Hideki Takeuchi's "Thermae Romae" — literally "Roman Bath" — was 2012's surprise box office smash in Japan, earning nearly ¥6 billion, the second-highest that year.

Based on Mari Yamazaki's hit manga, the film was about a bathhouse architect named Lucius (Hiroshi Abe) in ancient Rome who time-travels to modern-day Japan, where he is dumbstruck by "advanced" Japanese bath culture and borrows ideas that revive his flagging career in Rome. He also meets a cute neophyte manga artist, Mami (Aya Ueto), who is mad about all things Roman and accompanies him back to his own time, though the super-serious Lucius is barely aware of her existence.

This fish-out-of-water (or rather man-in-the-water) comedy, with its mixture of weighty political drama and light romance, was hardly high art, but it entertained in ways which were fresh and funny to Japanese audiences. At the same time, the film had a clever take on cultural superiority/inferiority, with Lucius contemptuously assuming that the elderly men he encounters in his first Japanese bathhouse are "flat-faced slaves," while they comically regard him as another clueless foriegner. It also didn't hurt ticket sales that Abe buffed up in the gym for the role of Lucius and spent much of the film in his birthday suit.