Japanese TV Drama Scripts–Tiger and Dragon
Could life be better? I submit that it could not!! No, I know it could, but DANG…it’s pretty good right now. Why? Why, you ask? Because you can buy the entire script (yes, the actual text as spoken by each character, plus a little bit of scenario/stage direction for clarity) of Tiger & Dragon [plus the prequel] in book form! Woohoo! My local library had it, and I’ve been reading it today, and it is, what is the word — the bomb.
Anyway, it sounds like good fun for all you drama lovers out there. By the way, I think other TV dramas also have book-form scripts/screenplays. However, you should be careful to actually confirm the contents before you buy these, since I noticed that the book-forms of, at least, American dramas like Prison Break and 24 are more like novelizations (less strict on rendering character dialogue exactly as it was said in the show) than scripts.
I can’t believe it took me this long to find out about stuff like this…
By the way, the collective name for these is シナリオ本(ぼん） — “scenario books”.
[New information: w00t! You don’t have to buy the book! Many TV drama scripts are available online here. Here’s the Tiger & Dragon one! [all main episodes…no prequel in sight, though…]
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Mark said,
August 30, 2007 @ 12:12 am
Yes, I’d meant to post a comment about these scripts but I never got around to it. I bought the Tiger and Dragon script a while back as well as the script for the second season of Dr. Koto. They seem to be listed under シナリオ, at least the one for Dr. Koto was. I would assume that scripts are only available for series that have exact subtitles, although I don’t really know.
khatzumoto said,
August 30, 2007 @ 12:21 am
>They seem to be listed under シナリオ
Thanks for that, I just added it.
Right!
>I would assume that scripts are only available for series that have exact subtitles
Good assumption. I don’t really know either way, but I wouldn’t be surprised…
James said,
August 30, 2007 @ 4:53 am
Hey khatzumoto, since you are learning chinese… have you found anything similar for chinese dramas?
quendidil said,
August 30, 2007 @ 7:55 pm
Khatzumoto-san,
How many example sentences of each new word/grammar should I put into my SRS?
I currently put at least 3-4, more if I feel like it, is this too little or too much?
khatzumoto said,
August 30, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
I just do as much as I can of anything, until I get bored. That’s my pattern.
quendidil said,
August 30, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
But sometimes, I add like 15 examples for 1 grammar word, will I hit the 10000 too soon without learning as much as I could have? I’m currently going at about 130 items in my SRS a day
khatzumoto said,
August 30, 2007 @ 9:01 pm
Not at all. What you’re doing sounds perfect.
mashuu83 said,
August 30, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
konnichiwa khatzumoto-sensei~
I found a website on the net a week or so ago. they have the scripts for several japanese dramas (including recent ones!) Here is the site:
http://dramanote.seesaa.net/
and their new site:
http://www.dramanote.com/
i can’t comment on the quality of the scripts though (i.e. how close they are to the spoken japanese), but I followed one while watching an episode of 電車男 and it was pretty close~! This could be a good resource for studying spoken Japanese dialogue and/or checking on those few words you missed while watching your favorite drama~!
是非チェックアウトしてね～
khatzumoto said,
August 30, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
WOW! 凄いね、これ！That’s really cool! Now that I think about it…I get the feeling someone mentioned this in the past and I lost it in my rigid email management system. Thank you!
quendidil said,
August 30, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
is there anything like that for アニメ？ though i suppose the 漫画 would usually suffice.
mashuu83 said,
August 30, 2007 @ 11:20 pm
i haven’t been able to find anything on anime yet… but that won’t stop me from searching~!
khatzumoto-sensei~
i was wondering if you could recommend any resources (drama, books, anything in japanese ^^) that one could use to learn/mine 警護 and ビジネス日本語. I work at a japanese company in US, and I’d like to learn some of these expressions to 1. grow in japanese, 2. impress my japanese bosses/superiors, 3. be on the ‘fast(er) track’ to getting a project/relocation in japan. any recommendations would be most appreciated~
thanks and glad you enjoy the drama site~!
khatzumoto said,
August 30, 2007 @ 11:28 pm
>警護
I take it you mean 敬語 :D. That one always comes up for me, too!
