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While most Japanese people celebrate New Year's Day at home, more and more otaku are defying their introverted homebound stereotype by celebrating the holiday together — at a symbolic otaku mecca and a literal holy shrine with an anime tie-in.

By contrast, many otaku go against the traffic and visit Tokyo during the last three days of the old year because of Comic Market

Traditionally, many Japanese people visit a local shrine during the first three days of the year to ask for good health and prosperity during the new year. An estimated 130,000 people went instead to Washinomiya, the Tokyo area's oldest shrine which was further immortalized (in a manner of speaking) by the Lucky Star anime series. Washinomiya's attendance during the first three days of the year is estimated to have grown almost 50% percent — 40,000 more people — this year because of this series which premiered last April.

"Our old enemy 'poverty' somehow disappeared, and we can no longer find an enemy to fight against" (Miyazaki, 1988). In other words, after Japan's industrial success since the Meiji restoration in 1890s and recovery from WWII cast out poverty from the nation, people still remain possessed by an illusion of gaining a wealthy everyday life and continue living with a gap between their ideal and real life. As a result, an endless and unsatisfying cycle of production and consumption has begun destroying harmony among family and community (Harootunian, 2000).

Zizek (1989) points out that people of late capitalism are well aware that money is not magical. To obtain it, it has to be replaced through labor, and after you use it, it will just disappear, as will as any other material. Allison (1996) adds to this point: "They know money is no more than an image and yet engage in its economy where use-value has been increasingly replaced and displaced by images (one of the primary definitions of post-modernism) all the same” (p. xvi).

Related to its presentation of the loss of spiritual values, the film elaborates an extensive critique of another contemporary global issue: identity confusion. A symptom of identity loss is seen in the way that cultures today encourage people to constantly refashion their self-image, so that individuals construct their identity based on ideals presented in popular media.