"Even in a period when outdoor shooting was a norm for Japanese directors, it must have seemed very audacious to make a film entirely on location, both inside and outside a bus chugging its way through the hills and villages of rural Japan. But Shimizu pulls it off, tracking away along the winding paths and introducing a prize collection of nice, nasty, funny and awkward passengers, accompanied by some favorite American tunes to while away the journey." (John Gillett) "That chirpy, cheerful bus ride...is the Shimizu film that comes closest to a full-scale social portrait of the 1930s. It has an underlying melancholy very far from the simple joie de vivre its surface humor implies. What, after all, are the passengers talking about? About young girls who cross the pass to the paper mills and never make the journey back; about failed businessmen in the depression years forced to sell their daughters into prostitution; about those who lose their minds because they have had to do so...Mr. Thank You is not a film that smiles through its tears but one that speaks out in anger behind the superficial good humor..." (Alan Stanbrook)