Spoiler range: episodes 5–6. Nothing from episode 7 onward is discussed. Episodes 1–4 were mostly disaster survival. This post sticks to what changed in the Shan City stretch of episodes 5–6.
1. After four episodes of disaster survival, episode 5 sends us back to the genre menu
Episodes 1–3 were pure disaster survival: earthquakes, tsunami, flooding, ground fissures, unexploded bombs, poison gas and food shortages, with real-world dangers stacked up at an absurd density. When the group reached Shan City in episode 4, the yoga and the spiritual commune already felt a little off, but it still made sense as a realistic theme: after a huge disaster, people look for a community and a kind of religious comfort.
Then episode 5 takes that hunch and floors the accelerator.
Disaster anime → spiritual commune → talking to the dead → cannabis field → party → pushy pickup attempt → DJ set → archery action → a sex scene between adults.
Viewer: "Where's Japan?"
The show: "We're in Shan City right now."
The title says Japan Sinks 2020, yet the Japanese archipelago seems to have taken about an episode off on paid leave.
2. Not "Granny Anya who reads minds", but exactly "a 55-year-old Mother who talks to the dead"
While live-blogging, it's tempting to call her "that mind-reading old lady, Anya." But the facts are a bit different. According to the official profile, the one called Mother, Kanae Murota, is 55 years old. After her husband died, she founded Shan City, a spiritual commune built around her son Daichi as its symbol. In episode 5 she appears as a medium who touches a dead person's belongings and passes on messages from them.
So she's less a telepath who constantly reads people's minds and more a medium, or a psychometrist-style character, who talks to the dead through their keepsakes.
The real issue isn't the type of power. For episodes 1–4, even with some sci-fi seasoning, the show scared us with the rules of the physical world: earthquakes, tsunami, crustal movement, poison gas, unexploded bombs. Now it suddenly steps into a world where the supernatural might be real.
Earthquake: "I'm geophysics." Tsunami: "I'm fluid dynamics." Unexploded bomb: "I'm a relic of war." Mother: "I can talk to the dead."
Isn't one of you holding a different rulebook?
To be fair, the official intro for the theatrical cut says outright that the work also mixes in "the fantasy that only animation can offer." So the show never promised full realism. The problem is less a contradiction in the setting than a sudden shift in the feel of the genre that viewers learned in the first few episodes.
3. Foreigners on a swing, English, and "it sounded fun" — Japan Sinks becomes an intercultural exchange class
In Shan City, we see more everyday scenes of Daniel and other characters from many countries: swings, small talk, conversations sprinkled with English. With the visuals as context, you could technically use it as English listening practice.
For a moment there's an escape hatch: "Should I just watch this as English study material?"
But what viewers want isn't "Shall we play tennis?" It's "How many more minutes will the ground hold?" (By the way, "Shall we play tennis?" isn't a line from the show. It's my joke about how it feels like a middle-school English textbook.)
Then Ayumu asks KITE why he didn't leave Japan after the earthquake, and KITE basically answers "Because it sounded fun." Per the official profile, KITE is a free spirit and adventure YouTuber who tours danger zones, so it fits the character.
But for someone who came to watch a disaster, there's no room to watch "Why did you stay in Japan?" / "It sounded fun" at normal speed.
Japan Archipelago: "I'm sinking." Viewer: "Point the camera at that."
4. Is episode 5 "filler"? Strictly speaking, no. But "feels like filler" is pretty accurate
Filler, broadly speaking, means an episode or arc that pauses the main story and pads out the time. In long-running anime it usually refers to original episodes made when the anime catches up to the source manga.
But Japan Sinks: 2020 isn't a show that adapts the original novel one chapter per episode. It's a 10-episode series heavily reworked for 2020. So the strict "it's not in the source, so it's filler" usage doesn't really fit.
On the other hand, the overseas review site Ready Steady Cut describes episode 5 as an episode that feels like filler and says episode 6 is where "the filler-type arc ends."
So the accurate summary is: as a production matter, we can't say it's filler; as a viewing experience, it feels like a lot of filler.
Japan is sinking right now, and the show spends two episodes on community daily life, a medium's ritual, a party, romance and sex, and drug culture. With only 10 episodes in total, anyone watching for disaster survival starts checking the clock.
"Can I have my remaining episodes back, crustal movement?"
5. The amount packed into episode 5 is wild: cannabis, pickups, a DJ, archery rampage, and a sex scene
Episode 5 is thin on disasters and absurdly dense with human events. Shan City has a cannabis field, and at night there's a party. KITE gets high, Haruo ends up as the DJ. A man approaches Ayumu and pushes himself on her, using a meeting with Mother as bait. Ayumu fights him off on her own.
Meanwhile, 78-year-old Kunio suddenly goes into combat mode with a bow. According to the official profile, Kunio was a master who won a national archery championship in his student days, so his skill with a bow is just a payoff of a setup.
Still, the impression on screen is from a grandpa at the supermarket a moment ago to a motorized-mobility, archery-rampage guy. At 2x speed it feels like "wait, did a different anime just get spliced in?"
And in roughly the same stretch, there's even a sex scene between adults: Mother and her aide Asada. According to the official profile, Asada is a 27-year-old secretary and manager.
So within one episode we get a medium + cannabis + a pushy approach toward a minor + a DJ set + a killing with a bow + a sex scene between adults.
All I'm doing is waiting for the earthquake.
"Disaster, please."
That lowest-of-the-low sentence turns out to be a pretty accurate review of the show's structure.
6. Watching at 2x speed is "disaster preparedness" for the viewer
Watch the Shan City arc at 2x and the Japanese is quite followable. The English, though, gets suddenly hard, because linking and weak sounds get squashed.
