A Life on a Loop in ‘Salaryman 6’

‘My life is a loop’, declares Shiode, the salaryman protagonist of the short film Salaryman 6, released in 2002. Co-written by Ryoko Tanaka and Jake Knight, this film, just over seven minutes long, seeks to reveal the millimetric and unrelentingly identical nature of the everyday existence of Japanese workers.

At the beginning, a man lies on the carpet of an open-plan office, seemingly inanimate. As two of his colleagues approach, he comes round and returns to his workstation. The only problem is that when he wakes up the next morning, he has no recollection of what happened the day before. Thus, he decides to tamper with one of his digital cameras so he can take photographs automatically. Every day, he attaches the device to his suit jacket, and the machine then captures snippets of his everyday routine.

A stifling daily routine

Shot in neutral colours, the film shows enormous buildings with doors and windows that are repeated over hundreds of square metres in an identical manner, a trip on the metro that’s very much the same both morning and evening, a stop at the same konbini day after day to buy meals… Everything has been done to give the impression of a life stuck on a loop, in which nothing is different from one day to the next, even the protagonist’s outfit and his actions when he enters his apartment.

Seven minutes suffice to provoke a feeling of suffocation, with the sense of being stuck inside a wheel from which it is impossible to escape. This is the everyday reality for many Japanese salarymen, whose commitment and attachment to their company are cardinal virtues, but with which the younger generation seems to be at odds.

Salaryman 6 (2002), a short film by Ryoko Tanaka and Jake Knight. More information on the website for the agency onedotzero.