Remi Takasugi is the most popular “item” at the “Rental Lovers” company where no customer request is deemed too impossible, outlandish or difficult to fulfill as long as certain rules and time constraints are observed. The company motto is “The ultimate rental girlfriend” and they guarantee complete satisfaction and perfectly-met requests. Remi is the ideal girlfriend in every way. But she also exhibits a few distractingly different traits. She absolutely refuses to smile once a date “gig” is over, and she wears an odd-looking bandage on her neck. So who or what is Remi? And what’s with the bandage? Cyborg? Alien? Cat? The suspense-filled love story starts here.

It is called “The Musical Koshien”, the All-Japan Wind & Brass Band High School Championship. Regional rounds begin across the country every July, gradually narrowing a field of over 3,000 high school bands to just about a dozen for the finals. Amid the event’s long history, one public school is legendary for having risen from complete anonymity to national champion. In 1983, Kanagawa Prefectural Noba High School was a rough and tumble, low-rated school with a music room littered with cigarette butts and an inactive brass band club made up of hopeless slackers. But in the short span of 2 years, one man turned them around and made them national heroes. Based on a true story about a teacher named Nakazawa who spent 10 years guiding students to glory while battling cancer, this inspiring drama depicts two years in the life of a broken down musician (Koichi Hikuma), searching for meaning after suffering an accident that forced him out of a musical career, and the turnaround he orchestrates for himself and for the lives of his problematic students.

Based on the writings of a true life, vision-impaired lawyer comes a story about a blind man who manages to pass the extremely difficult bar exam and earn his lawyer’s license. Long desiring to help the weak, Kensuke Okochi gets a job at an attorney’s office while he and his wife, also blind, look forward to their first child. When a plaintiff in a divorce case decides to withdraw from litigation, Kensuke worries at first that it has to do with his own perceived inadequacies as a lawyer, but a few days later, he is visited by the female plaintiff, Satomi, showing injuries to her body. While it appears an open and shut case of domestic violence with an audio recording as proof, Kensuke detects a “certain scent” coming from the plaintiff which gives him pause as to her real intentions.

Yuko is a biology teacher and education counselor at a local high school. Between the school bell chimes, she’s an ordinary teacher with superlative instructional technique. But when school lets out, she transforms into the one person you don’t want to mess with, a super problem-solving mercenary for whom no method is off limits when it comes to rooting out the myriad problems infesting teenage life in the schools. With an “eye for an eye” approach, she’s not above breaking a few laws and demands payment for her services. Enlisting as her sidekicks, Sumire and Aya, the personality-diverse trio run their elite “extra-curricular social work” club unified around Yuko’s charismatic leadership. High school students do not live in a sanitized bubble, and some extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions that black-and-white rules of propriety or common sense alone cannot solve.

Do you have a teacher you will never forget?
An ordinary looking school and a typical classroom. So many students have passed through it over the years; as have many battle-scarred teachers. A message on the blackboard embodies three dramatic periods in Japan’s postmodern history. There was the time just after World War II, the economic miracle that followed, and the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami. Viewed from three fascinating and iconoclastic teachers living through these three revolutionary milestones moments, here is a story that drives at the heart of education. What did these children learn? What were the adults able to impart to them? What does it mean to be Japanese? And what are the hopes and dreams of people of all ages?