In Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (1952), Watanabe Kanji has headed the citizens’ section of a city office for thirty years. He learns that he has stomach cancer. He then takes up a residents’ petition for a children’s park on a lot flooded with sewage water.
Residents had brought the petition to the city again and again. It had been passed from one office to the next, which Japanese calls tarai-mawashi. After his death, his colleagues go back to the old way of working.