Over the past three years, Netflix has steadily expanded its Younger Grownup (YA) slate throughout the Asia-Pacific area, together with the current premiere of its first YA sequence in Japan, Chastity Excessive.
The streamer’s YA slate consists of faculty dramas like India’s Class and Kota Manufacturing unit, Korea’s Hierarchy, Australia’s Heartbreak Excessive and Japan’s youth-focused romance drama Drawing Nearer. Themes revolve round highschool life, tutorial pressures, relationships and self-discovery.
The streamer introduced in Might that Heartbreak Excessive shall be renewed for a 3rd and remaining season. The primary season debuted at quantity six on Netflix’s world high 10 English sequence record in September 2022, remaining within the record for 3 weeks. The second season additionally ranked in the identical record in April 2024.
Netflix’s first YA sequence in Japan, Chastity Excessive, ranked within the streamer’s world high 10 record for non-English sequence within the first week of September, receiving greater than 1M views globally.
The sequence is about in a prestigious highschool attended by the kids of rich households. The college bans courting between college students, however a mysterious social media account exposing scandalous secrets and techniques quickly places relationships to the take a look at.
As a part of the artistic crew’s analysis and preparation for the sequence, they carried out quite a few interviews with present highschool college students to achieve a deeper understanding of how the youthful era approaches relationships.
“We mentioned numerous matters corresponding to how they method romance, how they specific their emotions in direction of somebody they like, what captures their curiosity, how they spend their money and time, and the way they use their smartphones,” mentioned Soushi Matsumoto, one of many three administrators on the sequence. “By centering the dialogue on their views on romance, we explored their total way of life. I discovered it fascinating to see each variations and similarities between their era and ours.
“Because the venture is centered round romance, I really feel like there have been loads of alternatives for the workers to naturally speak about their very own love tales,” Matsumoto added. “It’s fairly uncommon to have informal conversations about love between workers members of various generations, in order that was fairly fascinating.”
The sequence stars Ai Mikami within the lead position of Ichika Arisawa, in addition to actors Ryubi Miyase and Kyoya Honda. Manufacturing spanned virtually seven months.
“One of many gratifying elements was working with many younger and gifted actors,” Matsumoto added. “A few of the essential forged members had virtually no performing expertise, however all of them introduced an unbelievable quantity of ardour to the venture, which made daily a number of enjoyable. In just a few years, I’m positive a few of them shall be on the heart of the Japanese movie trade, in order that’s one thing to stay up for.”
Whereas getting ready for the manufacturing of Chastity Excessive, Mikami mentioned that she mirrored on her time in highschool in order that she may draw on these experiences for her character. Since she was round 22 years previous throughout manufacturing, a number of years had handed since highschool, however she nonetheless remembers the burgeoning “sense of self” from that interval.
“Wanting again at my highschool days, I keep in mind it as a time after I was nonetheless step by step constructing my id whereas coping with others and numerous conditions,” Mikami mentioned. “Typically, I’d blurt out issues I didn’t actually imply and I wasn’t superb at controlling myself. The method of step by step recalling that mindset throughout the preparation and filming was fairly difficult.”
Reflecting on what it means to her to star in a sequence about Japan’s youthful era, Mikami added: “In a world the place range and individuality are emphasised, there are inevitably moments when phrases appear to tackle a lifetime of their very own. The phrases and ideas that have been meant to assist us stay authentically and shield these we care about, can typically flip into weapons that hurt others. Proper and improper aren’t all the time black and white; I consider we will discover our personal solutions by means of empathy and consideration for others.”
On the area’s YA slate, Minyoung Kim, VP of Content material, APAC (excluding India) mentioned: “We need to entertain our members with compelling homegrown content material, together with younger adults throughout Asia Pacific and past. Whether or not it’s the Aussie slang of Heartbreak Excessive or the courting drama of Chastity Excessive, we would like audiences to attach with really native and entertaining tales.”
