Merry Berry Love

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A romantic comedy about a Korean spatial planner who loses his fortune overnight and moves to a small Japanese island, and an island farmer who has taken over her late grandfather's fields to grow a new strawberry variety, Merry Berry Love is a Korea–Japan co-production and the first drama Nippon TV and CJ ENM have made together.

Merry Berry Love (Japanese title: Merī Berī Rabu) premiered in Japan on October 7, 2026, in Nippon TV's Wednesday drama slot (Wednesdays at 10 p.m.), and from the same day Disney+ has been releasing it weekly worldwide, including in Korea. The Disney+ Korea page rates it 12+. Nippon TV presented the series as its first joint project with CJ ENM, the company behind Crash Landing on You and Queen of Tears, and said that, as part of a strategic collaboration between Nippon Television Holdings and Walt Disney Japan, the series would be broadcast on terrestrial TV and released worldwide on Disney+ in tandem. It is produced by CJ ENM Japan and Nippon TV. The main theme is SEKAI NO OWARI's “Supermarket,” and the insert song “Toki ga Tomatta Hi,” written by SEKAI NO OWARI and sung by Lilas Ikuta, was first heard in the episode 2 broadcast.

The series is directed by Kim Soo-jung and Noh Young-seop. Kim directed the Watcha series Semantic Error, and screenwriter Lee Jae-yoon wrote The Divorce Insurance. The project was developed by chief producer Lee Sang-hwa of CJ ENM's Global Content Production Team. CJ ENM announced the co-production in November 2025, and the series was also presented that same month at Disney+ Originals Preview 2025 in Hong Kong. Ji Chang-wook recalled that they shot on Nokonoshima, a real island in Fukuoka, and that he went back and forth by boat as if commuting to work, adding that Karin's house in the story was on the island as well. Mio Imada said the shoot lasted nearly half a year. She said that on the island she watched the scenery change as winter ended and spring arrived, and that many of the camera and lighting crew were Korean.

Ji Chang-wook plays Lee Yu-bin, a perfectionist spatial planner, and Mio Imada plays Karin Shirahama, a farmer on Charo Island (茶呂島) who is devoted to developing a new strawberry variety. In episode 1, Yu-bin, who has lost his fortune after being betrayed by his business partner, heads to Charo Island, where his late father is said to have left him an inheritance; he quarrels with Karin over a ticket for the boat to the island and then clashes with her again in the strawberry fields over a misunderstanding. Karin, meanwhile, is short-handed after a worker runs off just ahead of the review that will decide whether her variety is certified. In episode 2, Yu-bin goes back to Korea but then reappears at Karin's farm as a worker, making the two boss and employee, and he learns that Karin is living with an illness. In episode 3, after a storm wrecks the barn where Yu-bin has been staying, Karin takes him into her house, and he learns that his father once stayed there and researched crops with Karin's grandfather. In return for designing the Charo Island booth at the annual Green Nova Corporation Festa, as the islanders have asked him to, Yu-bin asks to be allowed to stay at Karin's house, and the two begin living together under rules Karin sets. Nam Yoon-su plays Park Gu-nam, a young working-holiday visitor who has settled on the island, and Rinka Kumada plays Karin's friend Mari Mizuno, who runs a café and bar and specializes in tarot readings about love.

Ji Chang-wook said he had very much wanted to take part in a joint project with Japan. He said he thought hard about how to portray a Korean who is not good at Japanese in a way that felt natural yet came across as endearing and funny, and that he refined the details on set by asking the Japanese crew questions. Mio Imada said appearing in a work by a Korean writer and director was a new challenge for her, adding that in some scenes, everyday conversations she had with Ji Chang-wook were incorporated verbatim into the dialogue. On October 14, Nippon TV announced that, based on viewing over the first five days after release, the series ranked No. 1 in global views among live-action titles from Japan released on Disney+ in 2026. In the same announcement, Nippon TV said episode 1 had passed 2 million plays on TVer as of October 13 (according to TVer DATA MARKETING).

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Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: isplus.com, ntv.co.jp, tenasia.co.kr, wikitree.co.kr, disneyplus.com · 2026-10-25