Looks like a really good show with a nice social theme. And it's getting decent ratings. It took 14 Sai No Haha slot on Wednesday night. Anybody watching?

I'm waiting to finish downloading it. The good first week ratings must also be due to Ryoko Shinohara helming the drama.

I found the profile of Ryoko's character, Haruko, very amusing to read:

She sounds like a no nonsense, tough cookie.

jade_frost wrote:

I found the profile of Ryoko's character, Haruko, very amusing to read

Only if you can understand Japanese.

This isn't an accurate translation but it roughly says:

Special skills: Can't tell
Interests/Hobbies: Definitely can't tell
Qualifications/Competencies: Many. What can't I write?
Health: Mind your own business
Strong points: You'll know if you hire me
Weak points: None
Character: Truely inept
Personal motto: Perseverance prevails

jade_frost wrote:

This isn't an accurate translation but it roughly says: Special skills: Can't tell Interests/Hobbies: Definitely can't tell Qualifications/Competencies: Many. What can't I write? Health: Mind your own business Strong points: You'll know if you hire me Weak points: None Character: Truely inept Personal motto: Perseverance prevails

This sounds really interesting, and I must say I love watching Ryoko in those kind of characters! Glad that the rating is doing well too!
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The first episode was interesting but the start felt a little queer and one bit toward the end appeared too much of a stretch despite an explanation given for it.

Shinohara Ryoko (Omae Haruko) and Kato Ai (Mori Miyuki) play contract workers outsourced to a company called S&F. They are assigned to the newly established marketing department that is helmed by a novice manager, Koizumi Kotaro (Satonaka Kensuke).

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Omae Haruko, is brutally efficient and resourceful in her work and commands great respect from S&F's boss, Matsukata Hiroki (Kirishima Toshio). Nothing flusters or distracts her. She never smiles, never minces her words, never lets people boss her around and never works beyond her lunchtime or 6.00pm, the end of her stipulated work day. Her rather brusque attitude rubs people the wrong way right from the very start, and some people like Ooizumi You (Shouji Takeshi) openly detest her and wonder why Kirishima wants to hire someone like her. Mori Miyuki is the total opposite of Haruko. A newbie, she lies about her proficiency in Microsoft Office applications and gets a position in the same department as Haruko but her incompetence becomes evident almost right from the beginning when she is assigned a task and is unable to complete it promptly. Haruko likes all things Spanish it seems ... it looks like the following episodes will show what made her the person it is today since there was a brief flashback to a moment when she was a bank staff and probably laid off.

jade_frost wrote:

This isn't an accurate translation but it roughly says: Special skills: Can't tell Interests/Hobbies: Definitely can't tell Qualifications/Competencies: Many. What can't I write? Health: Mind your own business Strong points: You'll know if you hire me Weak points: None Character: Truely inept Personal motto: Perseverance prevails

Thanks for the translation.

TELEVIEWS / 'Haken no Hinkaku': The temps take over NTV

Wm. Penn / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

Every overworked, under-appreciated office lady in the land should tune in to Haken no Hinkaku (Wednesdays, 10 p.m., NTV network) for some vicarious vindication. Haven't seen a series this satisfying in a long time. It manages to be both light comedy and scathing social comment.

Ryoko Shinohara is excellent as Haruko Omae, a supertalented haken shain (temp agency worker) who sets her own conditions and takes no nonsense from anyone. Haken no Hinkaku is thought-provoking stress relief for a nation caught up in the current employment mess where many now find they have to accept low wages, no security, bonus or benefits just to get a job.

Omae's answer to the conundrum is to be independent, highly skilled and versatile. In Episode 1,

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we found out she is a whiz at computers, can operate a forklift and makes a perfect cup of tea. She carries out her assignments ultraefficiently, but invests no passion in her job, accepts no overtime and doesn't buy into the corporate vision or team spirit. Her real passion is flamenco dancing. Shinohara enjoys a good supporting cast. We see Omae through the adoring eyes of her temp agency coworker Miyuki (Ai Kato), a young woman who fits the haken stereotype--young, inexperienced and rather irresponsible. Hokkaido actor Yo Oizumi is good as the seishain (full-time employee) section head who contemptuously addresses Haruko as "omae" (a condescending form of "you"). She simply uses her surname to put him in his place. "Omae," she shoots back while referring to him with a more polite, but equally condescending, term "seishain-san." The script for episode one was full of sharply crafted dialogue like this. Even Kotaro Koizumi, who plays Haruko's superior in the new marketing department, is good considering his role requires him to do little more than look convincingly incompetent. The scene in which Haruko pulls him up out of a bus seat by his necktie so it could be offered to a little old lady is a classic.

