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Kiryū City in Gunma Prefecture, post-war Japan: The misfortune of being born into poverty is something Toothy Boy knows all too well, or rather, was forced to know. We have traditional houses, poor families, diseases around the corner, deplorable living conditions, you know, the life-long status quo under capitalism. But this is indifferent to Toothy Boy. What time does he have to dwell on such matters when half the classroom makes of him, poor undeserving orphan squab in this cursed land, a monstrous toothy caricature? Of course none. Learning to keep quiet and to guard anger will be his inevitable fate for as long ... as he can resist. But what does it matter? We have the first train station built and the newest super express train of the moment in a de-industrialised Japan. Progress is coming!
Toothy does not understand the non-sense of existence. Or maybe the problem is much less profound and lies where social acceptance has been made impossible for him. They, the revilers of his dignity, wound his virtue with the poison of their words that reek of antipathy, reduce it to rubble and insert it into a sepulchre. They have taught it to hate the earth and all that glitters. Toothy might be a verminous scoundrel who walks through the deep mire of disillusionment with a will in agony. But what does it matter? Politicians celebrate and the degenerate old traditional Japan is spruced up by the beak of liberal modernity, Japan is industrialised. Progress is coming!
But what progress? Certainly the progress of environmental devastation, the progress of privatisation, the progress of individualisation, the progress of labour exploitation, the progress of mental health destruction, the progress of cognitive capitalism, the progress of a libidinous economy, the progress of annihilation, the progress of wealth accumulation for the oligarchy: the self-perpetuating progress of the unsustainability of human, animal and plant life.
"An animated film describing the bullying of a Japanese child" says the atrocious reductionist description of whoever wrote that. The effect is confused with the cause here, since bullying is a secondary factor whose genesis is facilitated by the social structure itself. The short film does not focus on putting the burden of blame on the children, but rather on the reality itself that ends up conditioning these situations. Again: It is not that they wanted to show how bad the children were with him, but rather the result of a reality that allows the mass reproduction of these situations.
Of course, the film makes a strong critique of liberal modernity. (Note the adjective "liberal", since liberal modernity is not to be equated with different forms of modernity such as cultural modernity, technological modernity, or modernity itself as a historical period). However, the critique is even more specific and focuses on the illusory idea of progress, after making clear the non-sense of a society in agony while an impetuous wind, detached from a late-model train carriage, sweeps away the houses it leaves behind it at a rapid pace.
One last image: Devastation is evident in a world with nothing to shine about, houses stand destroyed in an uncomfortable silence, and the sight forces the eye to focus on a reminiscence of the industrial society. There is nothing left to show signs of mass societal life. The last structure that made the existence of the industrial world patently visible has collapsed.
After all, what value does money have when there are no signifiers to attribute its fictitious symbolic value to it?
Life has been sacrificed for something that is, in the end, nothing.