TURNING POINT: 1997–2008

Orikaeshiten 1997–2008
(Turning Point: 1997–2008)
By Hayao Miyazaki
© 2008 Studio Ghibli
All rights reserved.

© 2008 Studio Ghibli
First published in Japan by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers.

Unedited English translation © 2014 Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt
All other materials © 2014 VIZ Media, LLC
Editorial notes by VIZ Media, LLC

No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
PO Box 77010
San Francisco, CA 94107

www.viz.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miyazaki, Hayao, 1941- author.
Cary, Beth, 1949- translator. | Schodt, Frederik L., 1950- translator.
Title: Turning point : 1997-2008 / Hayao Miyazaki ; translated by Beth Cary
and Frederik L. Schodt.

Other titles: Orikaeshiten, 1987-2008. English

Description: San Francisco : VIZ Media, [2021] | Summary: “In the mid-1990s, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki moved from success to success as his work found an audience outside of Japan. His animated films of the era, including Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo, were internationally lauded, and Miyazaki won an Academy Award® in 2003 for his popular and critical hit Spirited Away. Follow Miyazaki as his vision matures, as cinema-lovers worldwide embrace his creations, and as critics such as Roger Ebert take up the cause of animation and Miyazaki’s films. In a legendary career, these crucial years represent the turning point.”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051291 | ISBN 9781974724505 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Miyazaki, Hayao, 1941- | Animators—Japan—Biography. |
Animation (Cinematography)—Japan. | Animated films—Japan.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.M577 A3 O7513 2021 | DDC 791.4302/33092
[B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051291

Printed in Canada
First paperback printing, March 2021

CONTENTS

Hayao Miyazaki’s Original Drawings for Studio Ghibli
New Year’s Cards, 1997–2008

PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997)

The Battle Between Humans and Ferocious Gods—
The Goal of This Film

Poems: “Princess Mononoke”; “The Legend of Ashitaka”;
“The People Who Were Lost”; “The Demon Spirit”;
“Wolf Goddess Moro”; “Lady Eboshi”; “Kodama Tree Spirits”;
“Yakul”; “The Forest of the Deer God”

The Elemental Power of the Forest Also Lives Within
the Hearts of Human Beings

Those Who Live in the Natural World All Have the Same Values

You Cannot Depict the Wild Without Showing Its Brutality and Cruelty: A Dialogue with Tadao Satō

Princess Mononoke and the Attraction of Medieval Times:
A Dialogue with Yoshihiko Amino

On Japan’s Animation Culture

A Child’s Five Minutes Can Be Equivalent to a Grown-up’s Year

I Want to Fill the Space Between Myself and the Audience

Forty-four Questions on Princess Mononoke for Director Hayao Miyazaki
from International Journalists at the Berlin International Film Festival

Animation and Animism: Thoughts on the Living “Forest”:
A Discussion with Takeshi Umehara, Yoshihiko Amino, Seiryū Kōsaka; Moderator: Keiichi Makino

Recalling the Days of My Youth

Animation Directing Class, Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II School Opening:
Urging at Least One Seedling to Sprout! “Theories on Directing” for Aspiring Young Directors

To Energize People, Towns, and the Land:
A Dialogue with Yoshio Nakamura

What Grown-ups Can Tell Children So That They Can Live in a Happy Time

What Is Most Important for Children

Sacrifices of the Sky

The Sky That Saint-Exupéry Flew Through

Traditional Japanese Aestheticism in Princess Mononoke:
An Interview by Roger Ebert

Words of Farewell

Spirited Away (2001)

Chihiro, from a Mysterious Town—The Goal of This Film

Notes for the Spirited Away Image Album

Room to Be Free: Speaking About Spirited Away at the Press Conference Held Upon Completion of the Film

“Don’t Worry, You’ll Be All Right”: What I’d Like to Convey to Children

The Heart That Accepts a “Lonely Man”
Tokiko Katō (singer)

