American movie director Michael Moore came to Japan for the first time Monday to plug his new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" and to urge the country not to follow the path taken by the United States, where he says the gap between rich and poor is extreme.
"As much as I love America, quit being like us," Moore said at a news conference at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. "Be Japan. Be the Japan that has been creative since 1945. Be the Japan that never throws people out of work."
Moore's movie, which opens Saturday in Japan, is a sharply satirical documentary about capitalism, focusing on the wealth gap in the U.S. Its promotion flier says corporate executives get paid 400 times as much as employees while ordinary people suffer a housing foreclosure every 7 1/2 seconds and 14,000 people lose their jobs every day in the U.S.