Miyazaki’s Metaphysics: Some Observations on The Wind Rises

Another working paper. Title above, abstract, TOC and introduction below.

Download at:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/27132290/Miyazakis_Metaphysics_Some_Observations_on_The_Wind_Rises
• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2812252

Abstract: In The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki weaves various modes of experience in depicting the somewhat fictionalized life of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aeronautical engineer who designed fighter planes for World War II. Horikoshi finds his vocation through ‘dreamtime’ encounters with Gianni Caproni and courts his wife with paper airplanes. The film opposes the wind and chance with mechanism and design. Horikoshi’s attachment to his wife, on the one hand, and to his vocation on the other, both bind him to Japan while at the same time allowing him to separate himself, at least mentally, from the imperial state.

CONTENTS

Making Sense of It All: Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises 2
Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, Some Observations on Life 6
Some Thoughts about The Wind Rises 9
The Wind Rises, It Opens with a Dream: What’s in Play? 10
Horikoshi at Work: Miyazaki at Play Among the Modes of Being 23
The Pattern of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises 31
From Concept to First Flight: The A5M Fighter in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises 32
Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is Not Morally Repugnant 40
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises 49
The Wind Rises: A Note About Failure, Human and Natural 57
Problematic Identifications: The Wind Rises as a Japanese Film 59
How Caproni is Staged in The Wind Rises 67
The Wind Rises: Marriage in the Shadow of the State 89
Miyazaki: “Film-making only brings suffering” 99
Counterpoint: Germany and Korea 100
Wind and Chance, Design and Mechanism, in The Wind Rises 103
Appendix: Descriptive Table 112

Making Sense of It All: Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises

I was going great guns writing about The Wind Rises in November and December of last year. And then the energy ran out while I was drafting “Registers of Reality in The Wind Rises.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

The term, “registers of reality”, is not a standard one, and that’s the point. It’s not clear to me just what’s going on here, and so we might as well be upfront. But it has to do with those “dream” scenes, among other things. And it’s also related to what seems to be a common line on The Wind Rises, namely that while all other Miyazaki films have elements of fantasy in them, often strong ones, this does not.

Many of the reviews casually mention those so-called dream sequences. You can’t miss them. They seem, and are in a way, typical of Miyazaki. But if you look closely you’ll see that they’re not all dream sequences, not quite. Without getting to fussy let’s all them dreamtime with the understanding that sleep is only one of the occasions of dreamtime, that one can enter it under various circumstances–a discussion I open in the posts, “The Wind Rises, It Opens with a Dream: What’s in Play?” and “Horikoshi at Work: Miyazaki at Play Among the Modes of Being.” And they happen only in the first half of the film and at the very end. That’s one thing.

But I had more in mind with the phrase “registers of reality.” A couple paragraphs later in that incomplete draft:

That’s one set of questions. What’s the parallel set of questions we must ask about Horikoshi’s relationship with Naoko Satomi? I ask that question out of formal considerations. As I pointed out in an early post in this series, “The Pattern of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises”, Horikoshi interacts with Caproni in the first half of the film and with Naoko in the second half. His meetings with Caproni didn’t take place in ordinary mundane reality. What about his meetings with Naoko?

All of those meetings DO take place in mundane reality. The first half of the film alternates between mundane reality and dreamtime (whether waking or sleeping). The second half alternates between work-time and Naoko-time. But the two are, of course, symbolically related. The object of the “registers of reality” post was to make sense out of all this, out of how Miyazaki weaves them together–mundane and dreamtime, work and love–into a life.

But it got too hard, just too hard. And so I stopped. I had other posts planned, including one on “Unity of Being in The Wind Rises.” I’ll get back to it one day. I need to. Perhaps it will take more conceptual apparatus than I can work up in a blog post. Who knows?

That was half a year ago and I’ve not yet gotten back to it. I’ve decided to take the work I’ve done and assemble it into a working paper. Before I do that, however, I can at least indicate something of where I was going, of where I hoped to arrive.

Japan and Korea reach agreement about "comfort women"

Writing in The New York Timea, Choe Sang-Hun reports:

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and Japan announced on Monday that they had reached a “final and irrevocable resolution” of their decades-old historical dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army in the early 20th century.

The landmark agreement will remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between South Korea and Japan, its former colonial master, both crucial allies to the United States.

The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945. Forty-six former comfort women are still alive in South Korea.

“The Japanese government bears a heartfelt responsibility” for recruiting comfort women “with the involvement of its military” and for “severely injuring the honor and dignity of many women,” the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said on Monday, reading the agreement during a news conference in Seoul.

Mr. Kishida also said that his boss, the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, had expressed “apologies and remorse from his heart.”

"Comfort Women" and the Japanese State

Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and occupied it though the end of World War II. During the war tens to hundreds of thousands of women were forced into sex slavery for Japanese military personnel. They are euphemistically called "comfort women". It is a politically sensitive issue to this day and the details of what happened are in dispute. In 2013 a Korean Scholar, Park Yu-ha, published Comfort Women of the Empire, which has become quite controversial. Thus, writing in The New York Times, Cho Sang-Hung reports:

In February, a South Korean court ordered Ms. Park’s book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” redacted in 34 sections where it found her guilty of defaming former comfort women with false facts. Ms. Park is also on trial on the criminal charge of defaming the aging women, widely accepted here as an inviolable symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan and its need for historical justice, and she is being sued for defamation by some of the women themselves.

