Long Vacation (ロングバケーション) is a 1996 Japanese live-action series starring Yamaguchi Tomoko (Eng/Jpn) as Hayama Minami, an increasingly out-of-work 31-year-old model who was left at the altar by her no-good cheating fiance. Due to ::hand wave:: she ends up moving in with her ex-fiance’s roommate, a sensitive younger man named Sena who plays piano and looks like Kimura Takuya (Eng/Jpn), and with whom she will remain just friends.1
The show also features Minami’s scampish younger brother Shinji, who is torn between bad-girl girlfriend Rumiko and good-girl pianist Ryoko. Rounding out the cast is Minami’s eccentric model friend Momoko, The Phoebe.
Despite it being the ’90s and Momoko being The Phoebe, the show is otherwise not like its contemporary Friends at all, falling more into the dramedy category and telling its whole story in 11 concise episodes, which keeps its will-they-won’t-they situation blessedly temporally-constrained. Enjoyable even!
Long Vacation was a huge success, characterized in the Japanese press by the phrase 月曜日はOLが街から消える – On Mondays, office ladies disappear from the city – presumably at home glued to their TVs. The show was also credited for an uptick in piano lessons among young men. But perhaps the show’s greatest influence on pop culture was turbocharging the global boy band phenomenon, as Kimura, and by extension his group SMAP (Eng/Jpn), became superstars not only in Japan, but across Asia and beyond.
Anyhoo, did I mention the show is from the ’90s? Boy howdy is it from the ‘90s! The clothes! The hair! Everybody smoking indoors! Subplots revolving around two roommates sharing a single landline! Also the theme song (Eng/Jpn/FullVersion) looks and sounds like this:
Happy Day Threading!
- 😉 ↩︎