Detective Conan is 30 years on Japanese TV and the staff want you to work the next case. Yomiuri TV and NTV used a Saturday livestream to announce the first audience-participation original episode in the franchise. The title is The Misohitojima Murder Case (Misohitojima no Satsujin / 三十一島の殺人). Viewers are supposed to name the killer. No air date yet. It is meant to close the anniversary year in the regular broadcast slot after the other commemorative specials.
Yasuichiro Yamamoto thought the idea up more than 20 years ago after watching an armchair-detective drama. He sat on it until the 30th anniversary slate locked The Kudou Shinichi Aquarium Case SP and the two-hour 30-go Satsujin Jiken. He asked for one more piece in the weekly slot and got the yes. He also drew the rough island and setting art they posted. Script is by Takahiro Okura, the mystery novelist who wrote the show’s Birdman Rally bombing case and later worked on Lupin the 3rd Part 6.
Yamamoto’s early brief was brutal. He said they started out aiming for zero correct answers. He is not sure they pulled that off. That is the joke and the dare. Conan episodes usually hand you the deduction on a silver pointer. This one is built so the home audience has to sit in the chair.
Detective Conan: 30-go Satsujin Jiken (The Counterfeit Case of Ultra 30) airs September 25 at 9:00 p.m. on NTV’s Friday Roadshow, the block that usually runs movies. It is the first new two-hour TV special in about 10 years, after 2016’s Episode "ONE": The Deduction Showdown That Shrank the Great Detective. Elaiza Ikeda is the guest voice. The plot is counterfeit new banknotes and a national-level mess. Conan and the usual crew hit the National Printing Bureau in Nagano, then Conan and Heiji go to Osaka, where the fake bills look like they were printed.
Series writer talk around the special framed it as a festival episode: as many regulars as they can pack in, cops from across the country, a case that can travel. Mystery first, movie-scale action because the slot is two hours. The writer also said he had not seen the finished cut yet.
December gets Secret Conan SHOW Kiwami, a two-hour collab with Himitsu no Kenmin SHOW Kiwami. Netflix Japan dropped 30 character-sorted episode packs the same day as the livestream: Conan, Ran, Shinichi, Kaitou Kid, and the rest, exclusive for now.
Gosho Aoyama launched the manga in Weekly Shonen Sunday in 1994. The TV anime started January 1996 on Yomiuri TV. TMS Entertainment has animated it for three decades. Films still print money every spring. Viz Media publishes the manga as Case Closed, the old Funimation English title. Crunchyroll and other services carry the weekly show in the West. Saturday’s dump did not attach a global date to Misohitojima or the Friday Roadshow special.
Thirty years is a lot of locked-room lectures. The new bet is that the audience will sit through an original island murder and not get a free answer from a first-grader in glasses. Yamamoto wanted nobody to solve it. Okura has to write a case that is fair enough to be a Conan episode and mean enough to match that brief.
September 25 is the easy appointment: Friday night, two hours, fake yen, Ikeda. Misohitojima is the experiment. When it lands in the weekly slot, the challenge is public. Pause, guess, then see if the show calls you an idiot or a genius for solving the case.
Are you watching the September 25 special for the all-star cop pile, or waiting to get wrecked by Yamamoto’s island case? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.