This interests me because the "comfort women" issue is one raised by Inkoo Kang – "the orchestration of mass rape" – in her condemnation of Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, though in a later interview she acknowledges that Miyazaki himself is an activist on the issue [2]. What particularly interests me about the controversy over Park's book is the role of the Japanese state:

As she researched her book, combing through a rich archive in South Korea and Japan and interviewing surviving comfort women, Ms. Park, 58, said she came to realize that such a sanitized, uniform image of Korean comfort women did not fully explain who they were and only deepened this most emotional of the many disputes between South Korea and Japan.

In trying to give what she calls a more comprehensive view of the women’s lives, she made claims that some found refreshing but many considered outrageous and, in some cases, traitorous.

In her book, she emphasized that it was profiteering Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, who forced or lured women into the “comfort stations,” where life included both rape and prostitution. There is no evidence, she wrote, that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, coercing Korean women. [...]

Ms. Park’s book, published in Japan last year, won awards there. Last month, 54 intellectuals from Japan and the United States issued a statement criticizing South Korean prosecutors for “suppressing the freedom of scholarship and press.” Among them was a former chief cabinet secretary in Japan, Yohei Kono, who issued a landmark apology in 1993 admitting coercion in the recruitment of comfort women.

Even then, however, Mr. Kono noted that the recruiting had been conducted mainly by private agents working at the request of the Japanese military, and by administrative and military personnel. For outraged South Koreans, the caveats rendered the apology useless.

This month, 190 South Korean scholars and cultural figures issued a statement supporting what Ms. Park had tried to do in her book, if not everything written in it. They called her indictment an “anachronistic” attempt to “keep public opinion on comfort women under state control.”

Wind and Chance, Design and Mechanism, in The Wind Rises

I’ve mentioned the film’s title in other posts, but Miyazaki is so insistent on it that I decided it required a post of its own. But not entirely its own. I want to juxtapose the rising wind with another motif that is prominent in the film, design and mechanical detail.

The Rising Wind

Miyazaki tells us about his title as soon as the film starts. Immediately after a shot of the title he tells us where it came from:

00:00:33

The Japanese version, of course, has a translation into Japanese. Immediately after the film ends, and before he runs the end credits, Miyazaki has a shot telling us that the film is “A Tribute to Jiro Horikoshi and Tatsuo Hori”. It is in Hori’s novel, The Wind has Risen (風立ちぬ – Kaze Tachinu), that Miyazaki got the story of a woman with tuberculosis on which he based his fictional account of the real Horikoshi’s wife.

But, as we’ve already seen in How Caproni is Staged in The Wind Rises, Miyazaki repeats the title in the film itself, both literally, and in imagery. It enters the film during the Kanto Earthquake sequence, which starts with Horikoshi on the train back to Tokyo. Young Naoko Satomi utters it as she notices the wind – Le vent se lève. At the same time, a gust carries Horikoshi’s hat away

00:14:24

and she manages to catch it, though she almost falls from the train herself.

00:14:25

They then have a conversation in which she repeats the opening of the line – Le vent se lève – and Horikoshi completes it: il faut tenter de vivre. A few minutes later, after the earthquake has struck and after Horikoshi has made his way to his college after helping Naoko and her maid, Caproni repeats the whole line as he scraps the film of the failed flight of his dream plane.

In this one sequence, then, Miyazaki has 1) staged the first meeting between his protagonist and his future wife, 2) linked the film’s title phrase both to that meeting and to, 3) his protagonist’s virtual mentor, Caproni, and done it all 4) in the context of disaster, the earthquake and the failed flight. He has done this both verbally and in the events he depicts. Nor is not only the gust of wind that takes Horikoshi’s hat, but also the winds that fan the flames in Tokyo – in the course of which, incidentally, Caproni asked Horikoshi whether or not the wind was still rising.

Everyday life in Germany During WWII

Nikolaus Wachsmann reviews The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45 (2015) by Nicholas Stargardt in The Guardian.

Most Germans did not want war in 1939. When it came, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there was no euphoria and flag-waving, as there had been in 1914, but dejection; the people were downcast, one diarist noted. The mood soon lifted, as the Third Reich overran its neighbours, but most Germans still hoped for a quick conclusion. As Nicholas Stargardt points out in his outstanding history of Germany during the second world war, the Nazi regime was most popular “when it promised peace, prosperity and easy victories”. And yet, German troops continued to fight an ever more protracted battle, with ever more brutality, while the home front held tight. Even when it was clear that all was lost, there was no collapse or uprising, as in 1918. Why?

Stargardt rejects two easy answers: 1) fear of the Nazi's domestic terror apparatus and 2) genuine popular support. He argues:

Despite this lack of national cohesion and the growing war fatigue, Germans kept fighting. Most important, Stargardt suggests, were their feelings of “patriotic defiance”, arising less from fanatical nazism than familial bonds. They had to win the war at any cost, soldiers believed, to protect their loved ones and to make Germany impregnable. [...] Even Germans appalled by the genocidal war waged in their name rallied around their country. Their determination was fuelled by Nazi propaganda, which insisted that this was a defensive war, provoked by Germany’s enemies, and warned that defeat would mean the annihilation of the fatherland. This campaign, based on “strength through fear” (as a British commentator quipped), hit home. As another soldier wrote to his wife just weeks before the final surrender: “If we go to the dogs, then everything goes to the dogs.”

