Nagano Mei’s Drama Won’t Feature Best Friend Imada Mio After All — Ito Kentaro Cast as Her Co-Star Instead

Background and Key Points

DMM TV is the video-streaming arm of DMM.com, a Japanese e-commerce and media conglomerate whose better-known sister brand, FANZA, distributes adult content — hence the recurring joke telling DMM to “make it FANZA, not DMM.” That confusion matters because posters also mixed up the platform with Netflix mid-thread, showing how blurry Japan’s streaming landscape still is even to its own audience. Nagano Mei and Imada Mio are frequently profiled together as real-life best friends in Japanese entertainment media, which is why a magazine framing their non-collaboration as Imada “turning down” the role reads as loaded rather than neutral to posters. Ito Kentaro’s casting carries baggage too: he was involved in a traffic accident that dented his standing relative to Imada, who has remained a in-demand face for major ad campaigns and network drama.

The thread didn’t split over whether Imada declined — nearly everyone accepted that — but over why: a vocal minority insisted it was pure PR framing or agency-level maneuvering to avoid pairing a clean image with someone still associated with scandal, while others argued it’s simply mundane scheduling, since Imada’s calendar is reportedly packed with terrestrial TV and film work.

What outside readers likely miss is that “Himachi no Joou” is adapted from a webcomic on Shogakukan’s Manga One app — one poster’s skeptical aside about “using the Manga One source material” is the only hint of this in the thread, and no one explains what changes a TV adaptation might make to it.