1.15 Miyazaki’s “last” project, a meditation on (his) life
The Boy and the Heron, or 君たちはどういきるか (Kimitachiwa Dō Ikiruka?)
I went to see Miyazaki Hayao’s “final” movie project last weekend. He called it Kimitachiwa Dō Ikiruka, or How Will You Live, harking to the 1937 Japanese novel by Yoshino Genzaburō of the same name. But the movie isn’t actually an adaptation of the book, although it appears in a scene. Rather, it asks the same question that the book does, although it doesn’t give us any answers. I saw it as an observation, not a plea: at every turn in life, we are answering this question, even when we don’t realize that the question has been asked. And I think we are to assume that the main character, Mahito, has read the book and is at that moment in his life asking the same question.
I have the book in Japanese, although I don’t remember why I have it. I think I heard about it somewhere and thought that because it’s a children’s book I might be able to read it more easily than other Japanese novels. Also, a book published in 1937 has a certain allure for me. My mother was born in 1930 in rural Japan, so this book was an opportunity to perhaps get into the perspective of her parents’ generation.
Here’s the English-language trailer:
I told a friend who lives in Japan that I was going to see the movie, and she admitted that no one in her family had wanted to see it when it opened last summer. When I described the incredible artistry of the opening scene (the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II), she replied that in her experience, young people have little interest in anything havng to do with the war, and wouldn’t be drawn to a movie set in that era. She has two young adult children, so I’m sure she’s speaking from experience with them and their wider circle of friends.
I feel I don’t hear enough about World War II told from a Japanese perspective, and the generation who lived through it is dying out. Miyazaki is nearly 83 years old; my mother is 93. Miyazaki would have been four years old at the war’s end; my mother was a teenager. My mother won’t talk about it, and I keep asking around to figure out what exactly is written about it in Japanese textbooks, but in an initial cursory search of online conversations about this topic, I seem to find mostly opinion pieces.
[Does anyone else feel like nowadays it’s hard to tell whether the information we find online is just some person’s opinion, versus a well-researched thought piece or a scholarly examination or actual journalism? Washington Post, I’m looking at YOU…]
I’ve finally found some actual Japanese school textbook examples, although that deep dive will have to wait for another newsletter! But I’m keenly interested in the divide between those who lived through it or maybe were deeply influenced by parents who lived through it, versus those who “learned about it” through textbooks or popular culture. Miyazaki’s film is clearly popular culture, and given his worldwide fame for his beautiful hand-drawn work, you’d think that whatever he has to say about it will resonate as fact for those who have to rely on secondary sources and art for their knowledge, especially if the older generation isn’t around or refuses to talk about it.
The intro sequence of fires consuming Tokyo made a huge impact on me. There are ashes fluttering down from the darkened sky as people rush to fight the fires, a reminder that animation is far more effective than the CGI wartime backgrounds that I’ve come to resent on Netflix! Three cheers for hand-drawn work! It is a terrifying scene, and as you watch the humble bucket brigades in the tight-packed streets engaging in their futile efforts to prevent the entire city from burning, you are filled with a sense of dread. The city will burn, people will burn, reality will arrive in the form of death and uncertainty over the future. What could you possibly imagine would happen next, if this is your experience, especially if you are a child?
The Japanese-language teaser shows a bit of that initial terrifying scene:
My mother is from Gunma prefecture, the only landlocked prefecture in Japan. It’s mountainous and rural. What I’ve realized over the past few years is that despite all the tales of privation that I’ve heard as a child, her family was not poor. They were quite middle-class, judging from the fact that she took various types of lessons as a child, and that her father was the “educated” person in their neighborhood, whom others would approach when they needed a letter written. But I only realized this recently, because so many of the stories about her childhood had involved starvation, illness, and death. It took me until now to realize that this didn’t exactly square with the fact that she sang in a chorus, ran track at school, and had lessons in koto (a type of Japanese zither, associated with high culture) and flower arranging.
She would have had no experience being firebombed, but I do know that like the schoolchildren in Miyazaki’s film, she was taken out of school to work in a munitions factory. She has told me that she was an expert at putting together gas masks. She’s also lamented that being taken out of school to do farm work or factory work impacted her schooling greatly, and that she doesn’t feel as “educated” as she wanted to be.
This leads me to the major impressions that stuck with me after seeing the movie. Like in many Miyazaki films, the plot meanders. As a novelist, I’m sensitive to the pacing in any story; I keep track of where the emotional peaks and valleys are in the plot, and I ask myself what the director is trying to say and who he’s trying to say it to. Miyazaki is a subtle guy; a Miyazaki movie isn’t like a Marvel movie. If you watch a Miyazaki movie looking to be told how to feel and what to feel, you may be bored while waiting.
But there is an early scene where our hero goes out to the country (probably a place much like Gunma, which is around a 2-hour drive from Tokyo nowadays, although possibly longer back then—the train routes to Gunma always seem to take such a long time, too) to escape the bombing, and when he goes to school he is surrounded by hostile country kids. There are scenes of those kids doing farm work instead of class, and at one point Mahito’s dad (who owns a nearby factory) has military equipment produced by his business stashed at their (rather grand) home. There is an obvious status difference between Mahito and the local children. Honda Takeshi, the supervising animator, was interviewed about the film in the online publication, The Ringer, which had this to add :
Mahito’s father, Shoichi, is based on Miyazaki’s father, who was the wartime director of the Miyazaki Airplane factory, which crafted parts for military planes. Just as Miyazaki’s father profited off of the war, allowing his family to remain wealthy during a time of widespread poverty, Shoichi’s factory affords him the means to provide Mahito and his new wife, Natsuko, with a luxurious lifestyle for the time period. Shoichi shows no signs of guilt or any sense of nationalistic loyalty.
