The era background of ballroom dancing:
Looking for relevant information, you can find that one of the popular dances in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s was disco. This kind of dance of one person swinging freely in the ballroom is indeed very suitable for the Japanese people's introverted and lonely character who like to keep a distance.
As an imported ballroom dance, it emphasizes the close cooperation between two people and a high degree of physical contact, which is bound to have a gap with Japanese culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, ballroom dancing was considered an international dance, and the fans were mainly middle-aged and elderly people (the young people who danced ballroom dance during the post-war American occupation were getting old).
Ballroom dancing is only accepted by some people, and the world still has prejudice against it (such as the staff's evaluation of Aoki in the movie, ballroom dancing is considered to be a means of seducing girls). This is its contradiction in the degree of cognition and acceptance. At the same time, there is a gap and generation gap between the social and close contact side of ballroom dancing and the Japanese people who are reserved and like to keep a distance. This is the contradiction between its nature and the character of the audience. The contradiction of the subject itself makes it worth being photographed and discussed.
What this film wants to express is the life status of a (or a group of) middle-aged people: without the passion and dreams of youth, the loss of the soul after the life is on the right track and the repetition, and the boredom of the worldly life. What these people need is an outlet for emotional excretion, which happens to meet ballroom dancing. It is true that ballroom dancing has certain particularities in terms of foreign culture and physical contact, but the gist of ballroom dancing can still be expressed by replacing it with tango, cha-cha, and social shake. Therefore, it may be just the director's accidental inspiration that he chose the object of ballroom dancing.
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