Big Man Japan: Matsumoto's Deadpan Kaiju Mockumentary

A documentary crew is following a middle-aged man around Tokyo. He lives alone in a shabby house. He talks about his cat, his estranged wife, the daughter he barely sees, and the neighbourhood’s opinion of him, which is low enough that people throw things at his property. His answers are evasive and slightly boring. He seems tired.

His job is that when a monster attacks Japan, he goes to a power station, is electrified until he grows to roughly the height of an office block, and fights it.

Big Man Japan (2007) was Hitoshi Matsumoto’s first film as a director, and it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, which remains one of the more startling sentences in modern Japanese cinema. Matsumoto — one half of Downtown, and a household name in Japan for decades — plays Masaru Daisato, sixth-generation holder of the title Dai Nipponjin, Big Man Japan. The film is shot as a documentary about him, and the documentary is about a man whose profession has become embarrassing.

This is a revisit. The ending, which is famous and which I will defend, is below the line.

The premise, described

Daisato has inherited the role. His grandfather was the fourth Big Man Japan, a genuine national hero in an era when the country needed one and watched him on television in vast numbers. Daisato’s own broadcasts air late at night to a tiny audience and are sold by an agent, played by the singer Ua, who treats him as an underperforming property and hustles for sponsorship deals — logos painted onto his enormous body while he fights.

The monsters, which the film calls Juu, are the film’s finest invention. They are digital, deliberately cheap-looking, and completely deranged in design: absurd, sad, sometimes obscene creatures with behaviours that make no sense whatsoever. Each is an original, and each is funnier than the last.

Matsumoto plays Daisato’s interview material entirely deadpan. There is no wink. The man is defensive about his ratings, wounded by the public’s contempt, and unable to articulate why he keeps doing a job that has made him a national joke.

Why the mockumentary form is the whole idea

The formal choice here is doing every ounce of the work, and it is worth spelling out why.

A kaiju film is normally shot at monster scale — low angles, models, spectacle, a camera that gapes. Matsumoto shoots his monster fights from the position of a news crew: distant, badly framed, missing the action, cutting away at the wrong moments. The result is that the fights look like footage rather than cinema. They have no grandeur, and that absence is the joke and the argument at once. A giant man punching a giant creature, filmed by someone who is not very good at their job and does not much care, is a devastating image of a spectacle that has lost its audience.

The interview material runs the same play. Matsumoto and his crew adopt the visual grammar of low-grade Japanese television documentary with real precision — the flat lighting, the cramped domestic setups, the interviewer’s inane questions from off-camera, the long silences that a competent editor would have cut. Everything about the form says: this man is not important enough for anyone to have tried hard.

And the sponsorship gag is the sharpest single idea in the film. Daisato’s body is advertising space. His agent negotiates the placements. When he grows to fight, he is covered in logos, which means his humiliation is also his revenue, and the film never once underlines this. It simply shows it and moves on, which is the confidence of a man who has been making comedy for thirty years and knows the audience will get there.

The digital monsters are the one place Matsumoto spends money, and he spends it on ugliness. The Juu look wrong — smoothly rendered, weightless, tonally mismatched with the grainy documentary around them. That mismatch is deliberate. These creatures do not belong in this film’s reality, and their visual wrongness is a constant reminder that the whole premise is an absurdity everyone in the country has simply got used to.

There is a quieter mechanism running underneath all of this, and it is the film’s saddest. Documentary grammar carries an implicit promise: the crew is here because the subject is worth filming. Matsumoto exploits that promise ruthlessly. The longer the camera stays on Daisato in his kitchen, saying nothing of interest, the more insistently the form asks why anyone bothered — and the film’s answer is that they did not, particularly. The crew are making a cheap programme about a man who used to be famous, and their boredom leaks into every setup. Daisato is being condescended to by his own documentary, and he can feel it, and he keeps answering the questions anyway.

The collector’s ancestor

The surface ancestor is tokusatsu — the Japanese live-action superhero and monster television of the sixties and seventies, the Ultraman lineage, an entire industry of rubber suits and miniature cities. Matsumoto grew up on it, and the film is a wake for it.

