From a Road Trip to "That's a Dramatic Change!": An Engineering-Medicine Student's Romance and Youth Toward Architectural Design

Last October, during a road trip through Tokyo and the three northern Kanto prefectures in Japan¹, besides a few good friends, there was also a young Japanese travel companion who’d come along specifically to help with translation and communication.

Long-distance highway driving is always like this: as the fields and mountain scenery flash past the window, the car naturally fills with all kinds of boundless chit-chat. Somehow, we got to talking about everyone’s favorite types of Japanese TV variety and reality shows. As each of us pulled out our personal top three, we were delighted to discover a shared beloved that spanned language and borders—the long-running classic masterpiece produced by Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “That’s a Dramatic Change!” (大改造!!劇的ビフォーアフター / That’s a Dramatic Change!).

Whether it’s that classic piano soundtrack “Inscrutable Battle,” or the narrator’s every suspenseful mention of what magic the “Takumi” (master craftsman) has worked this time, this show, for us, is an indispensable warm memory accompanying countless dinners and late-night snacks.

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A Medical Engineering Student’s Cross-Disciplinary Architectural Dream

As we chatted, my thoughts couldn’t help drifting back to those youthful years when I was in grad school.

During my university and grad school years, although like my engineering friends I studied in the orthodox science-engineering and medical-engineering fields, deep down I always had a rebellious streak that refused to follow the rules. My elective schedule was often packed with all kinds of “useless” credits that made my advisor frown and nag repeatedly—the most outrageous of which was when I insisted on taking “Healthcare Architectural Design,” a course offered by the architecture grad school in another department.

On the first day of class, the whole room was almost entirely architecture-background graduate students, and I was the only “architecture novice” who’d wandered in from the medical engineering department.

The architecture professor was an extremely open-minded and interesting old scholar. After chatting with me a bit during a class break and learning that I knew nothing about basic hand-drawn perspective or building codes, he didn’t try to talk me out of it. Instead, the following week he specially hauled over from his office a heavy bag of his private collection—a complete, multi-volume set of “That’s a Dramatic Change!” TV DVDs he’d personally recorded and archived over the years.

The professor smiled and pressed the DVDs into my hands: “Kid, since you want to learn about medical circulation and spatial planning, go home and watch all of these carefully. First figure out what problem the profession of architectural design actually solves for people.”

Actually, I’d privately been a devoted fan of this show all along, but receiving this heavy set of DVDs from a professional architecture professor—that feeling of being taken seriously—remains profound to this day.

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A Life Path Pushed Along by the Times

Honestly, deep in my heart I’ve always held immense passion and longing for spatial planning and architectural design.

Unfortunately, in our student era, when information was relatively closed off, the education system looked almost solely at scores and popular rankings. We had no way to truly understand the real face of various professional departments, and were even muddled about where our own true passions lay.

And so, I was pushed along, dazed, by the great wave of educational advancement, and naturally entered the then-popular electronic engineering department. Only later, after groping and colliding my way to my own direction, did I follow my curiosity about the human body and medical applications and turn to the field of medical engineering.

Life’s encounters are sometimes so subtle. Although I ultimately didn’t become an architectural designer spreading blueprints on a construction site, that course and that whole set of DVDs forever changed the angle from which I observe the world and living spaces—whenever I walk into an old house, a guesthouse, or step into a traditional Japanese kominka, I always involuntarily stop to examine the flow of light, the channels of wind, and that silent rapport between people and space.

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The Classic Finale Under Changing Times

Chatting in the car with my Japanese friend, he mentioned with a touch of melancholy: after more than a decade of regular broadcasting, “That’s a Dramatic Change!” had actually formally reached its final regular episode on November 27, 2016².

Behind the cancellation lay an extremely realistic backdrop of the times: due to the long post-disaster reconstruction after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, plus the nationwide construction labor shortage triggered by the subsequent all-out preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Japan’s overall construction manpower was severely insufficient and building material costs soared. This greatly extended the renovation timelines for old houses on the show, and the production team could no longer bear the pressure of weekly regular broadcasts in terms of budget and schedule. In the end, they could only announce the end of weekly regular production, switching to irregularly released feature-length specials.

Outside the window, the night deepened over the Kanto Plain, and soft music played in the car.

A quality TV show that earnestly explores “how people are reborn when their spaces are treated with care” accompanied the growth of a whole generation of travelers and students; and that absurd time in grad school, enduring the professor’s nagging while watching DVDs and sketching hospital circulation diagrams, has—just like those old houses renovated by master craftsmen—become the firmest and warmest cornerstone in my life’s memory.

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Further Reading and Notes:

Footnotes

1. Refers to an in-depth highway road trip departing from central Tokyo, passing through Tochigi Prefecture (Nikko, Utsunomiya), Gunma Prefecture, and Ibaraki Prefecture—the three northern Kanto prefectures. ↩

2. Asahi Broadcasting Corporation officially announced the end of regular weekly broadcasts at the end of 2016, mainly due to the crowding-out of public works resources by the Great East Japan Earthquake reconstruction and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which tightened the supply of private craftsmen and construction manpower; it was subsequently produced as irregular special programs. ↩