In this virtuoso film, Hiroshi Shimizu develops a story of student athletes into an artistic study of motion itself. Seki, the lackadaisical “star athlete,” and his hard-working rival Tani, are members of a cadet platoon out for a 2-day trek through the countryside. In five connected episodes, Shimizu follows their exploits as they decide to bunk at an inn for the night, flirt with young girls and older women alike, and frighten a hapless monk into thinking they are pursuing him. Two of the episodes are broadly comic, the others more serious with a vaguely nationalistic undertone typical of the era, and a more traditional moral characterized by critic Noël Burch as “fundamentally Japanese...: No matter how good you are individually, it is the group that comes first.” Burch considers the film at length in his book To the Distant Observer. He calls the second section--in which the march is captured in a series of 30 consecutive traveling shots--“one of Shimizu's most brilliant achievements.... (The action is) treated in a mode of cyclical humor close...to that of the French master Jacques Tati.”