Looks like this will be Ryoko Shinohara's third hit in a row following Anego (2005) and Unfair (2006), the film version of which hits theaters in March. If the series continues to be this good, it could mean four stars for the supertemp and a bonanza for the NTV Web site gift shop.

I'll be soft-subbing this series this season. Download the RAWs if you haven't already!

8thSin wrote:

I'll be soft-subbing this series this season. Download the RAWs if you haven't already!

This. Omg. Thank you so much!!!

8thSin wrote:

I'll be soft-subbing this series this season. Download the RAWs if you haven't already!

Great! Thanks!

This script is way better than Hanayome wa Yakudoshi. Ep1 was good but Ep2 was even better.

Haken no Hinkaku viewership:

Ep 1: 18.2% (Kanto region), 19.0% (Kansai region), 27.0% (Sapporo region)
Ep 2: 18.6% (Kanto region), 19.3% (Kansai region), 25.9% (Sapporo region)
Ep 3: 18.8% (Kanto region), 19.7% (Kansai region)

According to Nikkan Sports, the high ratings in Sapporo was attributed to the popularity of Oizumi Yo and Yasuda Ken - both of whom hail from Hokkaido. Oizumi Yo stars as Takeshi Shoji, the newly promoted Division 2 Sales Manager of S&F who is rather antagonistic and condescending towards hakens, while Yasuda Ken plays Hitotsugi Shinya, the manager of the employment agency which dispatches Ryoko Shinohara's Omae Haruko and Kato Ai's Mori Miyuki to S&F.

Ryoko in the flamenco scene in ep1:

Some screen caps from ep1:

Haken no Hinkaku's pretty riveting. I like how they've given Haruko different facets which makes her human despite how scarily efficient and multi-skilled she is. Haruko's also so inscrutable, brusque and business-like at work its quite hard to reconcile it with the warm, affable and unguarded manner she has when she's back at Cantante.

Screen caps from ep2:

This drama's probably meant to spur hakens (temporary workers) in Japan to believe that they are no way inferior to seishain (regular company employees), and it's doing a pretty good job at it. Ryoko's character is scarily talented. She has attained 26 very difficult qualifications which the drama is slowly displaying as the episodes progress.

The term "haken" refers to temporary workers supplied by an employment agency. Haken became popular in the 1990s as a means of finding job opportunities for women who wished to resume working in a flexible way at their convenience, but in the late 1990s, with the rising unemployment rate, many people chose to work as haken as a stop-gap before finding a full-time job.

According to the drama there are 3 million haken in Japan who are paid wages by the hour (on average about 1,590 yen/hr), have no bonus, transport allowances up to the company's discretion and contracts that generally last 3 months. In addition they have to contend with prejudices and antagonism from seishain who often treat them with disdain and view them as people to be bossed around.

jade_frost wrote:

This drama's probably meant to spur hakens (temporary workers) in Japan to believe that they are no way inferior to seishain (regular company employees), and it's doing a pretty good job at it. Ryoko's character is scarily talented. She has attained 26 very difficult qualifications which the drama is slowly displaying as the episodes progress. The term "haken" refers to temporary workers supplied by an employment agency. Haken became popular in the 1990s as a means of finding job opportunities for women who wished to resume working in a flexible way at their convenience, but in the late 1990s, with the rising unemployment rate, many people chose to work as haken as a stop-gap before finding a full-time job. According to the drama there are 3 million haken in Japan who are paid wages by the hour (on average about 1,590 yen/hr), have no bonus, transport allowances up to the company's discretion and contracts that generally last 3 months. In addition they have to contend with prejudices and antagonism from seishain who often treat them with disdain and view them as people to be bossed around.

Interesting.

She was very good in Anego... Is this drama comparable? Better? Worse?

From Japan Times,

Super temp worker who saves day is a nonconformist heroine

By PHILIP BRASOR

Prior to the start of the current Diet session, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that the ruling coalition would not submit previously announced bills to revise the Labor Standards Law. The move was seen as being cautionary, since there will be an Upper House election in July and the bills would have contained the so-called white-collar exemption, which says companies no longer have to pay overtime to a certain class of office worker. It is thought the exemption would anger salarymen voters.

