“One of the most powerful and brilliant films dealing with the effects of the Second World War and its aftermath would not be made until 1970. This was Shohei Imamura's History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess. Using the documentary approach of the cinéma vérité interview, the film consists of Imamura himself questioning an actual bar hostess, named Etsuko Akaza, who had bought the ‘Onboro' bar in Yokosuka, the setting as well of Pigs and Battleships. While ‘Madame Onboro' traces the history of her life from the end of the war to the present, Imamura intercuts actual newsreel footage of the tumultuous political events of the postwar period beginning with the arrival of General MacArthur in 1945.
“Sometimes the newsreels ironically contradict what Mme. Onboro tells us. As a bar hostess servicing the American base at Yokosuka, she has made her peace with the Americans, while Imamura, through his choice of newsreel footage, is violently anti-American. Imamura sees the Occupation and the years of the Japan-American Security Treaty (AMPO) as having been, in their own way, of almost equal destructiveness to Japan as the war itself.
“At other times, Mme. Onboro's suffering after the war makes her an effective critic of the postwar period and the newsreels confirm her point of view.... By the end of the film Etsuko has become a representative of ‘Japan,' and her attitudes express how Japan has coped with the Occupation and its aftermath as both victim and willing participant in its own victimization.” Joan Mellen, “The Waves at Genji's Door”