Here a theory pops up for a moment: "Isn't this excellent as English study material?" But the moment you hear "Why did you stay?" / "It sounded fun," you think: I don't even want it as English study material. Show me the disaster.
My speed plan goes like this: earthquakes and crustal movement are candidates for normal speed, Shan City daily life gets 2x, English conversation 2x, pickups 2x, the psychic powers just get their setup absorbed, the archery old man makes me want to go back to normal speed for a second, and the sex scene makes me want to rewind with "What did I just see?"
Even at 2x speed, the plot is moving faster than I am.
7. Episode 6 gives us a Morse code lesson, but this one actually connects to the main plot
I need to correct a fact here. The one sending Morse code is not Kunio. It's Onodera, the bedridden man who can't speak and whom Ayumu was caring for. The explanation "Kunio is sending Morse code" is wrong.
In episode 6, Ayumu realizes the signals Onodera taps out have meaning. So Morse code isn't just a throwaway gag; it works as a way of communicating a warning about the disaster. Structurally, it's a device that firmly brings the story back to the main plot.
But viewers who already got hit with English, a medium, cannabis, a DJ, archery and a sex scene in episode 5 are thinking:
The show: "Next up is Morse code." Viewer: "I don't need a correspondence course either. Bring on the earthquake."
The funny part is that after we beg "disaster, please," the disaster information itself arrives by Morse code.
The product we ordered is right. The delivery method is weird.
8. What's actually off here? Not "I hate psychics" but "the contract with the show changed"
Saying "the Shan City arc is bad just because psychic powers show up" would be a bit sloppy. The official intro for the theatrical cut says the work depicts Japan in 2020 through not only disasters but also people of different races, nationalities, beliefs and generations, internet culture, and even fantasy. Mother, Daniel and KITE are all necessary pieces for that theme.
Shan City also carries themes of its own: the search for a safe community after a huge disaster, the grief of wanting to talk to the dead once more, how each family copes with loss, Haruo, who had been shut in, finding a role, and relationships that cross nationalities.
The problem is running time and order.
Right after the first three episodes built a powerful hook (ordinary people thrown into a real disaster), the show spends the middle of its 10 episodes pouring in a pile of other genres. Viewers then feel, before the richness of the themes, "Where did the show that smashed Tokyo Tower go?"
It's less that the show is bad and more that what viewers thought they bought differs from the assorted gift set that starts arriving halfway through.
9. The numbers show episode 5 as a valley too, but we can't say "low rating = caused by this element"
According to the per-episode ratings on IMDb that I checked on August 26, 2026, episode 1 is 7.4, episode 2 is 7.3, episode 3 is 7.0, episode 4 is 6.7, episode 5 is 6.3 and episode 6 is 6.7, so episode 5 is the low point of the early-to-middle run.
Of course, IMDb scores alone can't tell us "psychics are the cause," "the swing is the cause," or "the sex scene is the cause."
Still, the sequence a relatively high disaster-centered stretch through episode 3 → entering Shan City in episode 4 → the biggest detour in episode 5, down to 6.3 lines up quite neatly with the gut feeling of "why is this suddenly a different anime?"
Overseas reviews also call episodes 5–6 a filler-type stretch, so this unease isn't one person's odd reaction.
10. Conclusion: the Shan City arc is "two episodes of an everything-at-once different genre while you wait for Japan to sink"
The themes of episodes 5–6 are many: loss, community, faith, multiculturalism, drugs, youth culture, parent and child, renewal, communication and obsession. But the summary from someone watching for disaster survival is much shorter.
Episode 5: pickups and psychics. Episode 6: Morse code. Viewer: disaster, please.
The final menu for episode 5 is an Anya-style medium Mother (actually 55) + the peaceful daily life of foreigners + conversations that almost become English study material but don't + a cannabis party + a lightning-fast archery old man + a sudden sex scene.
Serve that to someone who watched Tokyo Tower collapse in the early episodes, and of course their brain bumps the playback speed to 2x.
In the Shan City arc of Japan Sinks: 2020, the genre sinks before the Japanese archipelago does.
References (13)
- **** Japan Sinks: 2020 official story page — https://www.japansinks2020.com/story/
- **** Japan Sinks: 2020 official introduction — https://www.japansinks2020.com/introduction/
- **** Japan Sinks: 2020 theatrical cut, official introduction — https://japansinks2020.com/introduction/theater.php
- **** Official character page: Kanae Murota — https://japansinks2020.com/character/kanae-murota.php
- **** Official character page: Kunio Hikita — https://japansinks2020.com/character/kunio-hikita.php
- **** Official character page: KITE — https://japansinks2020.com/character/kite.php
- **** Rotten Tomatoes, episode 5 "Illusion" synopsis — https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/japan_sinks_2020/s01/e05
- **** TV Guide, season 1 episode list — https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/japan-sinks-2020/episodes-season-1/1030737055/
- **** Ready Steady Cut, episode 5 review — https://readysteadycut.com/2020/07/09/recap-japan-sinks-2020-season-1-episode-5-illusion-netflix-anime-series/
- **** Ready Steady Cut, episode 6 review — https://readysteadycut.com/2020/07/09/recap-japan-sinks-2020-season-1-episode-6-an-oracle-netflix-anime-series/
- **** Secondary source used to check scenes in episode 5 — https://anime0522.blog.jp/archives/6856862.html
- **** Official character page: Osamu Asada — https://japansinks2020.com/character/osamu-asada.php
- **** IMDb, Japan Sinks: 2020 per-episode ratings (checked 2026-08-26) — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12031040/episodes/
