Rich Man Poor Woman Episode 1

Hyuga Toru (played by Oguri Shun) is the Japanese version of a Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs type of mover and shaker. He and his partner, Asahina Kosuke, created their little enterprise, Next Innovation, in a dorm room. Now, at the tender age of 29, Hyuga is a billionaire. Want to use your smart phone to spend 900 million to buy a business in India? There's an app for that. He suffers from Prosopagnosia, which is basically an inability to recognize faces. He's looking for his mother, Sawaki Chihiro, who apparently walked away one day and never came back.

A struggling young college graduate (played by Ishihara Satomi) is wearing out her shoes looking for full time employment. Did a bee sting her on the lip? She has a really huge upper lip. She goes to apply for work at Next Innovation. Hyuga wants to throw her out because he doesn't believe she's the right type for his cutting edge business. She reveals she has eidetic memory. She also reveals her name is Sawaki Chihiro. Well obviously she's not Hyuga's long lost mother. Still, the coincidence jars him.

Hyuga decides to hire Chihiro for only 48 hours. He wants to use her extraordinary memory to help sell a project to the Ministry of Information. Things go very well at the meeting and Chihiro is making a good impression on everyone until the very end when her mouth (with the huge upper lip) kind of gets away from her and she may have jeopardized everything they had accomplished. Hyuga throws a hissy fit on her, and not in private. He leaves her in tears and goes for a drive to cool off.

Partner Asahina attempts to comfort her and offers to take her out to eat. She admits she's very hungry. Asahina says she can order whatever she wants, but first she must tell him something. What is her real name? He knows her name isn't Sawaki Chihiro.

This drama is all the rage right now. For myself, I kept looking to see how much longer I had to go to get to the end of this episode. That's never a good sign. Also, the character of Hyuga Toru is a bit of an ass, IMO. Maybe if Chihiro (or whoever she is) had had a bit more backbone in her and stood up to him, I might have almost cared. The pacing is really slow, the story is not interesting, and the characters don't grab me.