Award-winning Japanese director, Itaru Mizuno, talks about mixing the unreal with the ordinary, creating a middle-aged alien with high-energy superpowers, erasing gender stereotypes and including internationally recognised elements in premium series, The Hot Spot. 

Single mother Kiyomi Endo works at a hotel at the foot of Mount Fuji. Her daily reality is pleasantly monotonous. She goes to work, is cordial but not close with colleagues, and hangs out with childhood friends from her hometown. She thinks her older and unremarkable co-worker, Mr Takahashi, is annoying. Until one evening he saves her from what would almost certainly have been a fatal traffic accident... and, in the vein of Japanese series Rebooting, her whole existence is upended and her life becomes anything but ordinary.  

It turns out that Mr Takahashi, played by Kadota Akihiro, is an alien. He asks her to keep his secret – which of course she doesn’t because by now she thinks he is both annoying and crazy. This changes when he snaps a coin in half in front of her and her friends. In doing so, a force for good in the world is unleashed and The Hot Spot earns its place on Nippon TV’s roster of premium titles with international reference points and ambitions.  

The Hot Spot, written by Bakarhythm (Rebooting, Beethoven Netsuzou), aired earlier this year in Nippon TV’s Sunday drama slot, and streamed on TVer and Hulu. The series was acquired by Netflix and was the platform’s top show in Japan for three weeks in February and March this year, with top 10 rankings in other countries, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. 

Director Itaru Mizuno, who won Gold for Best Director for The Hot Spot in the 2025 ContentAsia Awards, says the idea was to leverage some of the elements of Rebooting to create a series with broader appeal for international audiences. 

The award-winning Rebooting, released in 2023, is a high-concept time-loop series about an ordinary, single woman in her 30s living with her parents and younger sister. When she dies in a traffic accident, she finds herself in an after-life that offers her the option of rebooting her existence, with the full memory of her old self. Rebooting won the ContentAsia Awards Gold Award in 2023 for Best Drama Series/Telefilm Made for a Single Market in Asia.  

A fan of U.S. entertainment like E.T., Stranger Things and J.J. Abrams Super 8, Mizuno says his “style is to bring something that is not real, something unreal and unique, to ordinary life, that’s what we often do”. 

In setting out to broaden appeal beyond Japan, the creative team chose to set The Hot Spot against the backdrop of Mount Fuji – an internationally recognised Japanese icon, Mizuno says. 

The Hot Spot is also part of a broader conversation that shifts on-screen stereotypes of women’s stories.  

“Until two or three years ago, every story with a female lead had to have romance or something like that,” Mizuno says. “Our point of view is ‘why do we need that?’. We had this stereotype of a female story – that we need romance and love and work-life balance. We tried to create something that works not only for women but for men too.” 

The litmus test for The Hot Spot was whether the dialogue worked regardless of whether the characters were male or female. “That’s what we wanted to do... to depict a human life, not a man’s life or a woman’s life”. Erasing gender bias in this way is new for Japanese audiences, Mizuno says.

The production’s biggest challenge was credibly portraying the superpowers of a middle-aged male alien – for instance, running fast or jumping high – on a realistic budget. 

“It had to feel natural,” he says. For this reason, ideas such as the alien fighting a bear in the mountains never made it past the paper stage. What was the bear replaced with? A long-distance run. “We changed the entire episode to a different story”. 

Mizuno doesn’t have a favourite episode. “I like most of them,” he says. What about a favourite scene? Here he picks the opening sequence of episode eight. “Most of the series is a comedy, with a light tone and the aim to make the audience laugh and have fun,” he explains. “But in episode eight, the main character realises that the hotel is going to close, and she also realises how much she likes it. That was a very emotional moment and a very important sequence for the entire series”. 

Setting aside some “tiny regrets”, Mizuno talks about the most unexpected response to the series – that many people, and women especially, thought this middle-aged alien was “kawaii” (cute). “We wanted him to be accepted as a cute middle-aged person, but we didn’t really know how it would work... the response was a surprise,” he says.

The Hot Spot also left a lasting impact on the three mountain towns on the foothills of Mount Fuji used to create The Hot Spot’s fictional world. These include Fujiyoshida and Fujikawaguchiko. 

Mizuno says the series drove an increase in visitor numbers as fans went in search of locations used in The Hot Spot. Eager to build on this new-found popularity, town authorities resurrected a summer fireworks event that was stopped during Covid. And, in a final tribute, a commemorative manhole cover was designed depicting the series’ signature bench scene – a quiet moment between the two main characters.  The cover is installed near Lake Shoji, close to the hotel used in the show. The town clearly hopes it will be their very own hot spot.   

▶ Published in ContentAsia's December 2025 Magazine