He follows two dozen individual through diaries and letters:

They emerge not as heroic resisters or as cartoon villains, goose-stepping across the pages, but as complex and contradictory human beings – men like the SA volunteer Wilm Hosenfeld, who sheltered several Jews in occupied Poland [...], and still prayed for a German victory. Or Peter Stölten, a would-be painter from Berlin, whose boyish enthusiasm for the war evaporated after his elite tank division was erased, and who sought solace in poetry, expressing his wish to “merge with beauty” (he died inside a burning tank in early 1945).

In the context of my current investigation of Miyazaki's The Wind Rises I'm wondering how ordinary Japanese thought about the war.

H/t 3QD.

Miyazaki: “Film-making only brings suffering”

He says that about an hour and 47 minutes into a documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which has made about Studio Ghibli in 2012 or so. While it’s not about the making of The Wind Rises, that film was being finished at that time and so it figures heavily in the documentary. Just a bit later, after a screening of Wind for the staff, Miyazaki goes to the front of the theater: “This is embarrassing, but this is the first time I cried at my own film.”

There’s some discussion of his father and the war. He tells a story about how his father gave some chocolates – rare at the time – to a family that had camped out in their home after an air raid. And mentions as well that his father became rich during the war selling airplane parts. Elsewhere there’s a segment where he talks about having difficulty drawing (pictures of) Zeros. Why? Who knows, I just was difficult. Here and there we learn of conflicts and contradictions. That is, life as usual.

The single most interesting thing – at least with respect to The Wind Rises (for there was some interesting studio gossip as well) – is that in his original storyboard Miyazaki had Horikoshi dying. That of course is not what happened with the real Horikoshi, but apparently that’s what Miya-san (as he was often called) had in mind for the film. He’d also intended a final battle scene but that didn’t even make it to the storyboard.

What would The Wind Rises have been like if Horikoshi had died at the end? Would Miya-san have cried at the and of THAT film?

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is streaming on Netflix and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Miyazaki.

What’s Miyazaki Constructing? More Lit Crit [Ramble 2]

Almost a month ago I put up something I called “weekly ramble”, thinking that I might do more such columns, possibly weekly. The idea was to ramble over things that have been on my mind without trying for anything “tight” or “conclusive”. Just ramblings.

For various reasons I did get around to rambling the next three weekends. But now I’m feeling the need. I want to write something, but I don’t really want to focus.

My current Miyazaki project – The Wind Rises – is beginning to weigh on me. I thought I’d be done by now. I didn’t have anything definite in mind when I started posting about the film, and the idea of doing a longer than usual run of posts on The Wind Rises wasn’t on my mind as I did a second or even a third post. I supposed it was about the time I did the 3QD post that I realized I was going long on this one.

But not this long. I’m a dozen posts in, though some are rather short, I’ve started drafting a 13th, and I can easily imagine one or two after that before wrapping up. It feels like those are going to take forever, and yet even when I wrap up I know there’s more I could do with the film.

And then all of a sudden Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has come to mind. It’s about how comics are constructed and I regard it as the best introduction to cognitive criticism, though it’s about comics and though it is itself in the form of a comic. I’m feeling that, though I’ve described a lot about Miyazaki’s film, I’m not sure what I’ve learned about how it’s constructed. What’s the point of all this description if it doesn’t add up to something else?

What it’s supposed to add up to is A LIFE. But how does it do that? What’s the principle? It seems to me that Miyazaki is trying to come to terms with Japan and Japanese history, but also with his own life, and what do the two have to do with one another? What kind of satisfaction did he achieve at the end, an end after all, with Japan in ruins and his protagonist walking off into dreamtime?

And then there are the ongoing struggles with literary criticism and computation and description. I’ve had a few brief email exchanges with an old professor of mine from Buffalo days, Charlie Altieri. I studied modern poetry with him. He’s a philosopher and works both sides of the aisle, Continental and Anglo-American, and so thinks about literature very differently from me. Which is why it’s been useful chatting with him. I’ve already posted a bit about him (HERE and HERE) and may end up writing an open letter.

And then there’s next year’s graffiti project with Green Villain. Things are slowly coming together. But it’ll be a slog.

I guess that’s my watchword for the week: I’ll be a slog.

The Wind Rises: Marriage in the Shadow of the State

01:45:17

The marriage between Naoko Satomi and Jiro Horikoshi is notable on several counts. In the first place, marriage is a major life event and a large number of stories are oriented around it. A romance may or may not actually depict a wedding at the end, but when it isn’t depicted, it is implied. This particular wedding doesn’t happen at the very end of the film, but it is quite near the end.

Secondly, I don’t know quite how to read it. That puzzle has two aspects. While I am generally familiar with Western marriage ceremonies and their depiction in film, I’m not very familiar with Japanese customs, though I know something. In consequence, I have little sense of how a Japanese audience would read the ceremony Miyazaki depicts. Would members of a Japanese audience see that ceremony as somehow unusual or exceptional or is it well within standard (movie) practice?

Beyond the ceremony itself, we have the way in which the marriage was contracted [1]:

Until the 1940s, almost 70 percent of all marriages were arranged (お見合い omiai). The modern system of marriage has adjusted to pressure from the Western custom of love marriages (恋愛結婚 ren’ai kekkon), which surpassed arranged marriages in number in the mid-1960s. The acceptance of the love-match meant that households, and in particular the parents of a young couple, did not have the final say in the marriage anymore.