You also realize that everyone in Mahito’s world is either elderly (except for his dad and new stepmother) or a child. There is a brief scene where a soldier is marching in a procession down the street, followed by family, presumably headed to the front. My mother’s older brother was the only one old enough to be drafted, but he would have been barely seventeen, and he miraculously escaped battle by coming down with a serious illness right at the last minute. He was hospitalized during the last few months of the war. Since the movie is meant to take place in 1944 or 1945, the newly conscripted soldiers must have all been similarly very young, as the country was running out of men.
This is a wonderful article in one of my favorite Substack newsletters, Old Photos of Japan, about Japanese soldiers going off to war, with photographs:
In another scene, Mahito is eating his meal with all the old ladies in the house, and he comments that the food tastes terrible. Given the hunger everywhere at that time, I think a Japanese audience would recognize right away that he is probably eating something that the ladies have scrounged somehow, somewhere. My mother has often said that they scrounged in fields for something to put into miso soup. The old ladies in the film often drop comments about what sorts of foods are still available. There is a running joke about the lack of cigarettes, and one person talks about smoking some kind of grass.
All of this is offered without commentary or explanation, which is what I love about a good movie: not a lot of talking, a lot of beautiful “showing.” But if modern Japanese youth are not interested, and foreign audiences are unaware, I do wonder who Miyazaki is talking to. Maybe himself? After all, he has said that this is his “last” film.
The Ringer quotes Miyazaki from his 2013 documentary:
“This may sound ridiculous, but I’ve had staff tell me they have no idea what’s going on in my films,” Miyazaki says in the documentary. “When we were making Spirited Away, even I didn’t know. The way I see it, we may never understand them. What does one know about this world?”
I turned to the various online reviews for some insight. I wondered whether the international audience “gets it” and whether Miyazaki cares. He apparently refused to have any publicity around this project, so when the film opened in Japan there was zero media coverage beforehand. I also wondered what various audiences in Asia think when they watch a movie with a militaristic Japan as a setting. Are these considerations for an internationally famous moviemaker in Japan, if he wants to set his supposed final project in the war years?
Without the specific background that the filmmaker is referencing, I thought many of the English-language reviews missed the significance of the wartime Japanese landscape. That’s not to say that any of us ever understands all of the references in whatever we watch! I could enjoy The Northman, for example, even without knowing much about Vikings in the year 895. But in the case of The Boy and the Heron, I think Miyazaki meant for us to understand that for him, the wartime backdrop is an inescapable part of his mental landscape. Some of the details of young Mahito mirror Miyazaki’s own childhood experience: his father owned a munitions factory, his mother was very ill during and after the war, and he was sent off to the country for safety.
If people outside of Japan don’t have a point of reference for the war, neither do young people in Japan, according to my friend. Eventually I suppose the U.S. will lose its Vietnam vets and the accompanying memories of that era, and those of us who grew up with Dan Rather reporting from Saigon will be the ones to try to explain to Gen Z what it meant to love our fathers and grandfathers who served while hating what it did to our country. It’s all the same. Life goes on, we repeat our mistakes, we learn or don’t learn.
I think “how will you live” is a good question to ask. Of all the reviews I read, The New York Times was the only one who looked into the book that is the movie’s Japanese namesake, and observed that
To tell a straightforward narrative, though, is not really the point. The Japanese title of the film is “How Do You Live?,” which it shares with a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino. The writer had been imprisoned for socialist thinking by a branch of the Tokyo police tasked with eradicating anti-authoritarian thought in music, literature and art. Upon release, he was invited to contribute to a series of books for young people, and intended to publish an ethics textbook to help youths live principled, freethinking lives. Knowing the dangers of such forthrightness, the series’ editor suggested Yoshino write a novel instead.
I think this is what Miyazaki has done. The movie is not about the book. Rather, the book is the template for the movie. And if young people today aren’t interested in the their own countries’ wartime past, perhaps they will look at Ukraine, or Gaza, and think again. Art is much better at explaining things than textbooks because they evoke a “feeling” rather than serve as a firehose of words that we then have to process. Feelings are much more accessible than thoughts.
Other links for the curious, in no particular order:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/12/8/23991174/the-boy-and-the-heron-hayao-miyazaki-studio-ghibli
https://apnews.com/article/boy-heron-miyazaki-movie-review-a38c35485066682e2c5026c69fef82be
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-boy-and-the-heron-movie-review-2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/movies/the-boy-and-the-heron-review-hayao-miyazaki.html
Thank you for this insightful review, Maya, and for mentioning https://oldphotosjapan.substack.com. I have been quite curious about this movie, but as you mentioned there was little publicity about it in Japan and it somehow moved off my radar. I wasn't even aware it was set in the final years of WWII. I will try if I can still catch it somewhere!