EXCLUSIVE: A new Japanese drama series is turning stereotypes around women in the workplace on their head, according to one of the top producers at public broadcaster NHK.
The Employee launched a fortnight ago and has got Japanese people talking about “the double bind” women face as they progress up the career ladder, Akiko Ueda, a senior producer in NHK’s content production team, told Deadline.
Starring Yoh Yoshida and Sara Minami, The Employee is the second Japanese show to emerge from NHK’s Writers’ Development Room (WDR), the first of which, 30,000,000 Yen, was profiled in our Deadline Global Breakouts column last year.
“We were deeply fascinated by the question: ‘Can a person who has internalized the values of an organization ever truly become free from them?’,” said Ueda. “In Japan, women in the workplace sometimes find themselves in what could be described as a double bind. Even when they possess high abilities and ambitions, they may also be expected not to assert those qualities too strongly. In such an environment, people can easily come to tie their sense of self-worth to how they are evaluated by their organization, creating a powerful need for recognition and approval.”
For Ueda, this is a “restrictive and unreasonable situation” and the writers set about pulling it apart by making a show in which a woman “who has allowed her value to be defined by her organization… ultimately fights against that system in order to reclaim herself.”
The Employee is the result. It follows Eriko, a 50-year-old executive hopeful who has spent her career fighting to succeed in a male-dominated corporate world. Leading a major project that promises to secure her place on the board, she believes she has done everything right. But just before the project’s launch, an anonymous threatening letter arrives, shaking both her career and the organization she has devoted herself to.
“Swaying between corporate and human righteousness”
NHK clearly wanted to attack big societal topics head-on and faced a “major challenge” in approaching areas like harassment, perpetrators versus victims, and gender dynamics in the workplace, according to Ueda.
The production team was helped by the cast. he explained. Ueda hailed Yoshida’s “earnestness” in playing Eriko as a character “swaying between corporate righteousness and human righteousness.” Minami, on the other hand, “constantly introduces new dynamics” to Eriko’s situation with her character Ruri, who has “underlying vulnerability.” “Led by these two, the entire cast performed their characters as multifaceted beings who cannot be neatly categorized as simply good or bad, bringing real depth and credibility to the story,” added Ueda.
Notably, the project could have been totally different. It started life as a brief three-line logline, Ueda explains, and at that point was set in a community of mothers connected through their children, rather than an office. Regardless of setting, however, NHK saw “great potential in a story about women with different values and life experiences meeting and influencing one another.” “Later, by shifting the setting to a corporate environment, we were able to explore not just interpersonal relationships, but also structural issues within organizations and power dynamics, giving the story greater social relevance,” added Ueda.
The Employee won the WDR’s second year after defeating eight other scripts that were shortlisted last summer. WDR program director Keita Hosaka previously told us that the writers room programme was forged due to fears that the best young Japanese drama writing talent was flooding to the manga, video games and comedy genres.
The first show, 30,000,000 Yen, a similarly winding thriller, was “widely praised” for its “fast-paced plot and unpredictability,” Ueda said.
NHK is hopeful it can run a third WDR but no word yet on when that will be.
The Employee is written by Tomomi Naka, Shu Matsui, Tomoe Asaka and Sou Tateya, directed by Keita Hosaka, Keisuke Oshima, Yuki Nishio, and produced by Ueda with Shouta Ishimura.
