These days, Japan seems to be in freefall. An aging population; decades of economic doldrums; an energy policy in chaos after the Fukushima disaster — it’s no wonder Prime Minister Abe is indulging in regional saber-rattling.
You could say that the country has entered a new phase in its post-World-War-II recovery. In the fifty years following its humiliating surrender in 1945, Japan found the answer to its cultural identity crisis in materialism. But materialism has its limits.
When I visited the country as a film student in 1987, Japan was ascendent. Its exports had graduated from an international joke — cheaply made knock-offs — to the envy of the world.
Everything I saw in Japan — from its pristine underground malls to its bewildering electronic toilets — pointed to a limitless future. This was in stark contrast to the United States, which was experiencing an identity crisis of its own. Everyone here was sick to death of the Cold War; nevertheless, it was a national preoccupation. One day, Ronald Reagan was exhorting Michael Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall; the next he was apologizing for the Iran-Contra affair. American companies were dispirited, and looking to the Japanese for tips on handling a disgruntled workforce. That same year, Prozac made its domestic debut.
But Japan’s glory was to be short-lived. The economic miracle of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, imploded spectacularly in the early 90s. Rampant real estate speculation was one culprit; terrible monetary policy was another; political paralysis was a third. The last twenty years have seen countless failed attempts to bring back the post-war magic.
Much has been made of the long deflationary period that has dogged the country since the go-go 80s, but let’s not forget that Japan is still the third largest economy in the world — not to mention the largest creditor nation, holding nearly 14% of the world’s private financial assets.
In other words, Japan may be experiencing a long, painful lull, but it’s still incredibly rich.
So why all the hand-wringing, the resurgence of militant nationalism, the recent proposals to rewrite the country’s peace-abiding constitution?
For the great Japanese filmmaker Hiyao Miyazaki, the source of Japan’s current malaise isn’t money. It’s modernism. Specifically, the way the encounter with the West, initiated by the forced opening of the country in 1854 and culminating with the Emperor’s disgrace in 1945, severed crucial links with Japan’s spiritual and cultural past and left its people morally adrift.
In gorgeous movies like Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki has presented fanciful animated worlds under attack by the forces of modernity, with a special emphasis on the evils of industrialization. In these movies, the young protagonists, who are often clever and capable girls, find themselves — and their power — by way of the spirit world.
Princess Mononoke, a historical fantasy set in medieval Japan, depicts an all-out war between the guardians of a mystical forest and the human beings who see trees not as spiritual beings, but only as a natural resource to be consumed. The film came out in 1997, not long after the bursting of the economic bubble. It was the highest grossing film of the year — and the highest grossing Japanese film of all time — until it was displaced by Titanic, another cautionary tale of industrial hubris.
Titanic‘s box office record was soon shattered by another Miyazaki film, Spirited Away, the story of a girl’s journey into the spirit world to recover her parents, whose greedy habits of consumption have literally transformed them into pigs. Spirited Away cemented Miyazaki’s international reputation; the film won the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and created a foreign audience for his next films, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo.
Last year, at the age of 72, Miyazaki released his final feature film, The Wind Rises, which became, yet again, the highest grossest film in Japanese history. I made it a point to see The Wind Rises in a movie theater. Our daughter has been a huge Miyazaki fan since she was a toddler, and we’ve seen all of his movies — many, many times — on a variety of small screens. I thought it was only fitting to see the Master’s swan song on a big screen.
The movie was a visual feast, as always, and there were moments of the old Miyazaki magic. But The Wind Rises, despite its occasional flights of fancy, is grounded in modern history. It’s a portrait of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical genius who built the deadly Mitsubishi fighter plane we know as the “Zero.”
Horikoshi is portayed as a dreamer, a man so in love with the idea of human flight that he’s willing, despite deep misgivings, to become an important cog in the Japanese military-industrial complex. He knows that his airplanes will be used in war; even so, he can’t stop perfecting them. Engineering is like religion to him.
The audience is meant to feel surges of patriotism throughout the movie. As the film opens, Japan is an impoverished, second-world country; a laughing-stock; an international also-ran forced to license expensive foreign airplane technology, even though it can’t even afford to feed its own people. When Horikoshi finally succeeds with his new airplane, the film gives us glimpses of squadrons of newly minted Zeros reflected in the clouds. Go, Japan!
Of course, nowhere does the film acknowledge Japan’s pre-war role as regional bully; or its horrific war crimes; or the fact that Horikoshi’s brilliant Zeroes killed thousands of Americans and nearly destroyed the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
I confess I left the movie theater in a black mood. Miyazaki’s films had always left me feeling optimistic for a future beyond materialism. If Japan could reconnect with its spiritual roots, after suffering an apocalyptic military defeat followed by decades of rampant consumerism, surely any country could. But The Wind Rises seemed to offer another, more ominous path to national pride: the drumbeat of war.
