Shintaro Ishihara has a lot in common with Michael Moore: Both were long outriders in their particular political cultures, both have been called, more or less rightly, self-promoting blowhards — and both have an outsize talent for show business that has enabled them to imprint their personalities and ideas on the national (and in Moore's case, world) consciousness.
One difference is that Ishihara, as three-term Tokyo governor, wields serious political power; while Moore is and will probably always be a gadfly.
However, both have also made controversial new movies that plug directly into the national zeitgeist, if in radically different ways. Moore's documentary "Sicko" dissects America's grotesquely unfair and inefficient health-care system, while Ishihara's "Ore wa Kimi no Tame ni Koso Shini ni Iku (For Those We Love)" proposes a remedy for what he sees as a sickness of the Japanese soul: a renewed appreciation for the sacrifices of the war generation and a truer understanding of their values.
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