火曜サスペンス劇場「受験地獄」/ Kayō sasupensu gekijo: Juken jikogu / Exam Hell [1982]

Release date: Aired on January 12th, 1982

Director: Masaharu Segawa

Studio: Produced by Kokusei Broadcasting and NTV

Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.

Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts. Available in full on Internet Archive.

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It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.

Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo

Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, which first appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".

While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".

The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his conviction that he'll never get into university.

Where the 1982 version differs (and don't read on if you plan to watch it) is that instead of murdering the other student - who is renamed Sayama in the film - Kimura tries to lure him out in public, fails, and goes to his house with a knife, intending to kill him, but arrives to find medics carting his body out after he had committed suicide. Sayama's demand is also adjusted to a somewhat higher amount of money, obviously.

If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).

Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.¹ (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)

Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor.

In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father² Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake, Hirata's role is filled by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.

(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sayama in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui, which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)

Lot of graphic design choices going on here.

The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. Some blessed soul did upload it to Internet Archive (and check out that watermark!), but it's not getting a lot of attention in the way of re-broadcasts despite the nostalgia for it. It has also never received a physical media or streaming release, as far as I'm currently aware. I've only been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, but it's not out of the question that there were others.

Having watched the 1982 Exam Hell, I can see why people liked it so much. Kimura and Sato/Sayama are fairly sympathetic characters, and have very understandable motives for what they're doing that are laid out clearly without getting ham-fisted or cheesy the way a lot of other Suspense Theater movies tend to. It's a good movie, but even more so - if this makes sense - I can imagine it being the kind of thing that would stick with someone if they watched it as a teenager or young adult in the 1980s.

You can also find an original song from the 1982 Exam Hell called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so just gimme a minute and I'll have it here.

Anyway, that's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky it's extant and watchable - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time or draconian network reorganizations.

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1 That is, one of the only ones that have BEEN remade, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only other remakes I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007. (You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)

2 Which is ironic considering that in real life he was Masahiko's brother.