Where was the budget for COMPLETE subtitles?

Yeah, Criterion really dropped the ball with that. Also, the subtitles are hard coded. This means if you download the full subtitles from the internet, you have to look at both the hard coded subtitles and the ones you downloaded. This is annoying and immersion breaking.

And there really aren't any good full subtitles out there I could find. The best one I found was off on the timing so I had to adjust the delay every few minutes. It was hard to get through this movie having to choose between being unable to understand half of what is said or having to fix the subtitles every 5 minutes.

This film was completely incomprehensible. My son and I just watched it and kept going "what did they say..". Could not follow the dialogue and therefore the plot.

I'm German and understood everything perfectly fine. They aren't exactly talking fast or anything. The japanese parts that weren't subtitled were translated directly after by the japanese translater.

I understood most everything, but yeah I definitely agree that the movie would really have benefited from subtitles. I don't really understand why they didn't make subtitles for the English dialogue, considering what thick accents the Japanese characters have.

Ironically, English is my first language and I only understand some Japanese, but I found the Japanese dialogue easier to understand than the English (and whenever the Japanese characters were speaking English, I kept wishing they'd switch back to Japanese). I managed, but subtitles would have made it easier.