Their marriage is not arranged, but Naoko’s father is fully aware of developments in their relationship and Horikoshi initially broached the issue of marriage with him, not Naoko, though she was within earshot (when they were in the dining room at the mountain retreat). We know nothing of her mother nor of his parents. In a sense, though, the Kurokawa’s are ‘standing in’ for his parents, as he was living with them at the time.

Why was he living with them? Because he was hiding from the Japanese secret police. Why was he hiding from the secret police? Because he had been seen consorting with an anti-Nazi German. When and where had he been doing that? When he was at that same mountain retreat where he met and courted Naoko. And that German even played a minor facilitating role in their relationship.

Do you see what’s going on here? If so, please tell me. It’s complicated, no?

Moreover their relationship follows a convention common in anime and manga. This convention is that of two lovers meeting prior to full adulthood – often in connection with marital arrangements made on their behalf by their parents, becoming separated until they reach adulthood, and then meeting again. At this time they may or may not recognize their childhood connection but in any event they fall in love and, in course, become married. That’s not a Western romantic trope and so I don’t how to read it. More to the point, I don’t know how Miyazaki’s Japanese audience would read it.

I do sense, though, that while arranged marriage is no longer the norm in Japan, it is still practiced in Japan and the transition to love marriages (恋愛結婚 ren’ai kekkon) is recent enough that the nature of the relationship between Naoko and Jiro would register with a Japanese audience in a way that it doesn’t with a Western audience. In this respect Miyazaki is making a statement about their relationship that resonates more deeply in Japan than it does in the West.

How Caproni is Staged in The Wind Rises

After my first time through The Wind Rises I had the impression that it alternated between dream sequences and live-action sequences. After all, it opens with a dream sequence [1], which is followed soon after by another, this time one featuring Gianni Caproni. We then get two more Caproni sequences and then one at the end. So that’s five dream sequences, no?

No. One of the Caproni sequences isn’t a dream sequence and of the other three, yes, we can call two of them dream sequences, but they differ from one another in significant ways. As for the last one, the one that ends the film, it’s not clear what it is. Though much of it takes place in the same green meadow as the two dream sequences, Miyazaki doesn’t mark it as a dream sequence. He doesn’t mark it at all. He just cuts to it.

First Caproni dream: Aeronautical Engineer

The first Caproni dream sequence, which is the second dream sequence in the film, begins with Horikoshi on the roof of his house looking up at the sky. He’s joined by his sister, who wonders why he isn’t wearing glasses. He says he’s heard that you can cure your vision by staring intently at the stars.

00:07:50

As they’re looking at what’s clearly a nighttime sky we see this, airplanes flying the colors of Italy in broad daylight:

00:08:00

And then we have one of the loveliest images in the film; that previous sky projected on Horikoshi’s face.

00:08:05

Identity, Terrorism, and the Nation State

I’ve got one thought about terrorism, and it has to do with identity. If you live in a nation-state, such as the United States, such as the states that have dominated international affairs since the 19th century, you have been indoctrinated as a citizen of that nation. That citizenship is a central part of your identity. And it is through that identification that you see your position in world history. Your nation’s position in history is your position in history.

I am a citizen of a large, rich, technologically advanced country, the remaining superpower, the United State of America. I may not like some of the things this superpower does in my name, I may have complex and ambivalent feelings about this superpower, but the fact that I am a citizen of the USofA is part of my identity and it's a way I think of myself in the world and in history.

What if you’re living in a nation-state that doesn’t have a very prominent place in world affairs, but you’ve got a TV and radio and through them have some sense of the larger world? You know that there’s a world beyond your village, or town, or your neighborhood. How do you relate to that larger world?

What about someone living in, say, Lagos, Nigeria. That's a very different country. In the context of Africa, Nigeria may be rich, but a lot of that oil money ends up in a few hands. It's got the third largest film industry in the world (as measured by titles per year), though I'm not sure how many Nigerians know that, or what they think of it. I'm guessing that people who work in Nollywood (as it's called) know it quite well and are proud of that. But not every Nigerian lives in Lagos. Some Nigerians are aware of the world at large; they've got TV and whatever. Some are not. How do they think of themselves in relation to world history?

At the moment I'm deep in the analysis of Hayao Miyazaki's last film, The Wind Rises. It's set in Japan before WWII. One of the motifs is that Japan is a poor backward country. But the protagonist his Jiro Horikoshi, who is a real person, though his life is highly fictionalized in this film. Horikoshi was an aeronautical engineer and he designed the A6M Zero, which was on, say December 7, 1941, the most sophisticated fighter aircraft in the world. Hayao Miyazaki, born in 1941, is a pacifist; his father manufactured tail assemblies for the Zero. H.M. loves planes and is immensely proud of the Zero and the pilots who flew them. The interplay of identities and committments in this film is bewildering and wonderful.

Problematic Identifications: The Wind Rises as a Japanese Film

When we say that a film is Japanese, what do we mean?

First of all, and most fundamentally, we mean that it is made by Japanese artisans in Japan. In that sense of course all of Miyazaki’s films are Japanese. But a number of them don’t appear to be Japanese. Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, and Howl’s Moving Castle are all set in Europe and have European characters. The language, of course, is Japanese, but not in an English or French dub.

