For much of
the postwar, it seemed that all too many Japanese cultural products were
attempting to forget WWII, to hide either the trauma of defeat or aspects that
were inconvenient to Japan’s emerging national narrative. Now a good 65 years
after the end of the war, with the real trauma having faded - or the war having
too effectively been forgotten – it today seems that it is the postwar that is
the object of selective remembering and forgetting. As I argued in a recent article in Japan Focus, Yamato’s gruesome depiction of the war that functions
to forget the postwar, or Always: Sunset on Third Street’s remembering the
postwar through rose-colored glasses, are two sides of the same cultural effort
to avoid dealing with what the postwar, and its history of the Cold War,
American dominance, economic growth and its cost, and political turmoil, have
meant for Japan.
The new
Ghibli film, From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokuriko-zaka kara コクリコ坂から), is set around the same
time as Always, in the years just preceding the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This does
a better job than that film at attempting to mix its nostalgia with the effort
to remember history. Yet in the end it is an earnest but middling work that still
somewhat selectively forgets the past.
Scripted by
Miyazaki Hayao and directed by his son Goro, the film features several parallel
stories, most of which focus on issues of memory and identity. The heroine, Umi,
helps manage a small rooming house in Yokohama for her busy mother, while
attending a nearby high school. Having lost her sea captain father during the
Korean War, she raises signal flags every morning to pray for the safe passage
of all the ships in the bay below. One who sees those flags is Shun, a year
ahead of her in high school, who travels to school on a tug boat. It is their
blossoming love – and the problem of their parentage – that serves as the
central story.
The other
main story is the effort of Shun and his classmates, including eventually Umi
and her friends, to preserve the school’s old clubhouse, a once fine Meiji-era Western-style
mansion, from demolition. Their rallying cry, uttered by the school council
president, is the argument that tearing down historical artifacts is tantamount
to erasing history.
For someone
who has seen Japanese cities destroy much of their post-Meiji architecture,
including many splendid old movie houses, I couldn’t agree with the sentiment
more. A cultural policy that preserves pre-Meiji buildings while largely
ignoring more modern artifacts has long been a means to define Japaneseness through
tradition and thus as transcending – and in effect irrelevant to – the modern. That
renders the modern unimportant to the nation, something that can be forgotten.
It is nice
to see a film trying to defend something other than “good old Japan.” But if
this is one of the messages of the film, it is an inconsistent one. From Up on
Poppy Hill tries to preserve another historical relic: the student protest. But
Miyazaki Hayao, who had contemplated filming the original manga for years, only
decided to do it now because, as he says in the press notes, enough time had
passed to enable depicting school protests through nostalgic eyes. This
indicates that the preservation of history here is less an encounter with what
is other to the present – that which can relativize and critique our world - than
a present-day invention of the past through a projection of our images on
history.
This
becomes evident in the Yokohama presented here. While From Up on Poppy Hill has
some of the attention to detail that made Arrietty memorable (see my review), that
detail does not come down to the level of history. When I taught at Yokohama
National University, I took my students on historical tours of Yokohama and
always reminded them that this city and its port was strongly colored by an
American military presence up until at least 1970. Yet none of those details
appears in the film, as America is this film’s absent other (or absent father?).
Talking of preserving a Western-style house in the midst of the Cold War
without mentioning America is a serious case of denial.
The US-Japan
Security Treaty (Anpo) protests (the subject of Linda Hoagland's new documentary) took place only a few years before this story,
but only the attentive viewer will find mention of them in the film - in the scrapbooks
visible in the bookcases in the school newspaper office. Locating history then becomes
a pursuit of trivia little different than finding the “Ghibli” name on one of
the ships.
This is
thus an antiseptic, sterilized history. It is tellin that, as the press notes
declare, the film owes much of its vision of history to referencing Nikkatsu
youth films from the early 1960s. Umi, it seems, is Yoshinaga Sayuri. From Up
on Poppy Hill thus less preserves history as it really is, than offers an image
of an image of history.
Such an
overtly ideological reading of this film may rub some Ghibli fans the wrong
way. Why not talk more about the animation? In some ways, this reading is
necessary, given how too many readings of Miyazaki have attempted to emphasize
his progressive politics, when in fact his films are more complex and
contradictory – often to their benefit. But an ideological critique also seems
warranted because the film emphasizes its romantic narrative over its status as
animation. To put it differently, it is a story that could have as easily been
told in a live action film. The fact it was not, however, is significant. True,
animation does sell better in Japan, but in addition, I would argue that the
narrative would have seemed less believable if its actors and locations were
real. The disjuncture between its history and our reality would have been too
much to sustain, so animation functions to ameliorate that gap.
Perhaps I
am being harsh towards what is a reasonably pleasant, though ultimately undistinguished
film. But choosing animation over live action was, I contend, itself an
ideological choice, one that has the effect of rendering this version of history
more palatable. There is a paternalist attitude in this, and I cannot but help
tie it to the search for the lost father in the film, to the desire for a
father figure who, like the chairman of the school board who steps in in the
end, will solve the complex and contradictory nature of Japanese postwar
history and identity by offering a consumable narrative backed by a strong, but
benevolent authority – that is Japanese, not American.
One wonders
if that father figure is what Miyazaki Hayao has become to many Japanese. (And
what that means for Goro, who has yet to step out from under his father’s
shadow, is another story.)