The Wind Rises
Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli
Initial release: July 20, 2013
There seems to be two kinds of people in the anime and manga business. On the one hand, you have people like Junji Ito, the most fatherly man you’ll ever meet, a lover of cats whose horror manga present some of the most horrifying tableaus ever committed to page. And on the other hand, you have people like Hayao Miyazaki, whose anime films are beautifully animated, presenting dreamlike fantasy worlds, but often there’s an underlying thread of pessimism that reveals Miyazaki’s own worldview. And what better example of this than The Wind Rises, a somewhat-fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japan’s infamous “Zero” fighter?
A recurring concept I see sometimes out of Japanese media is the idea of scientists, engineers, artists, and others who find their dreams, passions and work co-opted by the demands of capitalism and imperialism. Metal Gear’s Hal Emmerich just wanted to build robots; through a combination of bamboozling from his employers and a little bit of self-delusion, he built a walking tank capable of firing an undetectable nuclear missile from anywhere in the world. A major background figure in Mobile Suit Gundam had a dream of cheap and plentiful power, only to see it co-opted for genocidal warfare. And Dr. Serizawa from Godzilla was so terrified of the weapon he created falling into the wrong hands that he chose to sacrifice himself using it on the titular monster so that his work couldn’t be recreated.
Stories like these are likely equal parts a commentary on the atomic bomb (reflecting J. Robert Oppenheimer’s own sense of having blood on his hands in the aftermath of the bombing of Japan) and a commentary on Japan’s own violent history. Jiro is just a guy who wanted to design planes; the problem is, to do that in Imperial Japan, you have to work for a company like Mitsubishi, designing warplanes for the army or navy. When he first joins Mitsubishi, the idea of war is still distant, but it’s frequently discussed: who exactly are they building these planes to attack? Russia? England? America? Germany? Any or all of them, it seems. Frequently the issue comes up of Japan falling behind; in the aftermath of the Great War which showed the value of a robust air force, Japan’s lack of technological advancement is a source of great anxiety.
While Miyazaki has pretty well established himself as anti-fascist, he has a personal connection to the Zero: his father ran a factory that made parts for it during the war. This film could therefore be seen, perhaps, as an admittance to mixed feelings about that family history. Jiro’s physical myopia bars him from flying, so he gets into designing planes instead; his moral myopia, his obsession with designing the perfect plane, prevents him from seeing the obvious outcome: that his Zero, his life’s work, would become an infamous symbol of Japanese tyranny and bloodshed. So we get mixed messages from the film, where someone says that the Zero, one of the most technologically advanced planes ever made, is something Japan can be proud of, but at the end, Jiro walks through a dream of a ruined Japan, shattered planes strewn everywhere, filled with regrets for what he’d built.
The other side of the film is that of Jiro’s relationship with Naoko. Wholly fictionalized, and in fact lifted from an unrelated book by author Tatsuo Hori by the name of The Wind Has Risen, we’re treated to a somewhat episodic journey through Jiro’s personal life, from rescuing a young Naoko and her maid during the 1923 earthquake, through to reconnecting years later, and marrying despite her terminal tuberculosis diagnosis. Throughout, Jiro is torn between his love for his wife, and his passion for planes. He’s frequently berated for this: early on, his bosses (somewhat teasingly) tell him not to get romantically involved, because he’s so busy; his sister (always a firecracker, and probably my favorite character) later seems to confirm what they were warning against, yelling at him for neglecting his wife and family to work on his damn plane. And in the end, he’s not even home when Naoko passes; instead, a symbolic gust of wind distracts him at the moment of his greatest triumph, the first successful test flight of the Zero.
So is The Wind Rises a typically Japanese example of spiritual myopia, a “Make Japan Great Again”-style vision of a nation unspoiled by the war it helped cause? Or is it Miyazaki’s own commentary on that very national tendency to gloss over Japan’s violent past, to forget that Zeroes were built by enslaved Koreans, to forget things like comfort women and Unit 731 and all these other things? A moral and spiritual myopia just like Jiro’s? Jiro didn’t fly the planes. He didn’t drop bombs on people. He didn’t strafe people at Pearl Harbor or perform desperate kamikaze attacks on Allied ships. But for all the hash the film makes about the genius of his engineering, it still raises the question: how responsible are we as individuals for the sins of our nation?
Frustratingly for fascists and anti-fascists alike, Miyazaki has no answer.