It’s a Tough Era, But It May Be the Most Interesting of All:
A Conversation with Tetsuya Chikushi

Once Again, a World Where People Believe Everything Is Alive:
A Dialogue with Tetsuo Yamaori

So, Where Do We Go from Here? An Interview with the Winner of the 2001 Kinema Junpō Best Ten, Reader’s Choice for Best Japanese Film Director

This Is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make

Children Have a Future That Transcends “Imagination”

Nothing Makes Me Happier Than Watching Children Enjoy Themselves

We Should Each Start Doing What We Can

The Lights of Zenshōen

On the Film Dark Blue World: A Dialogue with Producer Toshio Suzuki

Comments on Receiving the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film

The Fujimi Highland Is Fascinating

On the Occasion of the Republication of Three Works by Yoshie Hotta

Two Pages Are Fine. Just Draw Them!

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

To Everyone at Ghibli

I’ve Always Wanted to Create a Film About Which I Could Say, “I’m Just Glad I Was Born, so I Could Make This”

The Question Is Whether You Really Find It Interesting or Not:
A Talk with Director Nick Park at the 18th Tokyo International Film Festival

An Attempt at a Short Film: Remarks on Accepting the Japan Foundation Award for 2005

What’s Important for the Spirit: Text of a Speech to Be Given on the Occasion of Receiving the Japan Foundation Award for 2005

Robert Westall’s Blackham’s Wimpey: Proposal for a Book with a Supplementary Guide of Random Thoughts

I Like Westall

A Man Who Lived Bravely, Confronting a Tough Reality

Proposal for an Original Animated Short Titled “Mon Mon the Water Spider,” for the Saturn Theater in the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “Mon Mon the Water Spider”

Proposal for “The Day I Bought a Star”

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “The Day I Bought a Star”

Proposal for “House Hunting”

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “House Hunting”

Remarks to the Staff of the Ghibli Museum at the Screening of “Mon Mon the Water Spider,” “The Day I Bought a Star,” and “House Hunting”

Worlds of Insects, Trees, and Humans: A Dialogue with Takeshi Yōrō

Feeling Responsible for the Future of Children and Not Wanting to Make Halfhearted Films

Memories of Lost Landscapes: On Genzaburō Yoshino’s Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka (How Will You Young People Live?)

Words of Farewell

The House of Three Bears

From the Anthill: An Introduction

Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen):
A Film That Made Me Think Animation Was Worthy Work

Ponyo (2008)

On Ponyo

Memo on Music for Joe Hisaishi

Biographical Chronology

As an Afterword

About the Author

“Princess Mononoke,” “Ponyo,” and “As an Afterword” translated by Beth Cary.

“Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle” translated by Frederik L. Schodt.

▶ PRINCESS
MONONOKE

The Battle Between Humans and Ferocious Gods—
The Goal of This Film

Princess Mononoke Proposal (April 15, 1995)
Compiled in Film Pamphlet issued by Tōhō, July 12, 1997

In this film, samurai, lords, and peasants who are customarily featured in period dramas hardly make an appearance. Even when they do, they perform only in very minor supporting roles.

The main characters are humans who do not appear on the main stage of history and ferocious gods of the mountains. The human characters are ironworkers, members of the iron-production group: engineers, laborers, blacksmiths, iron sand gatherers, and charcoal makers. They are transporters such as packhorse and ox drivers. They were in those days armed and had formed organizations that we might today call cottage industry manufacturing groups.

The ferocious mountain gods that confront the humans appear as wolf gods, boar gods, and in the form of bears. The Forest Spirit (Deer God), the key figure in the story, is an entirely imaginary creature with the face of a human, the body of a beast, and antlers of tree branches.

The young male protagonist is a descendant of the Emishi people who disappeared after being defeated in ancient times by the politically powerful Yamato people. And if we search for a likeness for the female lead, she is in appearance not unlike a clay figurine from the Jōmon period (12,000 BCE–300 BCE).

