# JAPAN SINKS: People of Hope (2021)

> Young Japanese bureaucrats scramble to plan the nation's future as a global environmental crisis threatens the country.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/111620

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 10
- Episode runtime: 54 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: science fiction, drama
- Network: TBS
- Cast: Shun Oguri, Kenichi Matsuyama, Anne Watanabe, Eiji Wentz, Anne Nakamura, Toru Nakamura, Teruyuki Kagawa, Manabu Hamada
- TMDB rating: 6.5/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15569106/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: none
- Tone: tense, sober, melancholic, hopeful

## Synopsis

JAPAN SINKS: People of Hope (2021) is a Japanese television miniseries broadcast on TBS, a ten-episode limited series of roughly fifty-four minutes each. Shun Oguri plays Keishi Amami, a Ministry of the Environment official, alongside Kenichi Matsuyama as Kōichi Tokiwa of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and Teruyuki Kagawa as Yūsuke Tadokoro. Set in 2023 Tokyo, the story follows Prime Minister Eiichi Higashiyama (Toru Nakamura), who pushes a controversial plan called COMS to liquify pollutants and store them in cracks in the seafloor, then gathers young bureaucrats into a Japan Future Promotion Conference. Their engine is a race against a looming environmental catastrophe, with every episode built from closed-door meetings, policy battles, and a public kept uneasy by competing narratives and media manipulation. The tone is sober and tense, with a focus on national survival and the moral cost of decisions made in the name of the future. Viewers who enjoyed the political weight of Chernobyl and the national-scale dread of Shin Godzilla will find resonance here.

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