Iijima continued acting in Japanese TV serials including the 2003 Fuji TV romance and the 2005 TBS romantic drama . but she also starred in a serious drama about World War II. In the October 2005 TV movie Iijima played Yukiko Sugihara, who helped her husband, Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara, write visas which saved the lives of six thousand Lithuanian Jews in 1940. For the 2008 TV series , broadcast March to September 2008, Iijima, no longer the ingenue, plays the mother of the twenty-year-old heroine Hitomi (Eikura Nana). The romantic comedy has a 23-year-old "salaryman" (Hayato Ichihara) falling in love with Iijima's character, an "around 40 year old" beautician. The series was originally aired on the mobile phone channel BeeTV but its popularity led Fuji TV to combine the episodes into a TV movie broadcast in December 2009.