The main locations are the foreboding deep forest of the gods and the fortresslike Iron Town where iron is made.

The conventional period drama settings of castles, towns, and farming villages with rice paddies are merely distant backdrops. Rather, what I plan to recreate is the landscape of Japan when there were far fewer people, when there were no dams, and when the forests were dense—when nature had a high level of purity with its deep mountains and dark valleys, pure and rushing streams, narrow dirt roads, and large numbers of birds, beasts, and insects.

With this setting, my aim is to depict a freer image of the characters without being bound by the conventions, preconceptions, and prejudices of traditional period dramas. Recent research in history, ethnology, and archaeology has shown us that our country’s history is far richer and more diverse than we are generally led to believe. The poverty in period dramas has almost all been created from the drama in films. Disorder and fluidity were the norm in the world of the Muromachi period (1336–1573), the setting for this film. It was a time when present-day Japan was being formed out of social upheaval, when those below overcame those above from the days of the Southern and Northern Dynasties period (1336–1392), and the ethos of eccentricity, swaggering scoundrels, and the chaotic rise of new arts held sway. It differed from the period of Warring States (1467–1568), when organized battles were fought between standing armies, and also from the Kamakura period (1185–1333) with its fierce and earnest warriors.

This was a more unpredictable and fluid time, more magnanimous and free, with less clear class distinctions between warriors and villagers and women as depicted in the drawings of artisans and tradespeople. In such a time, the contours of life and death were very clear. People lived, loved, hated, worked, and then died. Life was not full of ambiguities.

Herein lies the meaning in creating this work, as we face the coming chaotic era of the twenty-first century.

I am not attempting to solve the entire world’s problems. There can never be a happy ending in the battle between humanity and ferocious gods. Yet, even amidst hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.

I will depict animosity, but that is in order to show the fact that there is something more precious.

I depict the bondage of a curse in order to show the joy of liberation.

What I will show is the boy reaching an understanding of the girl, and the process of the girl’s heart opening up to the boy.

In the end the girl may say to the boy, “I love you, Ashitaka. But I can’t forgive human beings.”

The boy will smile and say, “That’s all right. Won’t you live together with me?”

This is the kind of film I want to make.

Princess Mononoke

The Art of Princess Mononoke
Tokuma Shoten/Studio Ghibli Company, issued August 20, 1997

The trembling string of the taut bow

Your heart gleams in the light of the moon

The beauty of the keen-edged blade

Your profile like the tip of the sword

Those who know your true heart hidden in your sadness and anger

Are only the small spirits of the forest

The Legend of Ashitaka

A legend is

A tale hidden in the grasses, passed on from ear to ear

People have recounted without ever forgetting the story of

A youth, nameless in history, who lived in an outlying area

How valiant and courageous

Was the youth called Ashitaka …

Though cruel fate toyed with him

How deeply he loved people and the forest …

How clear were his eyes …

During their harsh lives the stoic people who dwelled in the mountains

Repeated over and over to their children

Be like Ashitaka

Live like Ashitaka …

The People Who Were Lost

When this island was covered by thick forests

In the far eastern land where beech and oak trees flourished lived a proud people

The men rode astride red elks—large antelopes—of legend

Shot arrows tipped with jade

Full of bravery rode the mountains and fields

The women chastely arranged their hair and adorned their bodies with jewels

Of high breast they were graceful and beautiful

The people revered the gods of the forest and listened to the breath of the forest

They lived as they made songs of the forest’s voice

When a power the humans called god surged from the western land

The people resolutely fought against it

At times they were victorious in pushing back the generals’ forces to the flatlands and plundered their storehouses