For my interviews, I looked up these
敬語
ビジネスメール
面接
ビジネスメール２
ビジネス文書
Generally, the first 4-5 hits should serve you well.
Jerry said,
August 31, 2007 @ 2:38 am
@ quendidil: 130 items per day! Man, I envy you. I’m lucky to get in 10 per day, and even then I’ve probably put in an hour on that. What am I doing wrong? I’m copying examples from text books. So I have to type in the sentences with kanji. Then in the answer field I type in the hiragana for the sentence. Then I type the example translation. Finally if there are notes to add I’ll do those.
Lately, as I improve, I only add hiragana for kanji I don’t know how to pronounce. Still, this takes some time to do. What should I do to speed up this process? Any ideas? I’ve been working at this for most of the summer and only have 880 or so example sentences in my SRS. Of course, I generally only have 30 - 60 minutes available a day to enter stuff into Mnemosyne.
Thanks for any help!
suffah said,
August 31, 2007 @ 7:48 am
Jerry,
I used to do the same thing, typing hiragana was a KILLER. Now I use Anki and my SRS woes are gone forever. Auto-hiragana is awesome. It also supports importing from Mnemosyne, and quite frankly, I have never looked back to Mnemosyne once I tried Anki. The author constantly updates the programs (with feedback from users).
Get it from http://repose.cx/anki/
I guess this has become the official thread for the program:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=556&p=1
Max said,
September 2, 2007 @ 12:34 am
Thanks a ton for the link, mashuu83. That should speed up the sentence-mining process
shaydwyrm said,
October 20, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
The online scripts for タイガー＆ドラゴン seem to have a lot of holes in them. Is that because there’s a lot of ad-libbing done on stage?
khatzumoto said,
October 20, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
@shayd
he does — it’s part of what’s so cool about him…adds extra realism/character to the character.
Charles said,
October 27, 2007 @ 11:55 am
Khatzu, since there’s a nice script site, what other TV shows would you recommend that are of the same caliber as タイガー＆ドラゴン ? The last list you gave centered around subtitles, but I’d be interested in good shows even if the subtitles are lacking.
By the way, do other shows display life in Japan like Tiger and Dragon did? Not that I’m an expert, but it seemed to give you a cross sectional look at areas fuch as: Theater, Love Hotels, Hostess Bars, Spas, Resorts, Formal dinners, restaurants, family meals, game shows, etc. Granted, no one ever seemed to take the train anywhere. Storyline aside, how realistic would you rate T&D?
khatzumoto said,
October 27, 2007 @ 12:03 pm
@Charles
Nice timing, I was just writing an article about my favorite shows (regardless of subs), I’ll be putting it up soon.
T&D was very realistic (8/10? 9/10?), both in terms of dialogue and in terms of age cross-section — people really do talk like that. A lot of other shows are more “realistic” in terms of storyline or situation (girl works at company and falls in love), but have stiff, fake dialogue that’s delivered without life or feeling: it’s like the first draft of the script and they’re reading it word for word…
Wan Zafran said,
October 28, 2007 @ 12:52 am
Tiger & Dragon was for me an excellent show.
I would agree that it is very different compared to your run-of-the-mill drama; story-wise, it’s highly original. And not only was the show itself funny and entertaining, but the cast were a highly memorable bunch too. (Plus I loved how the classical rakugo stories revealed in each episode could be weaved into the stories of the main characters themselves. In fact, for most of the episodes, the sudden coming in of the punchline always managed to surprise me.)
