There aren't many celebrities who would make good journalists, but something tells me Norika Fujiwara is one. She's well-traveled, socially active and not constrained by the mechanisms of public-relations strategies.
In the new WOWOW mini-series "Onna to Otoko no Nettai" (which is rendered in English roughly as "The Passionate Zone between Women and Men"), Fujiwara, 41, plays journalist Sonoko Miyabe. She gets a tip that the revenge-obsessed Satoshi Shindo (Atsuro Watabe) plans to kill the person he thinks is responsible for a terrorist attack that left his wife and daughter dead. What follows is a game of cat and mouse that fires up libidos and exposes the seedy underbelly of politics, business and the media.
"Commercial Japanese TV stations would rarely dare to tackle these issues," Fujiwara tells The Japan Times. "But if you think about foreign movies such as 'The Insider' and 'The Constant Gardener,' those kinds of controversial topics come up all the time. So I was fascinated with the script when I first received it."