A celebrated director makes what may be his swan-song, upsetting some fans and angering conservatives
By D.M. | TOKYO
A SOMBRE exploration of love, responsibility and death, “Kaze Tachinu” (“The Wind Has Risen”) is being described as Hayao Miyazaki’s first film for grown-ups. Having spent half a lifetime making exquisite fantasies for children, Mr Miyazaki, now 72 and regarded as the reigning genius of Japanese cinema, has returned to tackle the true story of an aeroplane-maker who worked through the second world war.
The title is a reference to a line from a Paul Valéry poem, “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the Sea”): “The wind is rising!...We must try to live.” The wind is a portent for the disasters that anchor the movie: the 1923 Kanto earthquake, which levelled much of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed more than 100,000 people; and Japan’s disastrous imperial war, over a decade later.
Despite its real-world setting, the film is saturated with the fantastical flourishes characteristic of Mr Miyazaki’s earlier work. It is bookended with dreams. At the start, a ten-year-old boy named Jiro Horikoshi imagines flying above his provincial home, only to be awakened by bombs that fall from a hulking aerial warship. By the film’s denouement, he is walking though the ruined landscape of wartime Japan, a nightmare wrought in part by his own boyhood dreams of flight.
He grows up to become a brilliant but naive engineer. The character of Jiro is based on the real Japanese designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. In its time considered to be the world’s best aerial fighter plane, the Zero enjoyed a terrifying reputation across the war’s Pacific theatre. The Zero was on hand to open the war against America, by leading the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. By 1945 however, it had lost its technical edge. Then teenage kamikaze pilots were using Zeros as suicide bombs, ramming them into the approaching American fleets.
Born in the year of the Pearl Harbour attack, Mr Miyazaki is imprinted with the pacifism that is typical of Japanese from his generation. His movies are paeans to the natural world and warnings about its perilous state. In many, children are the first to warn of the dangers of greed and militarism, which inevitably fall on adults’ deaf ears.
The childlike Jiro sustains his boyhood fantasies by building his plane, oblivious to Japan’s looming catastrophe. His love of flying is depicted as a pure and uncomplicated thing. There is a sensual, erotic quality to the aerial scenes; his budding love for his fiancée, Naoko, is symbolised by the soaring flight of paper aeroplanes. Regret comes only in the final scenes.
Fans have asked why the great pacifist film-maker has made a movie about a weapons-maker. Mr Miyazaki says he was drawn to the story of one of Japan’s great eccentric geniuses. Engineers are neutral, he explained in June 2013. “It was wrong from the beginning to go to war,” he said. “But…it’s useless to blame Jiro for it.”
Not surprisingly, in a country where politicians regularly stir up ghosts from the past, his film has triggered caustic debate. This month, Mr Miyazaki published an article in which he said he was “disgusted” by government’s plans to upgrade Japan’s army and navy and taken aback by how ignorant the politicians are of Japan’s wartime history. Though he didn’t mention him by name, it is clear that Mr Miyazaki’s broadside was aimed at the prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
Conservatives have responded by telling Mr Miyazaki to stay out of politics. A popular online bulletin board, 2channel, is filled with furious comments that brand him as an anti-Japanese traitor. Worse, some have judged the new movie’s sensual, slow-moving style and lack of digital fireworks to be “boring”.
Mr Miyazaki’s film feels very personal. His own father was the director of a company that made rudders for the Zero. Like Jiro, the young director grew up obsessed with aeroplanes. A swan-song, artistically and politically, “Kaze Tachinu” looks likely to outlive its critics and it’s not doing badly at the moment either: It debuted this month at the top of Japan's box office.
