Turning Hakkenden into an NHK Taiga Drama, Eh...

July 07, 2026

On some corners of the internet, there are indeed voices saying, "Hakkenden should be made into an NHK Taiga drama."

If it ever happened, I would be nothing but grateful. Still, I cannot help wondering whether it is actually possible.

One factor that makes Hakkenden difficult to adapt for the screen is its sheer length. After all, the original work took twenty-eight years to complete.

Considering that scale, perhaps only the running time of an NHK Taiga drama could keep up with it.

(The 2024 film Hakkenden seems to have had reasonably decent reviews.)

Of course, it could also be broadcast as something like one of TV Asahi's Super Sentai series. But would children today be interested in heroes who do not transform, let alone in something close to a period drama?

(Lemon-chan from Kochikame likes period dramas, though.)

In addition, while the story of Hakkenden is long, its content is fundamentally simple: good triumphs over evil.

The question is whether that could sustain viewer ratings over the length of a Taiga drama.

Of course, even a straightforward tale of rewarding good and punishing evil can draw people in if it has enough rhythm, contrast, and pacing.

Tsubouchi Shoyo, who would later help set in motion the decline of Hakkenden's reputation, wrote in The Essence of the Novel:

"Even good people have some worldly passions, and even evil people have some conscience."

That is what he argued, but I wonder whether today's adults want to watch that kind of drama.

(The similarly good-versus-evil drama Seven Secretaries was popular, after all.)

The same was true of Yonezawa and Onogawa Onsen, which I visited recently: Chiba's Tateyama, the home ground of Hakkenden, also sees very few foreign visitors and feels, if anything, rather faded.

I would be glad if more foreign visitors came to both places. Looking at it this way, even though Japan aims to be a major tourism nation, I feel that the places foreign tourists actually visit are quite unevenly distributed.

Of course, as someone who loves English, I would like to be able to convey the appeal of Hakkenden to people overseas well enough.

(I know I keep repeating myself, but Harem Protagonists as the Eight Dog Warriors and The Girls und Panzer Commanders as the Eight Dog Warriors were prototypes for that purpose. Basically, I thought that if I used Cool Japan, foreign readers might take an interest.)

I used Claude Code to summarize my article that brought all of those Eight Dog Warriors together, and then put it into PowerPoint. I will close by posting it here.