After her passionate portrayal of a high school student with Gender Identity Disorder in the 6th series of the long-running classroom drama Kinpachi sensei, "3-nen B-Gumi Kinpachi Sensei 6" (2001), endeared her to the Japanese nation, she was able to pursue a solo music career with her first single, "Pureness", released in August 2002. It was this performance that also convinced cult movie director Ryohei Kitamura to cast her in the title role of Azumi (2003).
With the film's release date coinciding with the sale of her debut album "AYAUETO" in the spring of 2003, Aya was set for super-stardom. Her famous smile has since earned her increasing numbers of commercial contracts and magazine covers - all-important exposure for any idol - combined with starring roles in a number of popular television dramas have meant she is rarely out of the limelight and has cemented her position as one of Japan's top entertainers.
She has been married to Hiroyuki Igarashi (HIRO of EXILE) since September 14, 2012. Their first daughter was born on August 19, 2015. On July 27, 2019, the birth of their second child, a boy, was announced. On Jun 23, 2023, the birth of their third child, a boy, was announced.", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/4rQw6_5c.jpg" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Matsuda Satoshi", "alternateName": "松田悟志, まつだ さとし, Satoshi Matsuda", "birthDate": "December 16, 1978", "nationality": "Moriguchi, Osaka, Japan", "description": "", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/matsuda-satoshi.png" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Enami Kyoko", "alternateName": "江波杏子, 野平香純, えなみ きょうこ, のひら かすみ, Nohira Kazumi, Kazumi Nohira, Kyoko Enami", "birthDate": "October 15, 1942", "nationality": "Tokyo, Japan", "description": "", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/enami-kyoko.png" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Kobayashi Nenji", "alternateName": "小林稔侍", "birthDate": "February 7, 1941", "nationality": "Japanese", "description": "Kobayashi Nenji is a Japanese actor. He won the award for the best supporting actor at the 23rd Japan Academy Prize for Poppoya.
(Source: Wikipedia)", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/0ddX7_5c.jpg" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Kobayashi Chiharu", "alternateName": "小林千晴", "birthDate": "January 19, 1973", "nationality": "Japanese", "description": "", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/vpdAD_5c.jpg" } ], "director": [ { "@type": "Person", "name": "Karaki Akihiro", "alternateName": "唐木希浩 (からきあきひろ)", "birthDate": "", "nationality": "Japanese", "description": "", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/0Vz47_5c.jpg" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Matsunaga Yoichi", "alternateName": "松永洋一", "birthDate": "", "nationality": "Japanese", "description": "Matsunaga Yoichi is a Japanese director. He made his directing debut with 2003 tv drama "Hitonatsu no Papa e".", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/pbnoV_5c.jpg" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Hiroki Ryuichi", "alternateName": "廣木隆一", "birthDate": "January 1, 1954", "nationality": "Japanese", "description": "Hiroki Ryuichi is a Japanese film director. He won critical acclaim for 800 Two Lap Runners. Film critic and researcher Alexander Jacoby has described Hiroki as "one of the modern Japanese cinema's most intelligent students of character".
Of the directors who have graduated from “pink film” to the mainstream, Hiroki has remained perhaps the most faithful to his origins: he continues to make films on sexual themes, though titillation has given way to analysis. In the eighties, after serving as assistant to prolific “pink” director Genji Nakamura, he made pornographic films for both straight and gay audiences; likewise, his first mainstream feature, 800 Two Lap Runners (1994), explored both hetero- and homosexual feelings in its account of the awkward relationship between a teenage runner and the former girlfriend of the dead trackmate with whom he once had a sexual experience.
Hiroki’s next film, Midori, was another drama about adolescent emotions, focusing on a disaffected high school girl who feigns illness to spend time with her boyfriend. Female protagonists continued to be central to Hiroki’s most interesting work, which dealt with young adults and with their sexual conduct in the fragmented society of modern urban Japan. Tokyo Trash Baby, Vibrator, and Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World were all moving, understated films about lonely, alienated women seeking solace in romantic fantasy and transient attachments.
Hiroki shot these films on digital video, and his informal style, with its loose compositions and low-key performances, effectively dramatized the haphazard lives of his protagonists, insecure both in work and relationships. Darker and more melodramatic in the plot was L’Amant (2004), a coolly observed account of a teenage schoolgirl who sells herself for a year as a sex slave to three brothers. By refusing to pass judgment on the perverse actions it depicted, Hiroki’s detached style forced the viewer to confront his own taboos. The director again explored the extremes of sexual behavior in M (2006); described by Jasper Sharp as “a Belle de Jour for the internet age,” it charted the experiences of a housewife who begins to work as a prostitute after receiving an email from a dating website.
Besides these troubling and emotionally complex films, The Silent Big Man was an unexpectedly chaste academic work, set safely in the past, and prettily photographed against the scenic backdrops of the Inland Sea. Recalling Keisuke Kinoshita in its story of a mute teacher assigned to an island school, it lacked Kinoshita’s skill for melodrama, and though Hiroki’s dry style restrained its sentimentality somewhat, he seemed ill suited to the material.
Happily, with It’s Only Talk, a subtly compelling chronicle of the life of an unemployed thirty-something woman suffering from manic depression, Hiroki returned to his more fruitful preoccupation with the problems of contemporary urban life. Here his use of locations in Tokyo’s down-at-heel Kamata district was especially well judged, anchoring the drama in a near-documentary record of a specific place. Love on Sunday, meanwhile, revisited the territory of the director’s earliest mainstream features, exploring adolescent emotions as it charted a teenage girl’s last 24 hours in her country home. In his recent work, Hiroki has proved himself one of the modern Japanese cinema’s most intelligent students of character, as well as one of the most precise analysts of Tokyo’s twenty-first-century zeitgeist and Japan’s twenty-first-century malaise.
(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors)", "image": "https://i.hndrama.com/image/people/6DKgW_5c.jpg" } ]
}