“Weather Woman”: Japanese Cinema’s Hottest Sensation

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Kei Mizutani began her modelling career as a swimsuit and nude model for magazines. Her first film “WEATHER WOMAN” (1995, 84mins) became one of the most surprising successes in Japanese cinema of the 1990s. Based on a popular adult manga, which had been made into an anime series, the movie tells the story of a woman who becomes a phenomenally successful TV weatherwoman by exposing her panties on the air. This wickedly funny, over-the-top farce is about greed, power and Japan's national obsession with weather reports. It was placed on the top ten list of many Japanese critics and won prizes at both the Stockholm and Oslo film festivals.