In early August, as the heat continued, former SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi was running frantically in a park in Katsushika Ward, Tokyo, wearing long sleeves. [Image:] He made a mad dash in the extreme heat! The president of his agency also put a lot of effort into Kusanagi’s drama location “Mr. Kusanagi was looking for someone, shouting out someone’s name. They were filming as they moved around the park, and it must have been very hot because the temperature rose that day. Even after the cut, he still had a desperate look on his face,” said a passerby who was there. As shown by his autumnal attire of a denim jacket, Kusanagi was in the middle of shooting an autumn drama. He was in the midst of filming for the drama “Rondo in the Last Act – For You I Can Never See Again” (Fuji Television), which will be broadcast in October. Mr. Kusanagi plays an estate agent who has lost his wife and is raising his first grader son as a single father. It is a heartwarming human drama in which he accompanies a family with various circumstances through organizing their belongings. This is Kusanagi’s first appearance in a commercial TV drama series in two and a half years, and it is produced by Kantele. The station has teamed up with Kusanagi for several high-profile productions, including “Trap War,” in which Kusanagi played the lead role two and a half years ago. This is the ninth drama series in which Kusanagi has starred, the most for Kantele. The drama was cranked in Tokyo in early June, and the president of New Map, to which Kusanagi belongs, Mitsutomo Iijima, came to greet the cast on the crank-in date. Mr. Iijima is the former chief manager of SMAP and their foster parent; SMAP disbanded in 2016, and Kusanagi, Shingo Katori, and Goro Inagaki joined the company that Mr. Iijima had founded. She arrived in a very luxurious car with a Dior bag in one hand, and the scene was even more tense than usual. A few producers from the station were on hand to assist her, but I felt that she must be very enthusiastic since she went to such great lengths to come to the site. Mr. Kusanagi, on the other hand, brought us high-grade boxed lunches to the site to cheer us up during the physically demanding summer shooting. Mr. Kusanagi is well-known among the staff for his generous gift of lunch boxes from the popular bistro “BISTRO J_O” during the filming of “War of the Traps. Thanks to the “fat-hearted chairman,” the scene seems to be energetic.
