Exclusive: A new Japanese drama series is changing stereotypes about women in the workplace, according to one of the top producers at public broadcaster NHK.
Employee Akiko Ueda, a senior producer on NHK’s content production team, told Deadline that it was launched a fortnight ago and has inspired Japanese people to talk about the “double bind” women face as they move up the career ladder.
Starring Yoh Yoshida and Sara Minami, Employee is the second Japanese show to originate from NHK’s Writers Development Room (WDR), the first of which was, 30,000,000 yenProfiled in our Deadline Global Breakouts column last year.
“We were deeply influenced by the question: ‘Can a person who has internalized the values of an organization really be free from them?’,” Ueda said. “In Japan, women in the workplace sometimes find themselves in a double bind. Even when they have high abilities and ambitions, they may still be expected not to place too much emphasis on those qualities. In such an environment, people can easily tie their sense of self-worth to how they are evaluated by their organization, creating a powerful need for recognition and approval.”
To Ueda, this is a “restrictive and unfair situation” and the writers set out to dismantle it by creating a show in which a woman “who has allowed her worth to be defined by her organization… ultimately fights against that system to reclaim herself.”
Employee the result is. It centers on Erico, a 50-year-old executive candidate who has spent her career struggling to succeed in the male-dominated corporate world. Leading a major project that promises to secure his place on the board, he believes he has done everything right. But just before the launch of the project, an anonymous threatening letter arrives, which shakes both her career and the organization to which she has dedicated herself.
“Swinging between corporate and humanitarian righteousness”
According to Ueda, NHK clearly wanted to attack larger social topics head-on and faced a “big challenge” in areas such as harassment, perpetrators versus victims, and gender dynamics in the workplace.
The cast helped the production team. he explained. Ueda praised Yoshida’s “sincerity” in portraying Eriko as a character “oscillating between corporate religiosity and humanitarian religiosity”. On the other hand, Minami “constantly introduces new dynamics” to Eriko’s situation with her character Ruri, who has an “inherent vulnerability”. Ueda said, “Led by these two, the entire cast played their characters as multidimensional beings who can’t be neatly categorized as good or bad, bringing real depth and believability to the story.”
In particular, the project could have been completely different. It started life as a brief three-line logline, Ueda explains, and at the time it was founded in a community of mothers connected through their children rather than an office. However, regardless of the setting, NHK saw “great potential in the story of women with different values and life experiences meeting and influencing each other.” “Later, by moving the setting to a corporate environment, we were able to explore not only interpersonal relationships, but also structural issues within organizations and power dynamics, giving the story greater social relevance,” Ueda said.
Employee It won the second year of WDR, beating eight other scripts shortlisted last summer. WDR program director Keita Hosaka previously told us that the Writer’s Room program was created out of a fear that the best young Japanese drama writing talent was turning to the manga, video game, and comedy genres.
first show, 30,000,000 yen, The similarly twisted thriller was “widely praised” for its “fast-paced plot and unpredictability”, Ueda said.
NHK hopes to run a third WDR but there is no word yet on when that will be.
Employee Written by Tomomi Naka, Shuu Matsui, Tomoe Asaka and Sou Tateya, directed by Keita Hosaka, Keisuke Oshima, Yuki Nishio and produced by Ueda with Shouta Ishimura.