The Journalist - Netflix Series

The Journalist | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Malaysia

It's like watching a scandal unfold from behind the scenes. I'm guesstimating the whole thing unfolds over a period of a year, give or take any number of months. Somebody approves a grant and in exchange somebody becomes the owner of a substantial piece of property and only pays a fraction of its market value. At least I think that's what the scandal is.

Anyway, questions get asked, an investigation starts but is quickly squashed and it's all set to quietly fade away until the miscreants decide they need to cover their tracks. They put together a small group of guys and set them to work editing the records to eliminate any reference to the Prime Minister's wife.

Mr. Matsuda is hanging with the miscreants when they cook up this scheme and he files a formal complaint. Shortly thereafter his complaint is withdraw and he mysteriously falls ill and ends up comatose in the hospital where he remains for the rest of this story. His sister is The Journalist and she is distraught by what happened to her brother, but she has no evidence of what happened to him being anything other than an act of god.

Meanwhile the DCB (Dedicated Career Bureaucrat), one of the guys on the crew rewriting the records, is not happy about this work. He has always prided himself on doing a good and proper job that would be beneficial to the people, and this business of altering records has got him mentally crosswise. It gets so bad that he eventually kills himself, which causes a small scandal. What's going on with this guy? Happily married, career bureaucrat, commits suicide? He leaves a suicide note, but his wife keeps it quiet, for a while.

Now we have Ryo, the handsome young college student, nephew of DCB, who starts to become politically aware and runs into Ms. Matsuda, The Journalist, who wants to interview his aunt, the widow of DCB.

DCB kept meticulous records of the alterations he made on the official records. He put his record of alterations on a flash drive and gave it to his supervisor before he died.

Ms. Matsuda gets hold of some dirt and gets the story published, This irritates the miscreants and they unleash an army social media warriors on her. The have a secure room full of cubicles with a couple of dozen people in there, all bent to the task of raising cain on social media.

6 episodes, 45 minutes each.

I'm watching this show and I'm thinking this is exactly what's going on in the US, and has been since forever. Shoot, the same thing is going on all over the world.

Cast

I've been thinking I should include the cast of characters from these shows, because we watch so many, and there are so many actors that some of them are bound to appear in other shows. But putting together a cast list is a fair amount of work. Most of the cast listings found on the internet give the actor's name and the character's name, which is great, but they don't tell you their role. With foreign films the character's name doesn't help much because they are mostly unpronounceable. We hear what they are calling other characters, but often times the spoken version of the name is just a breath or a grunt and are incomprehensible. When my wife and are talking, trying to figure out what's going on on-screen, we mostly refer to characters by the role they are playing - the fat thug, the skinny detective, the girlfriend, terms like that.

So I decided to ask Google: Can you tell me the names of the actors in the Japanese TV drama 'The Journalist', their characters names and their roles? And presto, this very cool list appears:

The cast of the 2022 Japanese TV drama The Journalist, available on Netflix, includes Ryoko Yonekura as an investigative reporter, Go Ayano as an elite public servant, and Ryusei Yokohama as a student intern. The series is based on the 2019 movie of the same name and the book by Isoko Mochizuki, but features different characters.

 

Main cast and characters

• Ryoko Yonekura as Anna Matsuda (The Journalist): A determined and seasoned investigative reporter for the Toto Newspaper. She is known as a "maverick" in the news industry and is tenacious in her pursuit of the truth behind government corruption scandals.
• Go Ayano as Shinichi Murakami: An elite bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. He becomes entangled in the government conspiracy.
• Ryusei Yokohama as Ryo Kinoshita: A university student working as a newspaper deliveryman. He becomes motivated to uncover the truth and finds himself drawn into the scandal.
• Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kazuya Suzuki (DCB): A public servant who was initially involved in the corruption but takes his own life after providing the original documents to the Ministry of Finance.
• Shinobu Terajima as Mayumi Suzuki: Kazuya Suzuki's determined wife. After her husband's suicide, she joins Anna to expose the corruption.

Supporting cast

• Yusuke Santamaria as Shinjiro Toyoda (nasty, creepy villain): A political public relations strategist and special adviser to the Prime Minister.
• Tetsushi Tanaka as Tomoya Tada: An official who serves as the bureaucratic voice for the Cabinet.
• Tokio Emoto as Daiki Sato: A former colleague of Shinichi Murakami.
• Kaho Tsuchimura as Harumi Yashiro: A member of the opposition party in the National Diet who pressures for a reinvestigation of the corruption scandal.
• Masato Hagiwara as Kohei Matsuda: Anna Matsuda's late father, also a journalist.

So maybe AI (Artificial Intelligence) has some use after all.