Glad to know that the dialogue’s realistic (’colloquial’?) though! (Especially since I’ve ripped out the audio and printed the Japanese subtitles for all episodes of Tiger & Dragon, and am working my way through them now.) Looking forward to your next article, Khatzumoto!
Wan Zafran said,
October 28, 2007 @ 12:58 am
Khatzumoto, one question: do yakuza members really speak the way Tora (and Ginjiro, and Ginjiro’s father) does, i.e. in that mumbled, lazy-jawed manner?
khatzumoto said,
October 28, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
LoL! I don’t really know any yakuza personally, Wan-san! :). But…the way Ginjiro’s dad talks is far closer to REAL kansai-ben than the dumbed-down-for-Tokyo-people “何でやねん” version you usually see on TV.
Ginjiro talks more or less like a ヤンキー.
Ginjiro’s dad talks like a lot of men do in every country in the world — mumbled and slack-jawed; regardless of country, it always seems to be women that are the ones who speak clearly.
Wan Zafran said,
October 30, 2007 @ 2:58 am
I’ve been going through the Tiger and Dragon scripts on Drama Note. It seems to me that much of the dialogue from the show had been left out, and/or converted into narration form instead. Could you please confirm this for me with the Shibahama episode, Khatzumoto? (Because if this is true, it would mean that I can’t rely fully on the website.)
Mark said,
December 7, 2007 @ 1:19 am
Well, I’ve just got Tiger and Dragon from Amazon.co.jp, and I am looking forward to watching it…
Right now though I’m enjoying the Fuji TV series ‘Security Police’ (available at d-addicts). The dialogue is available at dramanote.com ( http://www.dramanote.com/?cid=27078 ). If anyone hasn’t been following this, I recommend it - it’s great fun
BTW - when you’ve got a moment Khatz, could you just give a *general* comment on the accuracy of the Japanese at dramanote - I assume it’s all good stuff, but I’d hate to enter hundreds of sentences from dramanote only to later discover that all the scripts there are typed by dsylexic 5 year olds.
I don’t really care whether the dialogue on dramanote is absolutely accurate with regard to having every single line of dialogue from a drama — I just want to know that I can enter it into my SRS with confidence that the Japanese itself is good and doesn’t contain grammar/vocab errors.
Thanks!
khatzumoto said,
December 8, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
@Mark
DramaNote is totally OK.
Bob Smith said,
February 2, 2008 @ 8:08 pm
Excellent website!
I’m using so much of what you wrote.
I tried to find the actual complete dialogue/transcript for Trick, either on dramanote or on amazon japan.. Of course, I can read only about 1200 kanji yet. I still have about three weeks of work to do with remembering the kanji… but with shipping times and all, I’d like to be ready and have all my material for when I’m done.. Do you know where I could find it?
Also,.. I know of one bittorrent site for japanese media: tokyo toshokan (http://www.tokyotosho.com/index.php), but I haven’t found more yet (that have any significant amount of real japanese stuff). Do you know any? Living in Canada, here you can’t really find much in videostores…
Thanks again for this great website!
Bob Smith said,
February 7, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
Hi again!
I’d like to add a question to my previous post: does anybody know if the japanese subtitles for Star Trek the next generation season 3 or 4, dubbed in japanese, are an exact match to the japanese voice.. ?
Thanks again for the great website!
khatzumoto said,
February 29, 2008 @ 2:35 pm
@Bob Smith
>does anybody know if the japanese subtitles for Star Trek the next generation season 3 or 4, dubbed in japanese, are an exact match to the japanese voice.. ?
I have not checked, but I can answer “no” with 99% certainty.
dc said,
March 30, 2008 @ 8:56 am
just ot let you know your link for dramanote is out of date. here is the new one.
http://dramanote.seesaa.net/
I like the site, and you are an inspiration. All the way, dude!
I have been living in kyoto for two years with my japanese wife, and have made slow progress in my japanese due to my own laziness. I needed the kick in the bu** that reading this site gave me, so thanks for blazing the trail…