A ¥5 billion hit. What Japan agreed with was the day labour.

The headline is nothing but numbers. ¥5 billion in fourteen days. Ahead of the pace set by Shin Evangelion.

So the comment section should have been an argument about numbers. It wasn't.

I read all 132 parent comments. Not one of the top five discusses the box office. And every single comment that counted somebody else's money failed to gain traction.

Context for readers outside Japan

Chiikawa began as small doodles posted to social media by an artist working under the name Nagano. Round, white, roughly identifiable creatures.

If you only see the merchandise, it reads as a franchise for small children. Japanese readers thought so too, at first. The contents are different.

These characters have jobs. They pull weeds for a living, paid by the day. There is a formal qualification — a weed-pulling certification, with grades — and your grade determines which work you are allowed to take. If you want to earn more there is toubatsu, monster extermination, which pays considerably better and can kill you.

With the money, they eat something slightly nice. Ramen. Sushi, occasionally. This is presented as the peak of available happiness.

The film adapts one of the darker long arcs in that world. A children's-length runtime containing sacrifice and consequence.

The numbers, for completeness: 3.5 million admissions and ¥5bn in fourteen days. Shin Evangelion stood at ¥4.93bn at the same point and finished at ¥10.28bn — which is why it was invoked as a benchmark.

What the comment section is saying

Start with the quietest agreement in the thread.

105 upvotes against 5 downvotes. Twenty-one to one. Nothing else in 132 comments is agreed with this cleanly.

Beneath an article about ¥5 billion, this person is looking at a daily wage. That is how they describe a cute cartoon animal: it puts its whole life into working for the day's pay. And then the last line — our hearts are with them.

That is not a review. It is a self-description.

A shorter version of the same thing:

One line. 70 upvotes. No reason given — none was needed.

There is worry in the thread too, from people who know what the film contains. One comment at 95 upvotes describes a wife and child who collect the merchandise, have never read the story, and are going tomorrow expecting cute animals to bounce around for ninety minutes. The writer wonders whether to warn them.

Now the part that matters. Here is how the thread treated people counting somebody else's earnings.

10 upvotes, 37 down. An unsourced rumour, prefaced with apparently, doing arithmetic on a stranger's contract. It went nowhere.

Another comment speculated that the author's recent income may have overtaken that of two of the most famous manga artists alive: 3 upvotes. Another concluded somebody must be making a killing: 8. In this thread, guessing at other people's money does not move the votes.

And out of all 132, this was the most rejected comment of the lot.

7 up, 177 down. Twenty-five to one — the heaviest rejection in the thread.

What I make of it

Let me be honest: I found that last one ridiculous.

It is an article about a film with round white animals in it earning ¥5 billion. To read that and write bitter and sad means that inside this person, box office receipts are a league table. They will not receive a yen of it, and they have taken it as a loss for their side.

It is also constructed with some skill. I can only sleep at night is a worn Japanese comment-section joke — the gag is that it sounds like insomnia and means the opposite. So it may be half in jest. It did not matter. 177 people pressed the button anyway. Even in a joke's clothing, it did not pass.

And this is not one odd man. The same instinct appears repeatedly in this thread: people calculating the creator's cut, ranking his annual income, deducing who got rich, worrying about resellers. Every one of them is an ordinary viewer. They will not receive a yen and, in most cases, have not spent one either — and from that position, they are discussing other people's revenue.

I think this is one of the shapes Japanese resentment takes. When your own life is not improving, you begin counting what other people are taking. Counting does not increase your own share, and you have no way to obtain the real figures in any case. People do it because it is easier than talking about themselves.

Which is why the reassuring thing about this thread is that the votes did not choose it.

The top of the thread is the score, the script, the aftertaste — and that comment at 105 about day labour.

Read it once more. In a Japan where the ordinary sort of happiness is no longer ordinarily available. This person is also saying their life is hard. It is the same resentment. But they are talking about their own daily wage rather than a stranger's balance sheet, and they were accepted twenty-one to one.

The difference is not whether you resent something. It is whether you write it as your own life or as somebody else's accounts.

If you take one thing from Japan today, take this. A round white creature is currently a national phenomenon here, and the reason is not that it is cute. It is that the creature sits an exam, pulls weeds for a day's pay, buys something slightly nice to eat, and considers that to be happiness.

Grown men are crying in cinemas over it. Prefacing it with I'm just some middle-aged bloke.

¥5 billion is a studio's revenue. It is not the number the comment section was looking at. They were looking at the character's day rate, and at their own.

I will keep counting, and I will keep watching.

All quotes are reproduced verbatim with the source and capture date recorded, and commenter handles withheld. Source articles may be taken offline by the publisher. The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.