At times they were defeated and hid deep in the mountains

Their battles raged for years and years

The influx of power from the west was ceaseless

In time, the people left their land and disappeared into the forest

Eventually the people were forgotten and concealed by history’s shadows

Time flowed by, the power of the west waned, the fangs of the generals fractured

And when the land is filled with hatred and strife

The child of the lost people will surely return

Attired in the same way as in ancient times, astride a red elk

Having a reverence for the forest and a clear-eyed gaze

He will surely ride like the wind through the cursed land

Why? It is because the blood of the lost people

Remains still deep in the hearts of the people …

Even as they have been oppressed, forgotten, and slighted,

It is firmly imparted within their people

The Demon Spirit (Tatari-gami)

The ferocious god came from the western land

Its entire body covered in accursed black snakes

Burning up everything it touches

It came, from darkness to darkness

The old god of the mountains was attacked by people and the forest was taken from him

The god in the form of a gigantic boar

Its bones crushed, its flesh rotted, crazed with the pain of its wounds and its anger

It ran and ran across mountain and valley

Gathering the full force of the curses and rancor replete in the land

And finally turned into a gigantic demon spirit

All the karmas of the human world took the form of the animal

All things lose their strength when faced with its anger

It mustn’t be approached; it mustn’t be restrained

We can only hold our breaths and wait for it to pass by

You wretched old god

If I could, I would like to give you peaceful sleep,

O great god of the mountain

Wolf Goddess Moro

You mustn’t peer into her eyes

Because she will tear you apart with despair

Because she will eat your heart while it is still beating

The wolf goddess is a survivor from the old world

Her bristly silver hair and two tails are the faint signs of primeval gods

Moro is the counterpart of nature that exists as is and a mirror of the world

Despair is the true essence of life

Mercilessness is the true character of life

Her gentleness is the gentleness of life itself

What is more, she has learned hatred from humans

Lady Eboshi

A heart of steel that fears no one

An intense will, sympathy toward the vulnerable, unsparing toward enemies

The nape of her neck white, her arms slender, she exudes power

A woman who proceeds without wavering along the path she has chosen for herself

While attracting the reverence of her underlings

You gaze far into the distance

Are your eyes looking into the future?

Or are you gazing even now into the hell that you saw in the past?

Kodama Tree Spirits

Just when they seemed to appear

They tittered in laughter and have already disappeared

Just when they seemed to be walking at my feet

They were already in the duskiness far away, laughing

When spoken to, they run off in shyness

When ignored, they come close

You small children, children of the forest

Ah, to you this forest that you inhabit is so full of fun

Yakul

Noble, great red elk

Descendant of a species headed for extinction

Your hooves have no fear of steep slopes

You dart through the mountains like a flitting bird

My dear old friend for whom I yearn

Loyal beast

Your coat of fur is glossy

Your gaze is as warm as a mother’s

Come, let us go together to the ends of the earth

The Forest of the Deer God (Forest Spirit)

The forest that has existed since the world was born

In this world of deep shadows filled with the essence of all creation

Live creatures that have become extinct in the human world

A forest where the Deer God still dwells

A wondrous beast with antlers like branches, a stirring human face, and the body of a deer

Dying with the moon and reviving with the new crescent moon

Having the memory of when the forest was born and the pure heart of an infant

A brutal and beautiful Forest Spirit that presides over life and death

In the places touched by its hooves

Grasses put forth shoots, trees breathe life anew

Wounded animals regain their strength,

In the places reached by its breath

Death comes effortlessly, the grasses wither

Trees decay, animals die

The forest where the Forest Spirit lives is a world where life glistens and sparkles

It is a forest that denies entry to humans

These poems were written by Miyazaki to impart his vision of Princess Mononoke to the composer Joe Hisaishi.

The Elemental Power of the Forest Also Lives Within the Hearts of Human Beings

On directing Princess Mononoke

Cine Front, Cine Furontosha, July 1997

Knowing it will bring turmoil, I still open the door

—Though so many of your films are masterpieces, it seems to me, now that I have seen Princess Mononoke, that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke form the cornerstone of your works. You may think that I’m overstating it and may have had enough of this kind of talk, but the main theme in these three films is your effort to probe the way human beings relate to nature. This is a very modern theme, and I wonder what led you to approach this theme.

