When it was announced last year that entertainment Renaissance man Kankuro Kudo would write the script for NHK's spring-summer 2013 "TV novel," a few people probably wondered how the iconoclastic writer-director-actor would respond to the broadcaster's narrative strictures. In a recent interview with Aera, Kudo said that he writes what he wants to write, but if someone complains about something "I'll change it." NHK's 15-minute asa-dora (morning dramas) have been a tradition for more than 40 years. Always chronicling the coming-of-age and beyond of a female protagonist, they highlight special attributes of whatever location is the setting that season, which is why so many local governments lobby NHK to get their areas covered. Kudo was commissioned to write a story that took place in a fictional town on the Sanriku coast of Iwate Prefecture, which would eventually be devastated in the tsunami of March 2011.

The dramatic possibilities inherent in the disaster are compelling, but so far (the series started in April and ends in September) the story has not touched on the tsunami. Nevertheless, it has proven to be not only one of the most popular series in the history of asa-dora, with viewer share as high as 22 percent some weeks, but one of its most shamelessly entertaining, as well.

The lead character of "Amachan" is Aki Amano (Rena Nonen), a withdrawn Tokyo teenager who in 2008 accompanies her mother, Haruko (Kyoko Koizumi), to Haruko's hometown of Sodegahama, which she hasn't visited in 24 years. The impetus behind the trip is a note from the town's station master, Daikichi (Tetta Sugimoto), saying that Haruko's mother, Natsu (Nobuko Miyamoto), has fallen ill, but it turns out not to be true. Daikichi, who has had a crush on Haruko since they were kids, heard that she was getting divorced and hoped that if she came back she could be talked into becoming an ama, a female diver who collects and sells sea urchins plucked from the sea bottom. Haruko has absolutely no interest in becoming an ama like her mother, and her relationship with Natsu remains frosty, but Aki is brought out of her shell by her contact with the local culture and dialect and finagles Haruko into staying so that she can become an ama. Later, she is accepted into a program for training deep-sea divers.