Then we have films like My Neighbor Tototoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Ponyo, which are set in Japan and have visibly Japanese characters. The first three also draw on Japanese folklore and religion, and perhaps the last as well, though the story was inspired by a European fairy tale, “The Little Mermaid”. If you walk in on a showing of any of these films you’ll know it is Japanese regardless of the language on the sound track.

And then we have The Wind Rises, which is Japanese in those first two senses. But it is Japanese in a third sense, one that’s a bit tricky to characterize. What makes it Japanese in this third sense is that it is problematically entangled with Japanese imperialist aggression in the 20th century. This is what critic Inkoo Kang had in mind when she said it “is a film whose meaning and power vary so greatly in different cultural and geographical contexts that Miyazaki should have fought for it to never leave his homeland” [1]. But “culture” is not the right word, for it’s not culture that makes the film problematic. It is the institution of the nation-state and the identifications entailed by it that make the film problematic.

Here I’m making a distinction between culture and society which is often elided. By society we mean a group of people; by culture we mean a whole range of beliefs, practices, and attitudes taken by people. But Japanese cultural practices exist all over the world, not just in Japan. It is not just that many societies have enclaves of Japanese emigrants who still speak Japanese and may live in Japanese ways, but that non-Japanese have adopted Japanese cultural practices as well, maybe not completely, not “through and through”, but to some extent. Nor is everyone who lives in Japan ethnically and culturally Japanese. Furthermore there are lots of cultural practices in Japan that aren’t Japanese. Are the chemistry and physics that are taught in Japanese schools and practiced in Japanese research institutes and companies, are they Japanese in any deep sense? What about baseball? Japanese have grown up playing baseball for well over a century and many think of it as a Japanese game. Is it, or isn’t it?

Which Japanese State?

The distinction between culture and society is a tricky one in practice, but then The Wind Rises is a tricky film. There’s nothing problematic about the fact that most of the characters are Japanese, or that most of the film is physically set in Japan. What makes the film problematic is its relation to the Japanese nation-state and through that to the international system of nation-states. The film paints a sympathetic portrait of a Japanese engineer, Jiro Horikoshi, who designed warplanes that were used by Japan in waging war in East Asia and in the Pacific. Japan lost the war in the Pacific to the United States (and its allies) and in consequence its governing institutions – those of the Empire of Japan (大日本帝國 Dai Nippon Teikoku) – were replaced by new ones imposed upon Japan in the constitution of 1947. Moreover Japan was physically occupied and ruled by the Allies from 1945 to 1954. If you will, the Japanese nation is still the one that had emerged in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 [2] but the state is new.

Sorting this out is tricky. Miyazaki’s parents were born and reached adulthood under the imperial regime. While Miyazaki was born under that regime in 1941, he was so young that that would have had little direct effect on his sense of identity [3]. For all practical purposes Miyazaki himself is a citizen of the new regime, but this film is about his parent’s world and the state in which they lived the first part of their lives. What’s the relationship he proposes between these two regimes? Crudely put, Miyazaki admires the technology embodied in the A6M Zero, Horikoshi’s best-known design, but abhors the use to which that magnificent plane was put.

The Wind Rises: A Note About Failure, Human and Natural

Horikoshi interacts with Gianni Caproni, the Italian aircraft designer, three times in the film. The first, third, and fourth times seem to involve dream states [1]. The second is different. Horikoshi is in Japan doing one thing (putting out fires after the Great Kanto Earthquake) while Caproni is in Italy doing something else (testing a new plane). But they can talk to one another and have a short conversation:

C: “What do you think, Japanese Boy, is the wind still rising?” [In Italy]

H: “Yes, it’s a gale.” [In Japan]

C: “Well then, you must live. Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre.” [In Italy]

Caproni is filming the first flight of a new plane, one with nine wings and intended to carry 100 passengers across the Atlantic:

00:23:38

That’s Caproni in the dark suit; his cameraman is next to him. The plane fails:

00:24:01

And Caproni grabs the camera, yanks the film out, and tosses it overboard:

00:24:28

It’s when he’s tossing the film overboard that he quotes that line from Paul Valéry, the line that gives the film its title, and the line that Horikoshi and Naoko Satomi shared when they first met, a bit earlier during the earthquake sequence.

Why does Miyazaki juxtapose these two events, a natural disaster that destroys Tokyo, and a technical failure that dashes one man’s hopes?

While you’re thinking about that, you might want to watch this clip of that very plane, the Ca.60 Noviplano:

That clip’s been on YouTube since 2007, so Miyazaki could have seen it there, if not from some other source. And you just know he’s familiar with that clip, don’t you?

I found out about the clip in very interesting post by StephenM, The Kami-Electrified World: Hayao Miyazaki and The Wind Rises, which discusses the film in the context of Miyazaki’s general body of work, including work he did before Ghibli. You might also want to check out another post, Just a little more of The Wind Rises, from frame-grab comparisons between this film and other Miyazaki films.

