 Following the success of Departures at the Academy Awards , critic Saburō Kawamoto found the film to show a Japan that the Japanese could relate to , in that , in a nation whose customs put great weight on visits to ancestral graves , a death was always a family affair . He believed the film had a samurai beauty to it , with its many scenes of families sitting seiza . Critic Yūichi Maeda gave the film a 90 % rating , and credited the performances of the two leads for much of the film 's success . He praised its emotional impact and its balance of seriousness and humour , but was more critical of the father – son relationship , which he considered overdone . Maeda attributed the film 's international success , despite its heavily Japanese content , to its clear depiction of Japanese views on life and death . He found the film 's conceptual scale to have an affinity to that of Hollywood ( something he considered lacking in most Japanese films ) . 
