad thing.
The Themes and Why The Series Is Great
You cannot read anything about Oshin without running into the words “persevere” and “perseverance”. Indeed, those words also appear frequently in the subtitles, and one assumes that the equivalents are there in the original Japanese. The surface-level reading of the series is that it is about perseverance. Oshin perseveres through various hardships. Some of them are the results of various historical events like Japan losing WWII. Some of the hardships are a result of sociological and economic structures like the lack of universal education in the early 20th century, traditional family structures or sharecropping. The character of Oshin is held up as an exemplar of perseverance, and how if people persevere, life can get better.
But while obvious, that theme is demonstrably not wholly nor even at all what Oshin is trying to say, nor is it why the series is great. Oshin is great because the character Oshin is countercultural. The series is about pacifism in times of war, labor movements in the times of severely exploitative labor systems, feminism in times of patriarchy, and antimaterialism in times of extreme materialism.
The series really is quite surprising in that way.
You might expect this series to be yet another slice of life family drama about a woman growing up and facing challenges throughout her life, and the series ends up being much more political and progressive than it seems it would or even should be. Oshin in her time, place and social standing does not have any power at all to effect change even in her own family let alone in national issues like worker’s rights or peace movements. She does not ultimately even really have the power to change the attitudes and expectations that she herself has and that she was brought up with. And yet, she knows what is better if not what is best even as society slowly progresses in that direction. She knows war is bad, she knows women are as capable as men, she knows that labor should be fairly compensated, and she knows that money and wealth cannot insure stability or happiness.
Nevertheless, the themes are quite explicit.
Oshin is sent off to work as a live-in babysitter when she is seven, and that job results in her encountering a person who has been through Japan’s war machine. He teaches her to read and introduces her to pacifist writing that she will hold precious for the rest of her life. And so when the wars come she objects to every decision the men in her family make. She does not want her eldest son to enlist, but he is drafted. One of her younger sons is lured by the propaganda to enlist in flight training to be a Kamikaze pilot, and has to run away from home to do so since Oshin will not budge.
But she has no real say. Her husband transforms their small business into one which supplies the military over her repeated objections. He tells her that she must not make her opinions known outside the house, and she tacitly acquiesces. When the war is over all she can do is lament that she should have done more to resist the militarization of her country.
Similarly, she encounters a labor organizer named Kato as a young woman, and he becomes a character that persists literally until the last shot of the series. Oshin works for several people over the course of her life, but mostly she finds her greatest successes and happiest times when she is running her own businesses. For Oshin, business is about supporting her family and nurturing relationships with her customers. Because the men in her family repeatedly over-extend and expand those businesses only to see them destroyed through outside circumstances, she becomes, understandably, risk-averse.
Oshin never becomes a labor advocate. In fact, she often exploits the free labor within her family in exactly the same way that her labor was exploited. But she does see the circumstances of the family farm improve through the efforts of Kato, and she does ensure that everyone is ultimately paid for their labor and taken care of within her family.
The feminism of Oshin is even more subtle. She proves several times over the course of her life that she does not need the patriarchal family structures of her time to survive and to thrive. She can support herself and her family. She encourages all the people in her life to pursue their dreams. She experiences having to live under the thumb of a terrible mother-in-law, and she tries not to be the same when her son becomes the head of the family. She aspires to see all her children become educated and have opportunities that she never had. Her resistance to the patriarchy she lived in is largely internalized and hidden.
Finally, Oshin, for all her entrepreneurial spirit, does not care about wealth at all. She lives through Japan’s post-war economic miracle with a healthy skepticism that materialism matters beyond meeting people’s basic needs. Oshin’s primary values are family and relationships. When materialism and greed threatens her family and the relationships that have sustained that family through some of the hardest times in the 20th century she objects and resists in surprising and narratively satisfying ways.
These themes, while overt, are not a constant presence in the series. The story is much more frequently focused on the day-to-day drama in Oshin’s life. She establishes several successful small businesses over the course of her life, but they are destroyed in sequence usually through circumstances beyond her control, and she has to start from nothing again. In the meanwhile, she falls in love, meets a man who she marries against the wishes of her mother-in-law, has children and ultimately builds a financially successful business with them.
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| Oshin at 83 played by Otowa Nobuko |
Ep. 186 of Oshin vs. The Finale of M*A*S*H
The most-watched episodes of all time in the US and Japan could not be more different.
The final episode of M*A*S*H was a Very Special Episode in virtually every sense of the phrase in US culture. The production team used five episodes’ budget to produce a 2.5 hour epic that dealt with the trauma of war and its effects on the beloved cast of characters that the US audience had enjoyed for 11 years. It used narrative and film techniques that were otherwise not available or used in the series prior to its conclusion. It was advertised and hyped and everyone who had ever enjoyed the series found a television to watch it on when it was broadcast.
Ep. 186 of Oshin was very much just another episode of the series and interest in the show just happened to peak that Saturday. Much more dramatic events in the story occur both earlier in that week’s episodes and on the following Monday’s episode. Those events have consequences that effect the rest of Oshin’s life, but ep. 186? Not so much.
And so do not watch Oshin expecting ep. 186 to be some iconic moment in the history of Japanese television. The series as a whole is iconic and great, but that particular episode is just a small part of that achievement.
Conclusion
Oshin was the most watched series in Japanese television history and deserves its reputation, popularity and acclaim. Through the lens of one woman’s living through the worst times and the best times in 20th century Japan we are reminded that there were Japanese voices speaking against militarism even as the military led the country into ever expanding conflicts and war, that there were people fighting for worker’s rights even against landowners who had exploited farmers for centuries, that women are as capable of running businesses as men, and that materialism is no panacea or safeguard for one’s family. It is an important part of Japanese television history and is worth watching in that light.
Oshin was certainly influential on subsequent Japanese productions, particularly in the asadoras which were made thereafter. For me a series must both be influential and also make me want to rewatch it in order to merit a rating of 10. Oshin absolutely is as influential as any bit of media in Japanese history. But I doubt I will ever wish to see it again unlike, say, Gochisousan (which covers much of the same time period through the war), Amachan or Natsuzora each of which are asadoras that I would happily watch again anytime. And so on my personal rating scale Oshin is a 9.0.