MIYAZAKI: This may be a strange way of putting it, but I was a bit happier than I am now when I was making Nausicaä and Totoro. When making a film, even if it is a film for children, we mustn’t tell the story without presenting its ecological issues. Also, since the things around us, like plants and water and animals, are always affecting an important part of our hearts in some way, isn’t it strange to forget that and think that the problems of this world consist only of those between people? It is with this kind of awareness of the issues that I made Nausicaä and Totoro, but after that things took a strange turn. This refers to both the creative process and our psychological state. From our sense of crisis that unless we protect greenery it will be destroyed, we have come to feel that the plants around us are weak and easily hurt and so must be treated with great care. People’s perception has become dissociated from the true qualities of nature. This developed concurrently with the curious branding that “Ghibli makes films that are gentle to greenery and to nature.” With Princess Mononoke I wanted to break away from that label. The way nature and humans interact incorporates within it the issue of the true essence of the existence of human beings, what we can call karma or fate. Knowing this problem, if we merely put a lid on it and just show the delights of nature and say, “We should cherish nature more,” or “We shouldn’t cut down trees,” it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be any different from the sort of advertising that claims “Our company is a business that is kind to nature.”

—This is a further extension of your themes in Nausicaä and Totoro.

MIYAZAKI: There have been some excellent recent publications on the relationship between human beings and nature, such as Environmental Archaeology (Myra Shackley, 1982; Japanese translation, 1985) and A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (Clive Ponting, 1991; Japanese translation, 1994). They indicate that there is an inextricable relationship between nature and human beings; that the human race has repeatedly encountered failures, discovering that what was purported to be productive is actually destructive, and even facing the collapse of their civilization. These have occurred in the past on a regional basis, but now the destruction is happening on a global scale. Before we judge whether this is good or bad—since they result from well-intentioned human actions—we must realize that the issue is way too complicated to be settled by a sweeping condemnation. I had many misgivings about addressing this kind of material in a piece of entertainment, but I came to think that I had to deal with the issue now. Since I know that this door exists, even knowing that it will bring turmoil, I still open the door and enter straight through. How can it be all right to say the plants along the wayside are pretty without dealing with the problem head-on? So I needed to brace myself and enter through the doorway; I decided that I’d stop treating plants as merely pretty and face the issue straight on. Thinking that the time had come for this approach, I started working on Princess Mononoke. I certainly had doubts and apprehensions about many things, including whether the film would be effective as entertainment. I was concerned about my ability to take on the issue. I anguished over it, and then I went ahead and did it. There are things I can’t redo, but there’s nothing for me to do now but confidently acknowledge what I’ve done. [laughs]

—I think I understand what a big adventure it was for you to take on this theme in Princess Mononoke.

MIYAZAKI: I think children have an instinctive perception of the problems of our time, of the problems that lie beneath the surface like a bass harmony. They feel uneasy that they are not blessed, or feel like they are left holding the joker in a game of Old Maid. Nor do the grown-ups give them any clear answers. All the grown-ups can say is things like, “We should treasure the trees that are growing around us.” Even if children agree with this on an intuitive level, the essential problem isn’t something they can fully understand. Since we have urged them to turn their eyes toward this problem even though we can’t give a clear answer or offer solutions, I felt we could make a film showing how we feel about the problem. While I was making the film, I wasn’t thinking of the target audience’s age, but after the preview screening, I decided I want most to have elementary school pupils watch this film. I wonder how children will take this film. It may be that they just think it’s a film with many scary monsters. Even so, I want them to see it. They don’t have to understand it well. There are so many things in this world that we don’t understand. There’s no shame in not understanding them. I now think that it turned into a film that I really want children to see. This film connects to the worlds of Totoro and Nausicaä that children grew up watching. So when they reach a certain age and watch this film, I want to know how they feel about what is depicted in it.

