This amazing film is a collection of criticisms of virtually all things Japanese and some merely related to japan, dressed as a moster movie, dressed as a mockumentary.
The atomic monster what-have-you gets a send-up, but the meat of the film is in an adoring but heartbroken look at Japan. From the first scene when the busdriver announces the stop as “Nakamura Shrine, get off here for the shopping mall”, the movie is a reflection on a society which has forgotten its past, and developed a small and petty focus on the here and now and ooh, shiny!
As the old style problems diminish, so do the old skills for comping with them, until all that is left is pathetic echoes of former glory, longing for a supposedly better time, and scraps of hard-won ancient information.
The old times are sent up as well, not as a goal, a worthy destination or the rightful object of such reverence as the nostalgic maintain, but as a time in which it was easier to be big, because everything was so small.
And yet when the sake hits the floor, it’s a new version of an old problem, and our hero Daisato finds himself lacking in what was plentiful in the old days.
At one point, the interviewer asks him if he travels or plans to travel overseas. Daisato hedges that he’s not anti-American, but, you know, I was kinda raised that way, and dissembles. He poo-poos the notion of travel to the states, and yet for him that is the whole world outside of Japan, in one example of the love-hate relationship Japan has with the states, and with itself.
