On Saturday I was working at the computer with the TV on, and came across a re-broadcast of the first two episodes of パパとムスメの七日間, a Japanese weekend drama that was on a while back. I usually don’t watch Japanese TV since it consists of essentially talentless タレント芸の人 (celebrities) on quiz shows, or possibly cooking shows, or quite possibly celebrity cooking quiz travel shows. Actually, you can draw any keywords from the set (cooking, celebrity, quiz, game, challenge survival course, travel, food) and come up with a plausible Japanese TV show. I have to admit that I enjoy some of the survival course shows, but generally I don’t watch too much Japanese TV.

Every once in a while I’ll watch a drama, but because they are always broadcast on some sort of schedule and I don’t generally work regular hours I find it really hard to watch something broadcast on a schedule.

This drama, A week with Papa and Daughter, is only seven shows long. It was broadcast on the weekend, and has a kind of short run (usually they are 12 episodes or so I would guess?) That is a short enough run that I can get into it, and since I just “watched” two episodes I headed over to d-addicts.com and downloaded the rest of the series.

I really recommend it for intermediate and advanced level Japanese speakers. It is a funny series, and fairly easy to understand. A very brief description of the series:

A daughter, Koume, and her father (papa) don’t get along very well. Returning from Grandma’s house one day, they eat a magical peach that switches their bodies around, and hilarity ensues. The father works at a famous beauty supplies company, and is in charge of a new product launch: the perfume Beautiful Dream that they are aiming at high school girls up to office ladies.

The daughter, Koume, is a high school student with a crush on a student on the soccer team. You can imagine how a high school girl trying to be the boss of a project at work could be difficult (and also how a high school student could be useful for directing the product direction.) Of course, her father isn’t going to have any easy time with the midterm tests or Koume’s high school crush…

I found the entire series over on d-addicts in Japanese, and it looks like they also have English and Chinese subtitles for it.

It’s worth checking out!