The deeper ancestor is the original Godzilla, and the debt is structural. Honda’s 1954 film worked because the monster was a national metaphor with real weight behind it — a country processing a catastrophe through a creature. Everything the desk has traced in the kaiju film and the rubber-suit sublime and gathered in the kaiju canon descends from that act of displacement. Matsumoto’s insight is to ask what happens to the defender once the metaphor expires. If the monster stood for something the nation feared, and the nation no longer fears it, then the man who fights it is a civil servant maintaining a ritual whose meaning has drained out. Daisato is the kaiju film’s hero, still turning up, in a country that has moved on.

The other native ancestor is the satire of an ageing Japan, and the closest sibling is the nursing-bed mecha satire Roujin Z — another film about the collision of Japanese technological spectacle with the unglamorous reality of getting old, and another that finds genuine pathos in machinery. For the low-budget Japanese sci-fi register Matsumoto is quietly parodying, the mecha B-movie Gunhed is the reference point.

The form’s ancestor sits elsewhere entirely. The mockumentary that this most resembles in effect is the mockumentary that grieves — a film that uses the documentary’s plainness to smuggle in a sadness that a conventional drama could never have landed. Matsumoto is doing the same thing with jokes instead of ghosts.

And for the same mind on an entirely different problem, the white-room puzzle of Symbol is the necessary companion piece.

The case against

The film is slow, and its slowness is not always productive. Matsumoto’s signature move — hold the shot until the comedy dies and something else arrives — works magnificently perhaps six times here and simply stalls the picture on several others. There is a tighter cut of this that loses nothing.

The middle section repeats. Once the pattern is established — interview, call-out, monster, humiliating aftermath — the film runs it several times without developing it, and the Juu designs are carrying more weight than the structure gives them.

The grandfather material is the film’s most affecting strand and its most underused. An old man with dementia in a nursing home, who was once the nation’s hero and who still occasionally becomes enormous, is one of the best ideas anyone has had in this genre. Matsumoto touches it and moves on. That restraint is defensible and it left me wanting the film that stayed.

The verdict

Big Man Japan is a genuine oddity and a genuinely good film, and it is smarter about its genre than almost any straight kaiju picture of its era. The performance is a masterclass in playing sadness as boredom. The satire — a hero rented out as advertising space, sold by the metre, disliked by the public he protects — is delivered without a single explanatory line. And the film’s willingness to be tedious in the service of an effect is the mark of a director with something to prove and no interest in being liked.

Go in expecting a documentary about a disappointing man. Let the ending do what it does. Then watch Symbol, because the two films together are the clearest picture available of what happens when one of the most successful comedians alive decides he would rather make difficult art than easy money.

The film circulated widely on disc in the West after Cannes; streaming has been less dependable. Either way, watch it late.

Spoilers below

The last ten minutes abandon the film entirely.

After ninety minutes of grainy, deadpan, low-fi documentary, Matsumoto cuts — with no transition and no warning — to a live-action tokusatsu sequence, shot in the flat bright style of children’s television, in which Daisato is rescued by an American superhero family called Super Justice. Rubber suits. A visibly cardboard city. A family of costumed Americans who beat the monster with cheerful brutality while Daisato stands aside, superfluous in his own film, and is eventually invited to join in for a photograph.

It goes on for a long time. It refuses to end. It is the single most divisive stretch in Matsumoto’s filmography, and audiences at Cannes reportedly did not know what to do with it.

I think it is the point of the whole film. Everything preceding it establishes that Japan’s monster-defender has become an embarrassment nobody watches. The ending then shows exactly who replaced him: an American family, in loud costumes, doing his job louder and cheaper and with better ratings, treating him as a mascot to be photographed with. The national metaphor was bought out.

That the sequence is deliberately, aggressively unwatchable is the joke’s final layer. Matsumoto is showing you the thing that beat him, and making sure you cannot enjoy it either.