Well-done comedy and Kyoto travelogue
7 / 10Sakebitosan · 2016
Satake Ichiro transfers from a Tokyo tour guide company to its subsidiary in Kyoto, and his new boss hates him instantly, so Ichiro gets assigned all of the clients nobody else will touch: the spoiled celebrities, the company groups with impossible budgetary restrictions, the temperamental matrons who want every detail impossibly perfect. Every one of them has a reputation for complaining loudly, and every one of them is a threat from the boss to "Make them happy or you're fired."
Ichiro is inexperienced and inept, but he has a fallback: Down in the basement is the "Central Operations Department," which is just a fanciful name for the janitorial department. It's a repository for employees demoted from their positions as tour guides, and one of them is Takase Kyoka, a genius tour guide demoted after a personal conflict with a superior.
Ichiro begs and cajoles until she takes an interest and decides to do the work for him. Her encyclopedic knowledge of Kyoto and its history, along with her personal connections and the help of her fellow-demotees Tetsuo (a divorced taxi driver who can find any location,) and punker-girl Momiji (who's good at disguise,) enable her to transform Ichiro's "problem clients" into rave reviews (which he doesn't really deserve, but they get him off the hook with the cranky boss.)
The real hero of the series is of course Kyoka, not Ichiro, and along with some excellent farce-type comedy alternating with more sober drama, you the viewer get a great tour of Kyoto. The locations and their histories are like characters themselves, and if you're thinking about visiting Kyoto, you'll get a boatload of information just by watching this series.
It isn't particularly heavy on thematic content, but "Itsutsu Boshi Tourist" (named "The Guide: Five Stars in Kyoto" at Crunchyroll. Update: This show has since been removed from the Crunchyroll lineup.) is excellent entertainment and excellent travel information - therefore time well spent.