18-year-old Misaki Youko's (Ueto Aya) rock band is performing their final concert at a local Kyuushu venue to a room that's packed -- with chairs and three disinterested patrons. The band is breaking up because the guitarist is moving to Tokyo the next day.
Poor Youko. She fancies the guitarist, but hasn't got the nerve to tell him. When he joins the other band members in teasing Youko that she'd never have the good looks to be accepted as an air hostess (sorry, "Cabin Atendent"), she decides to try for the job that she's probably least suited for.
And, 14 months later, gets accepted.
This is the territory of the four-sided peg trying to fit into the one-sided hole, and her first week is hellish. Turns up late. Wears the wrong clothes. Creates havoc in the hangar. And then discovers that the guitarist has moved on and got himself a gorgeous girlfriend.
So she decides to quit -- only to be comprehensively told off by her instructor, and reflects to background music that sounds like it's from an old British WW2 RAF film like "The Dambusters".
So she goes back to school. Of course, we knew she would. What's the point of making an 11-part series if the lead actor leaves at the end of Episode 1? "Atenshon puriizu" makes use of Japan Air Lines' actual training school at Haneda Airport, and there are times when one suspects that this is an 11-hour-long advertisement for JAL. But for me, the use of the facilities and the realisation that we were watching a dramatised simulation of a training school (each episode gave an overview of what the real-life trainees would have gone through the week before) raised this show above the dross that normally results when you get a show that puts a group of beautiful young women together.
Unlike "Shinkansen Girl" which wasted Maya Miki in a similar role to the one she plays here, "Atenshon puriizu" showed us that -- contrary to the common assumption that they're just airborne waitresses -- the very young women who do this job are primarily there to save their passengers if things go wrong. I felt shivers going up my spine watching the emergency training drills in Episode 3. The girls were training for evacuation if the aircraft ditched. But if the aircraft were to really crash, then you could say on average that four of the 10 attendants would be dead in the crash, and another two probably killed by the resulting fire while trying to get the passengers out.
"Shinkansen Girl", on the other hand, told us that the main point of working as an attendant on an express train was to sell as many packed lunches as you can.
Standouts in the ensemble cast were Aibu Saki, who's character is in many ways another version of Misaki Youko, Otsura Chihiro and Maya Miki.
In the last episode, a nervous, newly-qualified Misaki Youko is asked (in the subtitles) by her instructor "Where's that brazen attitude I was so used to seeing?" and replies (in subtitles) "Umm, well, I was young back then, and..." "Back then" was only three months before.
Misaki Youko is still young.
But now she feels... much older.
Poor Youko. She fancies the guitarist, but hasn't got the nerve to tell him. When he joins the other band members in teasing Youko that she'd never have the good looks to be accepted as an air hostess (sorry, "Cabin Atendent"), she decides to try for the job that she's probably least suited for.
And, 14 months later, gets accepted.
This is the territory of the four-sided peg trying to fit into the one-sided hole, and her first week is hellish. Turns up late. Wears the wrong clothes. Creates havoc in the hangar. And then discovers that the guitarist has moved on and got himself a gorgeous girlfriend.
So she decides to quit -- only to be comprehensively told off by her instructor, and reflects to background music that sounds like it's from an old British WW2 RAF film like "The Dambusters".
So she goes back to school. Of course, we knew she would. What's the point of making an 11-part series if the lead actor leaves at the end of Episode 1? "Atenshon puriizu" makes use of Japan Air Lines' actual training school at Haneda Airport, and there are times when one suspects that this is an 11-hour-long advertisement for JAL. But for me, the use of the facilities and the realisation that we were watching a dramatised simulation of a training school (each episode gave an overview of what the real-life trainees would have gone through the week before) raised this show above the dross that normally results when you get a show that puts a group of beautiful young women together.
Unlike "Shinkansen Girl" which wasted Maya Miki in a similar role to the one she plays here, "Atenshon puriizu" showed us that -- contrary to the common assumption that they're just airborne waitresses -- the very young women who do this job are primarily there to save their passengers if things go wrong. I felt shivers going up my spine watching the emergency training drills in Episode 3. The girls were training for evacuation if the aircraft ditched. But if the aircraft were to really crash, then you could say on average that four of the 10 attendants would be dead in the crash, and another two probably killed by the resulting fire while trying to get the passengers out.
"Shinkansen Girl", on the other hand, told us that the main point of working as an attendant on an express train was to sell as many packed lunches as you can.
Standouts in the ensemble cast were Aibu Saki, who's character is in many ways another version of Misaki Youko, Otsura Chihiro and Maya Miki.
In the last episode, a nervous, newly-qualified Misaki Youko is asked (in the subtitles) by her instructor "Where's that brazen attitude I was so used to seeing?" and replies (in subtitles) "Umm, well, I was young back then, and..." "Back then" was only three months before.
Misaki Youko is still young.
But now she feels... much older.
