Yuta Shimotsu – Windows on Worlds

If all your friends went and formed a giant human pyramid, would you go and form a giant human pyramid too? Parents used to caution against such dangerous group think, but it has to be said that perhaps they only complained when the group activity didn’t suit them or required some additional expense they didn’t really want to pay. If the group activity was studying hard at school to get into a good university and become a successful member of society rather than buying the later must have fashion item to fit in at school, then they’d hardly complain about that.

Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist satire New Group is in many ways about the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that exist within a society to the extent that they are rarely ever questioned. Ai (Anna Yamada) is coming to an age in which she is beginning to feel hemmed in by a conformist society but at the same time does not have the courage or confidence to challenge it. When she sees another girl being bullied, she wants to step in to defend her but all she manages to do is give the bullies a hard stare. Her friend Haru asks her what university she’s thinking of applying to to, but Ai only says she’ll apply to the same one as her and study the same thing. She can’t even answer when she’s put on the spot about what she wants to do for the school festival for fear of picking the wrong one and being ostracised from a particular faction, so she just goes along with the first person who asked for her vote.

As her teacher says, though there is a strong groupthink in play, everything comes to a binary. It’s always “uchi-soto”, us and them. But what does it mean to be a member of the main group? Ai isn’t convinced she wants to give up her autonomy just to fit in and increasingly feels herself to be an outsider. Her name is of course reminiscent of the English pronoun “I”, though it’s true meaning is “love”. She’s pulled out of inertia by a boy named “Yu” who nevertheless is later pulled into the pyramid and tells her that “ai” is here, meaning both that the group is love and Ai, the individual, belongs with in it. She replies that he’s wrong, that isn’t love, and it isn’t her. There is no room for the individual within the pyramidic structure of the group.

Yu has recently returned from abroad and is living alone free of parental authority which is why he doesn’t fit into the carefully controlled harmony of the school. He is out of step at marching practice and less afraid to voice his true opinions. He intervenes to save the other girl from the bullies and chastises Ai that just watching makes you complicit. Yu might as well be one of the space aliens they keep talking about on TV, a subversive force out to destabilise the harmonious society. Yet Ai’s doubts seem to have arisen because of a personal trauma. As a child, she chose the group over her younger sister who was then killed in an accident. She feared being excluded and essentially sacrificed her sister for approval while also denying her affiliation to the group that is her family.

The quest of Ai and Yu is then to maintain their selfhoods while operating in a society that demands conformity. Controlled by the maniacal headmaster, their schoolmates all immediately start marching to the beat of the PE teacher’s whistle and dutifully take their place in the pyramid in which all they do is uphold the structure of the group. As the pair are chased by the zombie-like figures, Ai has to confront the fact that it might just be easier to go with the flow, even if that too comes at a price. Even so, in her efforts to resist, is Ai not just creating another group of her own that can only exist because of its opposition to the first? If there is “I” there must also be “you” and never the twain shall meet. A TV commentator played by the director Takashi Shimizu tries to speak out about the nonsense groupthink being conveyed through the innocuous medium of daytime television but is dragged off air while shouting at everyone to wake up and think for themselves. It seems that few are brave enough to switch off and think for themselves while the only path to freedom lies in loneliness and exile even if in the end it is “love” that saves us after all.

New Group screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A young woman is confronted with an uncomfortable truth on return to her old hometown in Yuta Shimotsu’s eerie horror satire, Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ, Mina ni Sachi Are). Is there really a finite amount of happiness in the world or would there be plenty to go around if only we weren’t all so selfish? The unnamed heroine (Kotone Furukawa) claimed she wanted to become a nurse to “save people” but in the end starts to wonder if the only way to be happy in a cynical world is to meet it on its own terms.

Even so, there’s something decidedly strange about her reunion with her grandparents. She notices them behaving oddly but isn’t sure whether to chalk it up to their age and not having seen them for a long time, only there’s something a little creepy in their overt “happiness” as they cryptically look up at the ceiling as if gazing at a higher power or suddenly start making pig noises before remarking that they should be happy as they eat their bacon that the animal has achieved its purpose in life. Meanwhile, for unclear reasons they forbid her from hanging out with a childhood friend who stayed in town to take over his father’s farm despite showing promise as an artist.

He too cryptically adds that he thinks there’s enough happiness in the world for everyone to have some without needing to hoard it, adding to the heroine’s unease as she tries to investigate the strange noises coming from behind a locked door in her grandparents’ home. Soon, she begins to discover what it is that makes them “happy” and is confused and appalled, unsure whether she should believe her eyes or has actually gone out of her mind in this already quite weird place.

On leaving the city, she’d paused on a pedestrian crossing to help an old lady with her bags while a salaryman had knocked hers out of her hands by walking into her. She was the sort of person that thought it was important to help others or at least to be considerate, but is confronted with an uncomfortable truth in being asked if she can go on pretending that her happiness isn’t bought with the suffering of someone else somewhere in the world even if they aren’t exactly “visible” to her. She tries to revolt and reject the strange goings on at her grandparents’ but is told that it’s the way of the world, that it’s happening everywhere, and that really she knows but has chosen not to see because when it comes right down to it she’s as selfish as everyone else and isn’t willing to sacrifice her own happiness to “save” someone else from suffering.

Meanwhile, she realises that some families are being shunned in the village for resisting and these families largely are “unhappy”, though undoubtedly some of that at least must be down to their stigmatisation. She and her friend save a high school boy who was being bullied, but even he later relates to her that he’s decided to “live smart” by going along with the local practice even if it doesn’t seem right to him because it’s pointless to resist when everyone is doing it. Another rejectee also tells her that the village philosophy is a fallacy because even if someone “should” be miserable there’s no way to know how they really feel and if you’re only basing your idea of “happiness” on external validation then of course you’ll always be miserable.

Confronted with a bizarre series of events, she begins to wonder if she’s going out of her mind and none of this is really happening even while pressured to submit herself to the ways of the village. In effect, she’s being asked to choose her level of comfort with complicity, acknowledging directly that her “happiness” is based on a quite literal exploitation, drained out of those less fortunate than herself. Her friend remained convinced that there is plenty of happiness to go around without needing to extract it from others, but the lessons she learns are more cynical, no longer stopping to help old ladies with their shopping and suspicious of those who do while proudly declaring herself “happy” with her new “reality”. Shimotsu excels in finding the eeriness of the every day in which an ordinary jar of miso or a workman’s tool box can seem to radiate evil while the grandparents’ ordinary house has an incredibly ominous atmosphere that raises a note of uncanniness in their “happy home” suggesting that their quasi-beatific state is more akin to curse than blessing.

Best Wishes to All screens in New York July 27 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tag: Yuta Shimotsu

New Group (Yuta Shimotsu, 2025)

Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ, Yuta Shimotsu, 2023)