Respective URLs:

http://petrifiedfountainofthought.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-kami-electrified-world-hayao_12.html

http://petrifiedfountainofthought.blogspot.com/2015/02/just-little-more-of-wind-rises.html

* * * * *

[1] I discuss the first, second, and third times in this post at 3 Quarks Daily, Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is not Morally Repugnant, URL: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/11/is-miyazakis-the-wind-rises-morally-repugnant.html

I also discuss the first here, From Concept to First Flight: The A5M Fighter in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/11/from-concept-to-first-flight-a5m.html

Horikoshi among us today: Sweet technology

This is from a New Yorker profile of Nick Bostrom, who believes that the development of super intelligent machines is inevitable and who worries about what they might do to/with us:

The keynote speaker at the Royal Society was another Google employee: Geoffrey Hinton, who for decades has been a central figure in developing deep learning. As the conference wound down, I spotted him chatting with Bostrom in the middle of a scrum of researchers. Hinton was saying that he did not expect A.I. to be achieved for decades. “No sooner than 2070,” he said. “I am in the camp that is hopeless.”

“In that you think it will not be a cause for good?” Bostrom asked.

“I think political systems will use it to terrorize people,” Hinton said. Already, he believed, agencies like the N.S.A. were attempting to abuse similar technology.

“Then why are you doing the research?” Bostrom asked.

“I could give you the usual arguments,” Hinton said. “But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.” He smiled awkwardly, the word hanging in the air—an echo of Oppenheimer, who famously said of the bomb, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

That's what Horikoshi thought, no, that building planes was technically sweet?

BTW, I think Bostrom is  wrong about the prospects of super intelligent machines, but that's another issue.

Astonishing Visuals in The Wind Rises, a Note

The Wind Rises doesn’t have the visual flamboyance of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Howl’s Moving Castle. We don’t have all those saturated colors nor the exotic creatures. That palette is more subdued, the creatures mundane.

Still, I’m astounded at the crowd scenes and the aerial views of cities. They really are magnificent, as wonderful in their way as the flamboyance of those other films.

Fuji, Cherry Blossoms, and Tuberculosis in The Wind Rises

Written the day after I’d written Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD].

Consider the associations emanating from Naoko Satomi: Horikoshi met her during the Great Kanto Earthquake, Japan’s greatest natural disaster in modern times (and the single most sustained depiction of violence in the film). Horikoshi courted her with paper airplanes, thereby associating them with his airplane designs. He puts the final touches on his design at night while holding her hand as she sleeps, or tries to, beside him. She’s also associated with Mount Fuji and with cherry blossoms. For all practical purposes she’s Lady Japan.

And she’s tubercular. She’s doomed. In one of his interviews Miyazaki noted that at one time Tokyo was the most tubercular city in the world [1]. Why make your Lady Japan tubercular unless, unless, you want to say that Japan is doomed. So when, in a great romantic gesture, Horikoshi marries her knowing that she’s doomed, well, who can fault him for that? It would be churlish to do so. Except that this is a movie and the characters in it are doing more than act out imaginary lives.

These characters aren’t symbolic in any crude way, nor is the story strongly allegorical. But it surely has an allegorical and symbolic dimension. And in that dimension, when Horikoshi pledges himself to Satomi, he’s pledging himself to a moribund mythos of Japan. He’s a kamikaze pilot painting cherry blossoms on the Zero he’s going to ride to his death.

[1] Hiroyuki Ota, “Hayao Miyakaki: Newest Ghibli film humanizes designer of fabled Zero”, Asahi Shimbun, August 4, 2013: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/cool_japan/movies/AJ201308040009

Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]

01:38:27

I chose to write about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises for this month’s column in 3 Quarks Daily: Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is Not Morally Repugnant. The title is a response to an article that Inkoo Kang, a film critic, published in The Village Voice [1]:

The Wind Rises is custom-made for postwar Japan, a nation that has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the brutality of its imperial past. Nearly 70 years after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, the Japanese military and medical institutions’ greatest evils, like the orchestration of mass rape, the use of slave labor, and experimentation on live and conscious human beings, remain absent from school textbooks.

I argued that, yes, one can read the film that way, but to do so you have to ignore some things which Miyazaki put in the film. I then point out some, but not all, of those things.

In offering her reading Kang said little about Horikoshi’s relationship with Naoko Satomi, the woman who became his wife. One thing she did say, that their marriage was sexless, is wrong, which I explained (they obviously had sex on the wedding night: 01:46:13-01:46:47). But this got me thinking, once again, about that marriage.

Cheap Melodrama

A number of critics have remarked that Satomi is not the strong assertive female lead associated with Miyazaki; she’s not like Nausicaä, Sheeta, Kiki, Fio, or Lady Eboshi, to name only the most obvious examples. She’s an artist and she’s dying of tuberculosis. While the real Horikoshi was married, his wife wasn’t tubercular and didn’t die before Japan began its war against America. Miyazaki based that aspect of his story on a short story, “The Wind Has Risen”, by Tatsuo Hori [2].

Why did Miyazaki give his protagonist such a wife? As that’s a question about Miyazaki’s intentions, we need to reframe it, as we’re not mind-readers – at any rate, I’m not. How does he use her in his story?

I’ve already pointed out how Miyazaki depicts the emergence of Horikoshi’s first successful airframe design as evolving from a dreamtime suggestion from Caproni through his initial courtship of Satomi [3]. Thus both an imagined father figure and whatever Satomi is, functionally considered (e.g. she’s not a muse), are bound to the design of that plane. What other binding does Miyazaki accomplish through her? I’m interested, not so much in what she is to Horikoshi, but, in effect, what she becomes to us.

At least one critic – alas, I forget who – noted that this aspect of the film is pure melodrama: beautiful woman, love, coughing blood, doomed marriage. Miyazaki is going for the kind of sentiment measured in tear-drenched tissues. If this were the whole film, it would be cheap melodrama. As it is, it’s cheap melodrama in service to something else.

