Straight to the point, today I will talk to you about a new drama of the island country "Wowow" - "Pareto's Miscalculation".
The heroine, Satomi Makino, played by Ai Hashimoto, is a clerk in the Social Welfare Department of Tsukawa City.
The main responsibility of this department is to review and issue welfare benefits in accordance with government regulations.
Although he appeared to be a civil servant, Makino was only an unorganized temporary worker, with a small monthly salary, and he was reluctant to buy even snacks.
However, in order to turn positive as soon as possible and strive to be transferred to the work of the urban construction department of her choice, she still accepted the job hard.
The work of the welfare department goes deep into the grassroots and often deals with the residents at the bottom of the society, so it is inevitable to encounter difficult people, especially on the day of the welfare payment, it is easy to become an innocent punching bag.
Some people come to collect money like uncles and have a bad attitude towards the staff; others play tricks and want to cheat more benefits.
These scenes are simply overwhelming for Makino, who has just started working, and going to work every day is like going to a grave.
The section chief seized on her eagerness to turn right and pushed the most tiring work to her as a newcomer.
At this time, the senior yamakawa in the department sensed her emotions and took her to visit the home of the recipient.
When the two of them first entered the door, there was a pungent smell coming from the face, and Makino did a lot of psychological construction at the door before he dared to walk into the room.
The owner of the house is an unemployed uncle who cannot work because of a waist injury and has received relief money for several years.
For such a communication object, Shan Chuan did not have any contempt or disgust attitude, but according to the work process, carefully understood the physical condition of the uncle, and personally fed the uncle medicine.
After that, they met several more recipients, whether the other party had a job at the moment, Yamakawa showed consistent care and enthusiasm, and every recipient who saw Yamakawa thanked him from the bottom of his heart.
This bystander experience not only made Makino admire the mountains and rivers, but also made her realize that the work is not as simple as giving people money.
Behind each application form is a complex life experience, as a civil servant in the welfare department, you must not wear colored glasses.
Since then, Makino has adjusted his work attitude and worked overtime to go through all the recipient information.
With the help of Yamakawa, she slowly developed a relationship of trust with her recipients, and she encountered more and more smiling faces and thanks at work.
However, at this moment, Yamakawa suddenly died of a fire during a visit to Nakamura's apartment.
Based on the on-site investigation and autopsy report, the police deduced that someone had deliberately set the fire and launched an investigation at the first time.
Thinking of Yamakawa's care for himself before his death, Makino could not stand idly by, so he proposed cooperation with the police officer in charge of the case, and the two sides shared the clues they found.
Makino found that 8 of the Nakamura apartments where the fire broke out were recipients of Yamakawa's responsibility. But these people were silent about what happened on the day of Yamakawa's death, some people avoided seeing them, and some people directly played missing.
She believes that there must be someone here who knows the inside story of Yamakawa's death.
It is not difficult to find out here that this drama is actually a suspenseful crime routine, and the heroine is the key person who guides the audience to go deep into the case.
However, compared with the intrinsic reasoning that focuses on logic, this drama is a typical social reasoning, focusing on social criticism and portrayal of human nature.
The "Pareto" in the title refers to the "Pareto Law", also known as the Law of Two Eight, that is, 20% of the people in society own 80% of the social wealth.
This conclusion was later applied to various fields as an analytical method, and Kurata, a clerk in the welfare department in the play, applied the Pareto principle to his own work.
He believes that if 20 worker ants create 80% of the food in a colony of 100 ants, then if the 20 worker ants stop working, 20% of the remaining 80 hungry lazy ants will spontaneously devote themselves to the search for food.
In the same way, if the ant is replaced by a person, if the standard of welfare payment is tightened and the recipient is not provided with a "lazy environment", then someone will be forced to take the initiative to work.
So in Kurata's view, instead of letting the government spend large sums of money on recipients who don't work, it is better to raise the bar of censorship and spend the money on those who need it most.
In the process of receiving the recipients, Kurata also follows his own set of ideas. He felt that Makino was too simple and always approved the application unconditionally, so he intercepted and received a grantee with no fixed residence and rejected his application.
At first glance, Kurata has a sense of responsibility and wants every penny of taxpayers to be used on the blade, but he makes the mistake of talking on paper - people are not ants after all, cutting off the food source of 80 ants in one go, and the result will directly detonate potential instability.
Not long after, the rejected recipient became angry with the welfare department and rushed into the office with a knife, intending to die with Kurata.
The result of the storm was a lose-lose situation, with knife-wielding recipients in jail and the welfare section becoming disembodied in front of the media, accused of "abandoning low-income earners" and criticized for spending taxpayers' money indiscriminately.
The portrayal of this side story in the play is about the hot moment of Japanese society.
The severe aging and sluggish economy have caused the government's financial burden to continue to increase, coupled with repeated prohibitions on welfare fraud, and the government's credibility has gradually declined.
It can be said that the most brilliant thing about this drama is that it uses a fictional arson case to portray the real Japanese society.
In the play, Tsukawa City originally developed rapidly with the port, but with the loneliness of the shipbuilding industry, the city has lost its former vitality, workers have been laid off, many people cannot be successfully re-employed because of work injuries, and government welfare has become their only income.
Some of them began to resent the government, eating and waiting to die every day, and some people wanted to start all over again, but it was not easy to reintegrate into society.
The vice mayor of Tsukawa Ostensibly pays lip service to "reviving the city," but politics is for him nothing more than a tool for personal gain.
His daughter is also a civil servant in the Welfare Section, but she lives every day as a second-generation official.
In contrast, such a powerless and powerless "temporary worker" as the heroine not only bears a huge workload, but also because of the handle of "turning positive", she is always pressed to the ground and rubbed.
The Japanese society presented in the play, on the one hand, is the people who occupy the vast majority of social resources, who continue to take advantage of the loopholes in the system to accumulate wealth; on the other hand, the people at the bottom, for the sake of the few remaining resources, endure the last dignity.
However, the heroine was not discouraged by her own encounter, but with her conscience and sense of responsibility, she gradually discovered the inside story behind this case.
After the knife wound occurred, the heroine felt guilty about the victim of the prison.
She felt that if she had been tougher at that time and not allowed Kurata to forcibly intercept the reception, things would not have developed to this point.
The recipient was impressed by her sincerity, so he revealed to her an "inside information" - someone in the welfare department colluded with the underworld to help people defraud money.
At first, Makino was skeptical, but he didn't expect that this had become a secret rule in the local area, and even the owner of the restaurant knew:
Gangs go around wooing homeless people, providing them with fixed shelters, helping them apply for government benefits, and if they wish, artificially creating disabilities and increasing the amount of subsidies.
That is to say, the gangs have been using the government to squeeze the only benefits out of the poor.
At the same time, in order to find out the cause of Yamakawa's death as soon as possible, Makino managed to contact Ansai, a beneficiary who had been avoiding him.
It turned out that the residents of nakamura apartments who had caught fire did have ties to the gangs, and they had all been arranged to go to a hospital 10 kilometers away from their homes.
Makino then rushed there and really found a lot of old people who were not sick.
But just when she was about to inform the police officer handling the case, she was kidnapped by the gang...
As for this arson case involving gangsters, the government and the people at the bottom, who is behind the scenes, I will not give you spoilers here.