It asks for twenty minutes and then sits in your chest for a week. This is a commissioned piece, made to thank the people who showed up for the prefecture's reconstruction and to keep 2011 from softening into a date on a calendar, and it never once raises its voice to do it. Jun Agatsuma is a doctor's daughter turning her future over and over in her hands. Kunpei Satou already knows his: the boats, the same as his father's. Two sixteen-year-olds living out the difference between a life you choose and a life that was decided for you, in a place where the ocean took the choosing away from a lot of people. There is no spectacle here, no swelling catharsis, just the quiet insistence that these kids still have to grow up. That is the whole gut punch.

Two sixteen-year-old high school students in Miyagi Prefecture face very different futures. Jun, whose father is a doctor, is anxious about what lies ahead. Kunpei, the son of a fisherman, has already been set to take over his father's trade. Then the 2011 earthquake and tsunami strike their area and upend both of their lives. As the prefecture works to recover, the two grow through the aftermath and settle on the paths they will take. The one-episode drama special was made to thank those who helped Miyagi rebuild and to keep memories of the disaster from fading, and its cast was drawn from three people with ties to the prefecture.