This assumption presupposes the obvious, that salarymen resent working overtime for free, and opponents of the exemption refer to it with a number of sardonic nicknames: the "pin-hane (rake-off)" or "fubarai (non-payment)" bills, the "work-more measure" and the "death-from-overwork-promotion" rule. The ruling coalition ignored these snipes by concentrating on what it saw as the exemption's social benefits: company employees can spend more time at home with their families rather than at the office.

Though the business world supports the white-collar exemption, it just as strongly opposes the other revisions being considered for the bill, including stricter penalties for labor-regulation violations, an increase in the minimum wage and a ban on age limits in hiring.

These revisions would mainly benefit workers who aren't full time and whose increasing numbers in the corporate workplace have stifled salaries across the board, according to a report released last week by the labor ministry. In a debate on NHK last Sunday morning, a Social Democratic Party politician asked the Liberal Democratic Party's Secretary General Hidenao Nakagawa about this trend. Nakagawa again tried to emphasize the social benefits. "Many people nowadays prefer to work in their own way," he said, specifically referring to contract employees. The temp boom is merely a reflection of society's desire for greater freedom of choice.

This thinking feeds into the idea that temp workers are happy-go-lucky free spirits who work only when they want to and enjoy their lives more than full-timers do. It's a myth that's convenient for corporations, who don't have to pay benefits or social insurance for temps and who got the government to liberalize the labor laws in 1999 to allow virtually any type of job to be contracted out.

The myth is addressed in Nihon TV's drama series "Haken no Hinkaku" (Wednesdays, 10 p.m.). Haken, which means "dispatch," is the word generally used to describe temporary contract workers, and hinkaku means "dignity." The protagonist, Haruko Ohmae (Ryoko Shinohara), is described as a "super haken," a temp whose office skills are so sharply developed that client companies ask for her by name.

Haruko is a super haken in more ways than one. While she can whip up a spreadsheet faster than you can say "Excel" and knows how to brew a mean cup of ocha, she also knows her rights. She's out of the office exactly at six o'clock. "Overtime is not in my dictionary," she says coldly. Full-timers are expected to hang around until their superiors leave, even if they have nothing to do.

The full-timers resent it when Haruko marches home after eight hours because it indicates she is not beholden to the company. It's implied she has better things to do.

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At night she is a flamenco dancer at a Spanish theme bar, and between three-month work assignments she travels to Spain to polish her art and language skills. But beneath Haruko's extreme no-nonsense exterior is a broken heart. She was laid off from a full-time position when the company she worked for was downsized, and it's implied that her talents compensate for her loss of identity as a member of a corporate family. Every week, she reveals in superhero fashion another impossible skill -- operating heavy machinery, speaking Russian, preparing fancy seafood -- that she has picked up during her years as a temp. This contrasts humorously with the relative lack of skills displayed by the full-timers at the food-service company where Haruko is currently contracted to work. They look down on the haken workers as an inferior species, but in every episode Haruko saves the day. At one point, the middle-aged department manager who hired her reprimands his young staff for the way they treat the temps. "In order to reduce costs we need haken with skills," he says. The contract worker is something the full-time worker must accept, not only as an economic necessity, but as an equal partner. This is where the "dignity" comes in, and while the show emphasizes pride in accomplishment over financial reward it also makes the case that you can't have the former without the latter. Haruko commands a larger wage than other haken because she brings a professional attitude to her work. She does her job and expects to be compensated fairly for it. She wants no part of the corporate office culture and its politics of human networking. According to the laws of TV dramas, her heart will likely melt by episode 12, but for the time being she is an island of stoical purpose in a sea of unproductive workers. When the manager offers Haruko a full-time position, she curtly refuses. The company employees are so shocked, they fall over.

Haruko is a caricature of the haken ideal. The reality for temp workers is more complicated than the situation portrayed in "Haken no Hinkaku," but there's something refreshing, even radical, about Haruko's refusal to adhere to the mores of the corporate workplace, where working overtime is seen as a sign of conformity even when it's work that could have been done during normal hours. As the prime minister implied when he decided to shelve the white-collar exemption for the time being, even the most loyal salaryman expects to get paid for hanging around.

bmwracer wrote:

Interesting. She was very good in Anego... Is this drama comparable? Better? Worse?

Can't comment on that because I haven't watched Anego yet! But will be catching it soon.

I'm not very fond of Kato Ai's character in Haken no Hinkaku. Makes me want to

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She always gets into all kinds of trouble every episode and she's awfully whiney.