From Concept to First Flight: The A5M Fighter in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises

In yesterday’s post [1] I sketched what I take to the be overall pattern of The Wind Rises: Gianni Caproni presides over Horikoshi’s imaginative life until he takes a job with Mitsubishi, then Naoko Satomi, whom he marries, takes custody of his soul, if you will, as he designs his first real plane, one that goes into production. The purpose of this post is to follow that pattern in a set of scenes during which the design of that plane unfolds. Let’s pick up the action in a dreamtime sequence where Caproni asks him whether or wants to live in a world with pyramids.

The implication, we are to suppose, is that the pyramids are magnificent structures, albeit built by imperial dynasties for the glorification of rulers [2]. Caproni chooses a world with pyramids. What about Horikoshi? “I just want to make beautiful airplanes.”

Caproni: “Like that?”

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Notice the numbers at the lower left of the frame grab; that’s the timing in hours, minutes, and seconds. The timing starts at the beginning of the DVD, not of the film proper. Subtract 24 seconds or so to get the time from the beginning of the film.

The plane flies a loop over their heads and approaches from behind.

Caproni: “Very graceful.”

Horikoshi: “Oh I’d have a long way to go. I don’t even have an engine or a cockpit yet.

00.58.15

Notice that, unlike, for example, the plane on which they are standing, this flying object isn’t fully an airplane. It’s just a fuselage and airfoils. There’s no engine or propellers – it glides silently – nor any glass in the canopy above the cockpit area. It’s just a moving 3D form.

The camera then pans down from dreamtime to an aerial view of a city. We see Horikoshi at work at his drafting table. The next day he goes to work with the boss and is made chief engineer on the new project, a carrier-based fighter. The first try fails and Horikoshi is sent to a mountain resort to “chill out”, as the kids say. There he meets Noako Satomi, whom he’d helped years ago in the Kanto Earthquake. She was a girl then, but now she’s a young woman. They begin courting.

The Pattern of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises

I’ve now been through the whole film ‘harvesting’ frame grabs and I think I’ve got a basic sense of how The Wind Rises is organized. It looks like a ring composition.

The film runs a bit over two hours. It opens with a dream in which, in effect, young Horikoshi has to give up the idea of becoming a pilot. It ends a bit under 30 years later with a dreamtime scene – though it’s not really a dream, I don’t know just what it is, but does it matter? – after Japan has lost the war. There Horikoshi meets Gianni Caproni, the Italian aeronautical engineer who had inspired him in his youth, and his deceased wife, who had – “inspired” is not quite the right word, but maybe – loved him as an adult. Caproni praises Horikoshi’s design for the Zero; his wife urges him, “You must live, Darling.” She floats away in the wind and Caproni invites him to his house to drink “some very excellent wine.”

That’s the beginning and the end. The bulk of the film, of course, is in the middle. Jiro has three dreamtime – let’s call it that for now – interactions with Caproni that bring him to young adulthood and into his job at Mitsubishi. In the first (starting at roughly 00.07.59) Caproni tells him that, yes, he can design planes even if he can’t fly them. In the second (c. 00.23.03) Caproni himself loses a new plane, but urges Horikoshi, who is at the moment fighting fires caused by the Kanto Earthquake, to live. The third encounter comes when Jiro is on a train in Germany (c. 00.55.03). Caproni invites Jiro on his final flight, where he shows him a concept that will inspire the first plane that Jiro designs.

That’s the last we see of Caproni until the final scene. What happens, in effect, is that Naoko Satomi, the girl (and her Maid) he’d helped into the earthquake, takes over the “slot”, though certainly not the role, that Caproni had had in the narrative.

Shortly after Horikoshi returns to Japan he goes out for coffee with the boss and he is made chief engineer for the company’s new project, a carrier-based fighter plane (c. 00.59.00). Horikoshi’s first attempt at a design fails and he is sent to a mountain resort to recuperate. While there he meets Naoko and they fall in love. They conduct a crucial part of their courtship with two paper airplanes, the second of which looks a bit like the concept Horikoshi got from Caproni and that will inform Horikoshi’s new design. Then they must separate as Horikoshi must return to work. While at work he goes into hiding at his boss’s house because the secret police want to question him in connection with a suspicious (anti-Nazi) German he’d interacted with at the resort. This and that and Naoko’s tuberculosis gets worse. They decide to marry (c. 1.40.39) and so forth and he puts the finishing touches on his design late at night in their room while she sleeps and they hold hands.

As the new plane is taken out for testing Naoko sneaks back to the mountain sanatorium, leaving letters behind to explain her actions. The test is successful and she dies at the moment of her husband’s professional triumph. The film moves into its final sequence that begins in a montage of the war’s end (c. 1.59.16), which quickly transitions to Horikoshi’s meeting with Caproni (2.00.12) and then Naoko.

The overall pattern, then, is this:

• Opening: Horikoshi has a dream in which he crashes and burns because of his eyesight.
• Horikoshi becomes and aeronautical engineer while interacting with Caproni in dreamtime.
• Horikoshi is made chief designer on a new project.
• Horikoshi’s brings his skills to professional fruition while falling in love and marrying.
• The war’s lost, and Horikoshi meets both Caproni and his wife in dreamtime.

