Merry Berry Love: Disney+ pairs Ji Chang

In the key art Disney+ chose for Merry Berry Love, Mio Imada stands in a strawberry field in denim overalls, holding a basket of fruit, and rests her head on Ji Chang-wook‘s shoulder. It is the most familiar picture a romantic comedy can offer. The unfamiliar part is everything around it: a Korean leading man, a Japanese leading woman, and a series that two broadcasters from two countries had never made together before. Merry Berry Love is a romantic comedy series streaming on Disney+, and on Hulu in the United States, produced by CJ ENM, the Korean studio behind Crash Landing on You and Queen of Tears, with Japan’s Nippon TV.

Ji plays Lee Yu-bin, a star spatial designer in Korea who loses his career overnight and ends up on Charo Island, a remote Japanese island. There he meets Shirahama Karin, played by Imada, a young farmer who has built her life around growing strawberries on land she inherited. The official synopsis keeps the rest back: the two come from different worlds and “their lives collide in a big misunderstanding.” Disney’s own label for what follows is “a sweet and sour Korea-Japan rom-com,” and the sour half is already in the setup. The hero arrives on the island because his life in Seoul ended, not because he went looking for anything.

A Korean rom-com team inside a Japanese drama

The crew list explains why the series exists. Kim Soo-jung, who directed the campus romance Semantic Error, shares directing duties with Noh Young-sub, director of My Lovely Liar. The scripts are by Lee Jae-yoon, who wrote Divorce Insurance. All three come from Korean television. The broadcaster at home is Japanese: Nippon TV airs Merry Berry Love as one of its own primetime dramas, with Nippon Television, CJ ENM Japan and Shochiku’s studio among the production companies, while Disney carries it to the rest of the world on the same day.

Korean and Japanese television have traded formats and remakes for years, usually by selling a finished idea across the strait and letting the other side rebuild it. This is a different arrangement. It is the first joint series production between CJ ENM and Nippon TV, announced at Disney’s Asia-Pacific content showcase, and it was shot in both countries, on Nokonoshima, a small island in Fukuoka’s bay, and in Seoul’s Hongdae district. For Disney the appeal is plain arithmetic: one title with two home audiences that already watch each other’s dramas.

Ji Chang-wook goes back to romantic comedy

Korean press counts Merry Berry Love as Ji Chang-wook’s first romantic comedy in three years. His rom-com record runs through Suspicious Partner, Lovestruck in the City and Welcome to Samdal-ri, the last of them also set on an island, Jeju. Since then he has worked in a harder register: the undercover crime series The Worst of Evil, the revenge thriller The Manipulated and Netflix‘s The Scandal. A strawberry farm is a sharp turn from that run, and the casting draws on the screen persona he built in the lighter shows.

Mio Imada, known outside Japan for the Tokyo Revengers films and the live-action My Happy Marriage, carries the Japanese half of the premise as Karin. The supporting cast splits the same way. Nam Yoon-su plays Park Gu-nam, a working-holidaymaker on Charo Island, and Rinka Kumada plays Mizuno Mari. On the Korean side of Yu-bin’s story, Jung Soon-won plays Kim Bong-soo, his business partner and best friend, Kim Tae-hoon plays his late father, Lee Kyung-soo, and Moon Woo-jin plays Yu-bin as a boy, raised by his mother while his father worked abroad.

Two jobs that do not fit together

The episodes have not aired yet, so what the series does with its setup is still open. The setup itself is clear enough to read. Yu-bin’s job was designing spaces for other people, a career that could vanish in a single night. Karin’s job is tied to one piece of ground and one crop, and it cannot move anywhere. The premise suggests a comedy driven by that mismatch: a man trained to rearrange rooms dropped into a place where the work follows the season, not the client.

Publicity frames the romance as one worked out across language, culture and nationality, which is where the series will have to earn its jokes. Two people who misread each other is the oldest engine in the genre; two people who may not share a first language gives it more fuel, and more room to go wrong.

The genealogy is easy to trace. Crash Landing on You, from the same studio, stranded its heroine on the wrong side of a border. Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha sent a Seoul professional to a seaside village to start over. Merry Berry Love takes that rural-reset formula and moves it abroad, so the newcomer is not only a city man on a farm but a foreigner on someone else’s island. The local, for once, holds the land, the language and the advantage at the first meeting.

Merry Berry Love on Disney+: release, episodes and cast

When does Merry Berry Love come out? It premieres on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, with two episodes on Disney+ and, in the United States, on Hulu. New episodes follow weekly on Wednesdays.

How many episodes are there? Ten, forming the first season.

Is it a Korean or a Japanese drama? Both. CJ ENM produced it with Nippon TV, which airs it in Japan on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. It is set and largely shot in Japan, with Korean directors, a Korean writer, a Korean lead and a Japanese lead.

Who is in the cast? Ji Chang-wook plays Lee Yu-bin and Mio Imada plays Shirahama Karin, with Nam Yoon-su, Rinka Kumada, Jung Soon-won, Kim Tae-hoon and Moon Woo-jin.

The question the island leaves open

The key art already settles who belongs in that field. She holds the strawberries; he holds nothing. A romance between a man who arrives with no career left and a woman who will not leave her land makes a tidy poster, and a hard ending, because sooner or later one of them has to move. If the island is where Yu-bin lands because he has nowhere else to go, can the series make staying look like a choice?