The Japan Kanji Proficiency Examination Association (日本漢字能力検定協会) have announced their 2008 Kanji of the Year: 変, meaning both “strange” and “change” (and even “rebellion“).

I had high hopes for this year after the sneering cynicism of 2007’s winning kanji, 偽 (fake), but KotY voters clearly aren’t yet prepared to abandon basket-of-puppies territory. Not that they aren’t representing some sort of Zeitgeist — @nifty got exactly the same results polling bloggers — but when both Obama and Aso qualify as examples of the same phenomenon, it’s clearly “change” defined extremely broadly.

Tansho Miki (丹所美紀) observes [and Scilla Alecci translates], 変 by itself feels much closer to “strange” or “mistaken” than “change,” which, she argues, applies to Aso perfectly.

Runners up included 金 (money), 落 (fall), and 株 (stock), for obvious international reasons; 毒 (poison) and 食 (food), reflecting ongoing popular anxiety over food safety; and 不 (un-), which is straight-up nihilism — those who selected it invoke compounds like 不安 (uncertainty), 不幸 (misfortune), and even 不気味 (creepy).

Related: Pink Tentacle’s essential annual rundown of the year’s top 60 Japanese words.

What do you call a drama that stars an actor whose very fame has been described as a sort of “conventional wisdom,” pushes the idea that the inheritor of a political dynasty from the ruling party is Japan’s best hope for a brighter future, and is substantially no different than every other Japanese soap opera? Well if you’re a TV studio with an enormous amount of guts (or total lack of self-consciousness), you call it CHANGE.

The Monday night television drama, which aired from May 5 to July 14, stars Kimura “Kimutaku” Takuya as an unlikely prime minister. But if you had thought this show would attempt to tackle Japan’s many political failures, prepare to be disappointed. This show existed mainly as a vehicle for Kimura and consciously avoids difficult political themes. A shame, seeing that the broader topics are ripe for a prime-time takedown.

Kimura plays Asakura Keita — a schoolteacher in Fukuoka Prefecture. When his father, an MP for the ruling party, and older brother — the handpicked successor — suddenly die, he is faced with the choice of running in his father’s place. He reluctantly decides to throw in his hat and ends up winning a tight race. Once in Tokyo, senior party officials take notice of his instant popularity and decide to exploit Keita to distract the public from the current prime minister’s devastating sexual harassment scandal. Keita’s mentor, the scheming Kanbayashi, hatches the Grinchiest of schemes: install Keita in the Prime Minister’s office, use him to prime the party’s approval ratings and then call a snap election while they remain at a relative advantage.

To the ruling elite’s consternation, however, Keita proves astonishingly able: he can memorize tariff schedules overnight, knows exactly how to procure flashlights in a disaster, and is generally a really swell guy. His chief strength however, is his outsider status — frankly admitting that he cannot understand political jargon makes him a hit with the public. Can Keita, who is more comfortable in his nerd glasses and curly hair than the strait-laced and straight haired world of politics, beat expectations and outsmart his rivals, all the while balancing difficult relationships with his quirky live-in election assistant and a strategist who just won’t leave?

The plot is divided between political intrigue and the antics of Keita’s entourage. In the scenes featuring the entourage, the dialogue consists mostly of rapid-fire, sarcastic banter — rude screechings and non sequitur interruptions that produce the distracting feeling of eavesdropping on a loud, drunken argument on the commuter train.
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