The Dorama Encyclopedia:
A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953
Authored by: Jonathan Clemens and Motoko Tamamuro
Published Domestically by: Stone Bridge Press
Year: 2003
Number of Pages: 441
by Jeffrey Couto

Introduction

Back in the day, the time before the Internet was the information depot that it is today, fans of tokusatsu had very few precious sources of information. Unless you happened to have direct contacts in Japan or lived in a larger city, odds were that coming by tokusatsu information, videos, or merchandise would be a formidable challenge. Thankfully, there were a few professional sources of Tokusatsu information for those those of us who didn't have those types of contacts.

Publications such as Oriental Cinema, Sentai, and Ultra Fan/Kaiju Fan were some of the best and proved to be very educational for the beginner fan. However with the dawn of the internet age and other mass media most of these publications ceased to exist, leaving us with a large gap in professional English-based tokusatsu magazines.

Today there seems to be a revitalized interest in Japanese TV programming as our pop culture seeks out even more unexplored venues of artistic expression. With the success of Japanese animation this would seem to be a natural progression of things and a trend that I hope will continue and build as more great reference material such as the Dorama Encyclopedia is released.

Review

The Dorama Encyclopedia is a rather large tome that attempts to catalog literally over a thousand TV series produced in Japan since 1953. The book covers a gamut of genres, from detective dramas to comedies, soap operas, and historical programming. Of particular interest to visitors of this website the book also covers tokusatsu programming, and although not 100% accurate or complete (and to be fair, what is?) the coverage and information provided for Japanese hero shows in the Dorama Encyclopedia is really good and in some cases very in-depth.

Entries for tokusatsu programs such as Ultraman, Booska, Ultra Q, Thundermask, Fireman, are full of details, such as the general plot/story, production information, and background trivia about the show itself. The Super Sentai show entries proved to be just as good as the general tokusatsu ones, with the ones dedicated toshows that were re-packaged for distribution in the U.S. (Zyu Ranger – Aba Ranger) also throwing in some information about the US rendition of that particular sentai series.

Overall the writing for these entries is easy to read and quite interesting at points, which makes the Dorama Encyclopedia a good read.

Aside from the hero fare though, I found the book’s descriptions for other fare to be much more interesting as it presented a whole new universe of programs that seemed just as interesting and worthy of further exploration as the hero shows we love so much here at Japan Hero.

I really have to commend Jonathan Clements and Motoko Tamamuro for their efforts in collecting this amazing compilation of TV series titles and adding so much detailed information to each entry covered in the book. This was a work of love and it comes through in every page.

Conclusion

This book is not recommended for Japan Hero fans, it's required reading. With so much information collected in one book you would be hard pressed to find anything similar in terms of contents, quality, and overall presentation. Hope there is a second volume in the works, maybe one solely geared at tokusatsu? Now that would be something!

Jeffrey Couto