Hong Sanyu
At the beginning of October, Fuji Television in Japan broadcast a "Special Drama (SP)". The title of the play is very long, called "Three Single Mothers Wonderful Life Counterattack Story".
Although it is called a TV series, its length (one and a half hours) is more like a movie, consisting of three independent stories ("Todai and Green Curry", "For Mother", and "Dream Handbook").
The name thought, the reason is "Three single mothers".
Three Single Mothers
As far as the public perception is concerned, single mothers are undoubtedly a vulnerable group. This is even more so in the Japanese society of "male outside and female inside", most women will resign after marriage and childbirth to take care of the family. What's more, according to statistics, the average age of single mothers in Japan is 33.8 years old, and the average age of young children who need to be raised is 4.4 years old. Children at this age are not yet of school age. This means that single mothers are bound to spend more time with their children, and it is even more unrealistic to find a high-paying job.
This is the case with the three single mothers in the play. Sanae Mizukawa in "Higashi-Daiwa Green Curry" is a convenience store waiter, Maehara Mae-taka in "For Mom" is a masseuse, and Misuzu Sudo in "Dream Fulfillment" works two jobs as a real estate company clerk and a yoga studio. These single mothers have to maintain their families and pay for their children's education, and they are often in financial trouble. For example, Sanae Mizukawa voluntarily offered to work overtime on weekends just to make more money for her son to go to college— only to end up complaining to his son: "What mother doesn't even cook?" ”
The son's complaint about the overtime mother
Despite the difficult situation, the three heroines in the play have achieved a counterattack in life. Sanae Mizukawa sent both of his sons to the University of Tokyo, Japan's number one institution of learning. Maehara Maehara gave his son Koji unwavering support to help him enter osaka Kirin High School, a high school baseball club, and won the Spring/Summer Championship in Koshien (High School Baseball League). As for Sudo Misuzu, she successfully sold 100,000 copies of the "Handbook (Notepad)" with her own creativity, and made a huge amount of 100 million yen (about 6.5 million yuan)! What is even more amazing is that unlike some TV dramas that are busy declaring that "if there is a similarity, it is purely coincidental", "Three Single Mothers Wonderful Life Counterattack Story" generously stated at the beginning of the film that the three stories in the play are real cases from life!
Real life counterattack examples are naturally more contagious than fictional stories. No wonder some viewers left a message under the relevant webpage of Fuji TV: "I was touched by the outstanding acting skills of the actors!" "Watching the TV series... Tears came out of his eyes..." From this point of view, this drama is probably a success.
In addition to the touching people of the success of the counterattack, can we see more things in the TV series "Three Single Mothers"? The two stories of "Higashi-Dai and Green Curry" and "For Mother" focus on "maternal love" and "gratitude", especially the powerful actor Sanae Mizukawa, played by tatsue Kimura, does show a strong mother image. This is also the "self-sacrifice as a single mother" and "desperate effort" mentioned in the audience message.
Tae Kimura played Sanae Mizukawa
But from another point of view, not to mention the concepts of "as a mother, you should give everything you love your children" and "this is a good mother in the eyes of the world", which has been severely tortured in last year's popular Japanese drama "Home on Sakamichi", and the situation of single mothers themselves has also been eliminated in the first two stories. Only the perspective of "Dream Fulfillment Handbook" is different from the first two stories, not to prove the excellence of single mothers by the success of children, but through the experience of the protagonist Sudo Misuzu, people can see the hard side of single mothers.
There is a line in the 2015 Japanese drama "Problem Restaurant": The world is not full of flowers, under the appearance of false peace, there are many hidden, deprived, unfair existence, and they are likely to happen around you. In Japanese society, it is difficult for people to treat "single mothers" as equally as they do with normal families. Public opinion often praises single fathers as "heroes", but rarely gives "single mothers" normal respect – even family members.
For example, in "Woman" starring Hikaru Manjima, Koharu has been raising two children alone after the death of her husband. She would rather borrow five hundred yuan from a welfare club worker she didn't know, rather than ask her mother, Sha Qian, for help. And In "Three Single Mothers", Sudo Mizuru returned to her mother's house with her young child, and was greeted by the cold words of her biological father: "I said earlier, how can that kind of marriage go smoothly?" So much so that Sudo Lamented weakly, "I didn't become a single mother because I liked it."
Sudo Misuzu's lament
In fact, women's family life is unfortunately inseparable from their own nature, but strong social and cultural inertia is also to blame. Traditional Japanese society has long included the status of women under the umbrella of "family": unmarried women receive economic protection from the father-based family, and after marriage, they transfer their economic responsibilities to their husbands, and old women who live alone can enjoy the widow's annuity and the financial support of their sons... In this way, even if many women enter the workplace, they are actually playing the role of cheap labor - the reason why the real estate company manager in the play unscrupulously asks Sudo Misuzu to work overtime for free is because "the young and beautiful girls who work overtime without a word of complaint are more or less."
Unscrupulous manager
Misuzu Sudo did eventually come out of the predicament. In the play, she also opened the "handbook" of dreams and goals recorded in her student days, and worked hard to achieve each of the "small goals" written on it. In the process of using all her strength to open up her life, she was blessed by fate — someone suggested to her to use her creativity to run a "handbook" - and she did gain "financial freedom" from then on.
But if you think about it from another angle, what if Sudo Misuzu didn't find the business opportunities contained in the small "handbook"? She has angrily resigned from the real estate company, and with only a job as a yoga instructor, how can she change her destiny? After all, there are often thousands of horses in this world, but Bole is not often there. Even though Sudo Misuzu can stage a real life counterattack, in the more general reality, Japan's "single mothers" may still be difficult to avoid falling into poverty even if they work hard.
This issue is edited by Zhou Yuhua