A cheerful wartime propaganda song becomes the skeleton for a comedy that finds absurdity in the machinery of surveillance itself. The gap between the upbeat melody and what it actually was, a tool to monitor your neighbors, control your thoughts, ration your food, is where the joke lives. This movie knows you know the history; it's betting you'll laugh harder once you do.

A comedy film whose title refers to the tonarigumi, the neighborhood associations Japan's government created during World War II as the smallest unit of its national mobilization program. Each group joined roughly five to ten households, which were expected to help one another while keeping watch for suspicious behavior, making rationing and control of public thinking easier to manage. A song with the same name was written to promote the program and became a big hit in Japan thanks to its upbeat tune.