That’s a five-part sequence. In the middle segment Horikoshi is appointed chief designer of the new plane. Before that point Caproni in effect inspires his apprenticeship. Afterward he is inspired by his wife.

This looks to me like another ring-composition. I wasn’t looking for that when I started this post. But that’s what’s turned up.

We’ll see if I still believe that tomorrow and the next day.

* * * * *

I’ll be doing a post that follows Horikoshi’s plane from Caproni, through his paper-plane courtship, into execution. You can see it in the forms of the planes.

Horikoshi at Work: Miyazaki at Play Among the Modes of Being

Thinking about yesterday’s post analyzing the opening dream sequence of The Wind Rises [1] I thought I’d make a simple table listing the alternating sequences, dreamtime and mundane time (I’ll get to the reason I don’t all it “reality”), along with a short description of each. It seemed clear enough to me that that was the overall pattern of the film, a half-dozen or so dream sequences cut into the thread of Horikoshi’s mundane life. It also seemed to me that Miyazaki’s general idea is that those dreamtimes are fully capital “R” Real though in a different mode from mundane life – hence my reluctance set up an opposition between dream and reality.

Both are real, but in different ways. We take materials from our waking lives into dreamtime and work with them there. Conversely, what transpires in dreamtime bears on and influences our waking lives.

So, I set out to chart the film’s alternation between dreamtime and mundane-time without any particular intention of going through the whole film in one setting. I figured that it would take me several hours spread out over two or three days and it would make a nice post. After, say, a bit over an hour of work, I’d gotten about 35 minutes into the film, which runs two hours, and decided to write up these notes, which are more modest in scope.

What Miyazaki’s doing is just a bit more sophisticated than an alternation between dreamtime and mundane-time, though the spirit of that conjecture is sound. Here’s a relatively brief example of how Miyzaki deploys different modes of existence, to borrow a phrase from Latour [2].

Horikoshi at Work

Horikoshi has completed college and taken a job as an aeronautical engineer with Mitsubishi. Here we see him at work on his first day, making calculations with his slide rule:

00.34.27

Notice the numbers at the lower left of the frame grab; that’s the timing in hours, minutes, and seconds. The timing starts at the beginning of the DVD, not of the film proper. Subtract 24 seconds or so to get the time from the beginning of the film.

As an aside, I have no idea what the younger members of Miyazaki’s audience will make of his slide rule. Will those under what? 30? 40? even recognize it? Has anyone under 45 used one?

In any event, we’ve seen this slide rule before. Horikoshi was traveling by train back to his college in Tokyo – trains are a motif in this film (and in other Miyazaki films). The girl who would become his wife when she’d grown up, Naoko Satomi, was traveling on that train with her maid. Horikoshi met them, though of course he had no inkling of their future together, and befriended them when the train was derailed by the Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The maid’s leg was broken and Horikoshi used his slide rule to splint it. That connection is surely not accidental.

Here we have a shot of Jiro at his desk looking down at his work. Miyazaki is simply calling our attention to his eyes and glasses, which had figured so prominently in his decision to become an aeronautical engineer.

00.34.32

The Wind Rises, It Opens with a Dream: What’s in Play?

This post is about the opening dream sequence of The Wind Rises. I’m interested in the way this sequence prefigures the whole film. The sequence is about four minutes long, four minutes in which nothing happens to advance the plot. It “sets the scene” and establishes a mood. That’s all.

This is Miyazaki’s only feature-length film since his first, The Castle of Cagliostro, that does not have strong supernatural aspects. They’re very prominent in some films – Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle – and not so prominent in others – Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso – but they don’t exist in this one. Dreams, yes, but that’s different. THAT is in itself an important feature of The Wind Rises. 

The film has a minimal title sequence. We see the title in plain letters (kanji characters in the Japanese) on a blue-grey screen and simultaneously hear a mandolin accompanied by a guitar. The music is wistful and nostalgic. If you’re familiar with Miyazaki’s work you may think Porco Rosso at this point, as much of that film took place in Italy.

There will be no speaking at all in this sequence. Later dream sequences will have conversation.

That screen gives way to one where we see the quote from Valéry that gives the film its title: “The wind is rising! We must try to live” (in French and Japanese in the Japanese version). When that leaves the screen we see something like this, with the mandolin and guitar continuing accompanied by a concertina or accordion (one of those, I can’t really tell):

00.00.54

Notice the numbers at the lower left of the frame grab; that’s the timing in hours, minutes, and seconds. The timing starts at the beginning of the DVD, not of the film proper. Subtract 24 seconds or so to get the time from the beginning of the film.

This is not quite the first thing we see – I really can’t frame grab everything. The first thing we see is waving grass beneath the fog. Then we see this house rising out of the mist.

We move in closer. Is that a small shrine at the left? Notice the shape of the branch impinging from the left, like you see in traditional Chinese or Japanese paintings.

00.01.00

We zoom into the house where we see two children sleeping under mosquito netting. Jiro Hirokoshi is the one in the center; he’s the protagonist. That’s his sister to the left. She plays no role in the dream, but she’s a secondary character in the film. She’ll become a physician.

00.01.02

The (virtual) camera zooms in on Jiro:

00.01.09

And then we cut to a shot of him climbing along the roof of the house. What fun.

00.01.21

He walks along the roof ridge toward this slightly odd looking airplane. Can it fly or is it just an elaborate ornament as we sometimes see on Japanese houses and castles?

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