Filming of the 15 episodes of Mysterious Summer finished this week in Beijing, with Fuji TV's Satoshi Kubota (Tokyo Tower) directing a predominantly Chinese cast joined by guest Japanese actors, including Yuki Furukawa (Eternal Zero). Each episode is a stand alone story, in Chinese, with the drama scheduled to begin streaming on iQIYI on July 31.
Furukawa became a big star in China last year with the broadcast of the Japanese drama Itazura Kiss: Love in Tokyo, and is reported to have more than 600,000 followers on Weibo, a local Twitter-like platform. The 26-year-old actor has already done promotional work for Japanese companies in China, but this was his first time working a drama there.
Language was, unsurprisingly, the biggest hurdle for both Furukawa and director Kubota.
"Working in Chinese, with the five tones, was even more difficult than I'd thought it would be," Furukawa told The Hollywood Reporter the day after returning to Tokyo.
"The directions on set were being given in Chinese, so I had to guess what I was supposed to do a lot of the time," said Furukawa.
Furukawa also had lines in English, much less of a challenge having spent most of his schooldays in Canada and New York