One of the staples of Japanese daytime television for more than four decades has been the NHK Renzoku Terebii Shosetsu (serialized television novel), broadcast six days per week, Monday through Saturday, from 8:15 to 8:30 a.m. Begun in 1961, each "novel" runs for 26 or 52 weeks.
The series, which usually features a heroine struggling to overcome adversity and triumphing by the end of the story, has often been seen as reflecting the Japanese zeitgeist. The most famous example, "Oshin," broadcast in 1983 and 1984, attracted a remarkable 52.6 percent audience share and was widely interpreted as an allegory of Japan's century-long emergence as a modern state.
The current series, "Sakura," which began on April 1, is the 66th NHK morning drama. What is unusual about this series is that the main character is not a Japanese woman but a 23-year-old yonsei(fourth-generation descendent of Japanese ancestry) from Hawaii, Elizabeth Sakura Matsushita. Having viewed the first 36 installments (April 1-May 11), I am tempted to subtitle the series "E.T. (the Extra Terrestrial) Comes to Japan."