Producer Ueda had to answer repeated queries about a statement made in an "Animerica" interview. The controversial statement said "Lain" was "a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we adopted after World War II". He later explained in numerous interviews that he created "Lain" with a set of values he took as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures. When he discovered that the American audience held the same views on the series as the Japanese, he was disappointed.