Haha. A movie which satirizes this aspect of Japanese culture is オムライス ("Omuraisu" -- Omelette Rice: 2011 I think). In this film, the main character walks around his town (one of the purposes of his walk being to obtain ingredients for omelette rice), and responds to various odd signage. He invents stories which explain how those signs might have come to be, and those stories come alive as a sequence of disconnected, or loosely connected vignettes by various comedians.
One of the vignettes revolves around a succinct sign explaining a shop's opening hours on various days. The protagonist imagines that the sign began as a slightly different sign: one with a missing dash (though this is not easy for viewers to notice, I think). In the vignette, the characters argue about how the sign is unclear and propose various changes to it which make it more and more verbose. Finally, a third guy comes along and just adds the missing dash to the original (producing the succinct sign as seen by the protagonist). Everyone is like, "whoa ...".
Japanese sites don't rate this film very highly, but I liked it. It's not bad for "foreigners" interested in Japan. No subs were available, so I had to do without.
Haha. A movie which satirizes this aspect of Japanese culture is オムライス ("Omuraisu" -- Omelette Rice: 2011 I think). In this film, the main character walks around his town (one of the purposes of his walk being to obtain ingredients for omelette rice), and responds to various odd signage. He invents stories which explain how those signs might have come to be, and those stories come alive as a sequence of disconnected, or loosely connected vignettes by various comedians.
One of the vignettes revolves around a succinct sign explaining a shop's opening hours on various days. The protagonist imagines that the sign began as a slightly different sign: one with a missing dash (though this is not easy for viewers to notice, I think). In the vignette, the characters argue about how the sign is unclear and propose various changes to it which make it more and more verbose. Finally, a third guy comes along and just adds the missing dash to the original (producing the succinct sign as seen by the protagonist). Everyone is like, "whoa ...".
Japanese sites don't rate this film very highly, but I liked it. It's not bad for "foreigners" interested in Japan. No subs were available, so I had to do without.