November 29, 2009 (2009-11-29) – December 2011 (2011-12)
Saka no Ue no Kumo (坂の上の雲) (lit. “Clouds Above the Slope”) is a Japanese war drama television series which was aired on NHK over three years, from November 29, 2009 to December 2011, as a special taiga drama.[1] The series runs 13 episodes at 90 minutes each. The first season, with 5 episodes, was broadcast in 2009, while seasons two and three, each with 4 episodes, were broadcast in late 2010 and 2011. While most episodes were shot in Japan, one of the episodes in season two was shot in Latvia. The TV series is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Ryōtarō Shiba and adapted by Hisashi Nozawa.[2]
Executive producer Yoshiko Nishimura acquired the rights to the novel from Shiba's widow Midori Fukuda in 2001, after decades of the author refusing to let anyone adapt his controversial work for the screen. The NHK officially announced their intention to adapt the novel in 2003, though shooting would only begin in 2008. The series is the first taiga drama to be mainly set during the Meiji era, thus its production encountered more difficulties than usual in achieving an accurate depiction of its setting. It is now the most expensive taiga drama ever produced.
The theme song of the drama series is titled "Stand Alone". It was composed by Joe Hisaishi, written by Kundō Koyama, and performed by British soprano singer Sarah Brightman.
During the 1970s, executive producer Yoshiko Nishimura read the 1968 novel Saka no Ue no Kumo by Ryōtarō Shiba when he was a student at the University of Tokyo.[3] Though he dreamt of what the novel would look like on screen, his seniors at the NHK drama department thought that adapting the work was inconceivable; Shiba continuously refused throughout his life to let anyone adapt his controversial work for the screen.[3]
By the 1990s, Nishimura would travel to Hollywood to study filmmaking, gaining inspiration to mount an epic narrative on television that would elevate the status of the medium in Japan, which was considered by people to be inferior to cinema.[3] In 2000, Nishimura visited Shiba's widow Midori Fukuda to give his condolences, and presented to her his argument for a television adaptation of Shiba's novel: that it would encourage young people to read the novel after seeing the story onscreen. After a year of deliberation, Fukuda relented and provided Nishimura with the novel's adaptation rights.[3] The NHK would officially announce their intention to adapt the novel as a taiga drama by 2003.[3]
Writing and filming
Preparations for Saka no Ue no Kumo took three times as long as a regular NHK taiga drama.[3] The series was originally scheduled to begin its broadcast by 2006, but the suicide of writer Hisashi Nozawa in 2004 lead to the postponement of production.[4] The usual taiga drama production would first have one-third of the total number of scripts finished before shooting, with audience reception taken into account as the rest of the series is written; Saka no Ue no Kumo only began shooting in 2008 once all 13 ninety-minute scripts were finished.[3]
The Meiji era had never been depicted as the main setting of a taiga drama before, thus the television crew encountered more difficulties than usual in creating the visuals for the era due to a lack of familiar images.[3] Research into the military background of the time especially highlighted the differences between the Meiji military and the Shōwa military; according to Nishimura, no visual image of the Meiji era's military has ever been made that has actually stuck in the Japanese' imaginations, while the Shōwa era has been the default image in their minds.[3]
In adapting the novel for television, the crew addressed the lack of female characters in the original work by including scenes which depicted what the women were doing and thinking about in Japan during both the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. For Nishimura, "those scenes are one of the things worth noticing in a special drama like this one."[3]
The series has since become the most expensive taiga drama ever produced by NHK.[5]
