The Ikebukuro West Gate Park / ???????????? is an older drama (year 2000) starred by Tokio’s Nagase Tomoya / ???? and the current super popular idol Yamashita Tomohisa / ????. By the way Tomohisa (aka YamaP among his fans) looks SO young in this drama, I think he was like 15 years old or something around that time. When I was first watching the drama I was thinking like “oh that guy looks so familiar isn’t he YamaP?!” and later on when the credits scrolled around I figured out it was him…lol. I watched a couple of his recent dramas like Kurosagi and Nobuta wo Produce, he looked way more mature (he’s around 22 now I think), not a bad actor at all.

Enough talks. Now about the drama. It’s GOOD! The first couple episode is a little..boring ? Since they’re still trying to introduce the characters and setup the storyline. It gets really exciting and suspending starting around episode 4 when they starting to see hints and evidence of the strange murder that’s been happening around Ikebukuro. The story is about a group of youngsters (lead by Tomoya) whose job is to “protect” the Ikebukuro area from the harms. The head of a group of young gangsters named themselves “G-BOYS” likes Tomoya a lot since they have the same interests in protecting the area. In other people’s eyes, these youngsters are just a bunch of of jerks that screws around the area and cause problems. The story mainly portraits the lives of these young people, how they carry out tasks for their leaders, how they “protect” the area by fighting with some groups of other gangs…etc. It also depicts the lives of the young schoolgirl prostitutes that does Enjo Kousei (????) meaning “dating with compensation” in Japan.

Right from the beginning of the story, strange murders keep on happening, and the targets are always on these young prostitutes. Tomoya and his friends decides to start an investigation on this matter after his girlfriend got killed in the incident. There are lots of suspenses going on during the development of the story, and it’s also funny to see how the G-BOYS carry out their tasks and how loyal they are to their leader that they would basically do anything that they were told to. The leader of the G-BOYS (forgot his name) was really cool looking too and has a weird attitude and he speaks in a weird way, really hilarious! …and he has a really bitchy girlfriend which just adds more fun to his role.. anyway all in all it’s a wonderful 11-episode drama that really shows you the innocence and ignorance of young people in Japan in their raw forms, highly recommended!

• Japanese Drama Review - Akihabara@Deep / ??????DEEP
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• Drama Review - Code Blue . Doctor Heli Emergency Rescue/ ??????? ??????????
• Japanese Drama Review - Ryokiteki na Kanojo (My Sassy Girl) / ??????
• Japanese Drama Review - Galileo / ????
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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Japanese drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.