Oricon recently did an interview with Nogi Akiko and Tsukahara Ayuko, the scriptwriter and director of TBS Autumn 2024 drama "Umi ni nemuru daiyamondo" where you can find out more about how the drama came about, the pre-filming preparation work needed and the challenges in making it. While TBS is well-known for putting in a lot of effort and splurging on its signature Sundays 9pm timeslot dramas e.g. last year's "VIVANT" with its star-studded cast and long-term overseas filming in Mongolia, this year's "Umi ni nemuru daiyamondo" offers an entirely different set of challenges primarily because of the following reasons:
- the story shuttles between two timelines in Hashima and Tokyo spanning 70 years
- Hashima's infrastructure and buildings are left in a state of ruins after the mines were closed, the inhabitants moved out of the island and the effects caused by natural wear and tear thanks to the harsh weather
- access to most of the island being restricted since some buildings have already collapsed or are about to. In fact, you cannot go to Hashima at will and must go through designated tour companies to book the boat trips.
As there is no other means of transportation to the island other than by sea, unfavourable weather conditions can make it impossible for the tourist ferry to get to the pier for landing at times. If you are taking the sightseeing ferry to Hashima, you won't get a refund on your ticket if it so happens that the weather prevents a landing on the day of your visit. It's been estimated that landings are only possible on less than 160 days of the year so certain months of the year have a lower-than-average landing probability. Given these limitations, on-location shooting is out of the question. Even if tourists can get onto the island, access is restricted to a designated area so you can't go around freely due to the danger of potentially collapsing structures or do any restoration works to them for the filming.
Here are the highlights from the interview and how the production crew managed to work around these limitations and challenges to bring this drama to life:
* This is the first drama series featuring Hashima.
* Research for the script began about one year ago in summer 2023. As Tsukahara and one of the producers Arai Junko were busy with other works, it was not possible for them to participate in this phase. However, Nogi didn't want to write the script without adequate research yet there was a limit to how much she could do on her own. Thus, she got the help of director Hayashi Satoshi who is from Nagasaki Prefecture to conduct the research. His presence was a great help to her as Nogi had to interview past residents of Hashima in Nagasaki who were mostly in their 80s and only spoke the Nagasaki dialect. For an outsider like Nogi to do the interviews would have been extremely difficult so without Hayashi, this drama would not have materalised.
* Nogi first visited Hashima before it was designated as a World Heritage site while on a private trip. That was when the island had not been made into a tourist spot and the Gunkanjima Museum was not even built so the only thing she could do then was just land on the island and wasn't allowed to go anywhere else.
The second time she visited the island was with Arai and they got to hear more about Hashima from the guide who was a former resident on the island. That was when she first got the idea for this drama. Since the residents lived under such harsh and unthinkable conditions back then without even a water supply, she wondered how their lives would come across to the people living in this era.
* The buildings on Hashima are in a bad condition where some can be described as just standing blocks of crumbling concrete. In order to replicate the sights of Hashima in the past, it was important to find a place which bore resemblance to the old Hashima for the CG works to be done. However, Tsukahara remarked that it was impossible to find such a place in current-day Japan where about 5,000 people lived in an area size amounting to Shinjuku Station. As such, no matter where they chose as the filming location, it would still be inadequate. She also revealed that as she looked at the scripts where each scene's location was mentioned, she would think to herself that she could not do the filming at the designated places such as the shrine at the top of the island. One other challenge was that Hashima had no greenery at all in the 1950s but it was not possible to find a remote island in present-day Japan where there was not a single tree around. The artistic department would always worry about how to come up with the sets every time they got the new scripts but thanks to the teamwork of everyone, they are clearing each challenge as it comes.
* Hashima was "split" into 15 pieces for the aerial shooting done by drones and put together onto a round-shaped island through CG just like how you would do with Lego bricks. As for the filming of scenes on the island itself, they did not search for a single island to do that and instead went to different places such as the streets and pier so that they could piece together everything to look like they were all filmed on the same island.
* The challenge this time was how to do the CG in a manner that was reasonable in terms of costs and speedy enough. In most situations, the main filming would be done against a green screen before CG was applied but this would cost a lot and be very time-consuming. For a 10-episode drama, doing this was simply not feasible.
This time, they chose to do the CG based on the real dimensions of Hashima first and then do the filming at different places based on the specified camera angles so that everything could be fitted together quickly and easily. This method is hardly used in the TV industry now so hopefully, this might be something that could become more common in time to come. The issue would then be how to do the filming efficiently since they had to move around to multiple places.
* During the course of the research, Nogi mentioned that the love that former residents had for Hashima was very evident. In addition, despite shouldering the responsibility of literally powering Japan through their work in the coal mining industry and taking pride in what they did, these ex-residents had to deal with the discrimination against them because of their jobs and hide the fact that they came from Hashima even decades after they left the island. As such, these themes are important things which she hoped that the drama could convey to the viewers.
* The drama is based on the collective stories of the former residents so there is actually no single actual person who the lead character was modelled on. The story is ultimately fictitious but still based at an actual place with historical events happening in the background.
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