He could pass for one of the salaryman drones that populate his new film, Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust, a satire of Japan's bubble economy of the late 1980s. At 53, Japanese director Yasuo Baba is from the generation that wallowed in the excesses of those years, when wine was guzzled like water, shopping was something one did abroad and drunken suits given cab coupons as a part of their pay packages fought for taxis in the street.
But unlike Hiroshi Abe - Bubble Fiction's 43-year-old star, whose investment in real estate was gutted by a plummeting property market - Baba says he wasn't hard hit by the end of the good times, mainly because he'd spent his time drawing comics rather than pursuing get-rich-quick schemes. 'By the 1990s I was a mature adult and that's when I began to criticise the economy through my comics.'
Bubble Fiction began as a comic in 2004 - nearly 14 years after Japan's economy hit the buffers.
'Young Japanese today don't like the bubble economy era because they can't land jobs or enjoy the fruits of that era,' says Baba. '[The film] would have been difficult to make even seven years ago because feelings were raw: corporations went bankrupt, people took their lives when they were put out of work ... But in the past one or two years things have been picking up again. We're now able to laugh at how silly we were.'
And laugh he did with Bubble Fiction. Filled with sharp observations about the greed-is-good ethos that consumed Japan in those frothy days and about the government's part in fuelling the economic bubble, the film begins in the present day, when a researcher (Hiroko Yakushimaru) succeeds in transforming a washing machine into a time machine. A bureaucrat (played by Abe) tries to persuade her to return to 1990 to reverse the fiscal policy blamed for the dark days of that decade. When she disappears, her daughter, Mayumi (Ryoko Hirosue), tries to track down the 1990 version of the bureaucrat and enlist his help. But will the young man - who is as intoxicated with wealth as many of his peers - heed her warnings?
Although Baba emerged from the bust in 1990 relatively unscathed, his filmography is a reminder of how much Japan Inc suffered in that decade.