Actions taken by good people thinking they are doing good result in terrible problems

—The period settings of Nausicaä, Totoro, and Princess Mononoke go backward from the future to the near present and to the distant past, but the quality of the themes has become more modern, hasn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: Do you think so? Actually, in terms of my thoughts, I think Whisper of the Heart and Princess Mononoke stand on the same foundation.

—In what way?

MIYAZAKI: Whisper of the Heart was made with a clear line demarking what can be said and what we decided not to touch upon. What is in Princess Mononoke is what we hadn’t touched upon then. When people surrounded by paved roads wonder how they should live, I don’t think there is a markedly new way to live. There is only the classic way we have always lived. I wanted to point out that living that way is fine, and to cheer on the people living that way. And I wanted to show that the world we are living in is this sort of world. The historic order may be reversed, but both Whisper of the Heart and Princess Mononoke were made with that thought in mind.

—The character Lady Eboshi embodies the theme that you felt was difficult to treat when you opened this door. She had part of the forest cut down to make Iron Town. In that regard, she is an evil person who has destroyed nature. But by building Iron Town and producing iron, she was able to liberate women from feudalistic oppression and to ensure that the diseased who had been discriminated against were treated with dignity. On those points she has acted for the good. Yet, with the iron, she makes rifles that kill humans and animals. It seems we can’t label her as simply good or evil.

MIYAZAKI: Human history has always been like that. In our own time, women entered the workforce when the country went to war. If you cut out the complex aspects and look at everything just as good or evil, I don’t think you can grasp the true nature of things. I made Mononoke with that in mind, so I didn’t make it clear who was an evil character and who wasn’t. For starters, San (Princess Mononoke) and Ashitaka haven’t dirtied their hands much. Rather, I should say that they are still children, so they haven’t lived long enough to dirty their hands. For them, their lives will continue, so I expect they will be faced with moral dilemmas in the future. But many other people have already dirtied their hands. They all have their reasons, and it isn’t simply a matter of getting rid of those who have dirtied their hands. We have to continue living, accepting this troublesome part of ourselves. And as is often the case, those who are destroying nature are in reality people of good character. People who are not evil diligently take actions thinking they are for the best, but the results can lead to terrible problems. It would be easy to judge good and evil if obviously horrible people, motivated by self-interest and greed, were the ones who cut down trees, carved away mountains, and enclosed bays for land reclamation. [laughs] The complexity of the problems that people have to deal with lies elsewhere, so I decided to show the tangled parts just as tangled as they are. I didn’t do this on purpose, but in the end this is the kind of film it became.

—The most appealing thing about this film is the depiction of these entanglements just as they are.

MIYAZAKI: That is what I want elementary school children to see. Kindergarteners may cry at the brutal scenes. Since those scenes deal with problems of life and death, I really wanted to depict them so they could be understood just as they are. I also don’t want people to dismiss the presence of blood as something horrifying. I want to think that Princess Mononoke isn’t stained by blood, but that she is purified by blood. At the same time, the living animals, tortured by humans, bring on a terrifying curse and become demon spirits. I wanted to show the unbearable existence of these animals. I feel that it is impossible to talk about the relationship between humanity and nature unless I depict these aspects of it. This is what I plunged into, without knowing whether it would work as entertainment.

The Demon Spirit expresses the sensation I feel, of viciousness bursting from my pores

—From all over the body of the Demon Spirit, leechlike forms erupt, don’t they? That image is so awful and so powerful. I thought it was very much your style.

MIYAZAKI: I wondered if it was all right for me to depict such a thing. I worried whether it was all right to give shape to a cursed demon spirit. Not whether to give it form, actually, since it doesn’t originally have a form, but how to depict it. My staff were all at a loss as to how to give the image its shape. I have actual and personal experience of being overcome by such a sensation. At times, I have an emotion that I can’t suppress, and it explodes so that it feels like my viciousness bursts out from all the pores on my body.

—I have experienced that same kind of sensation. You were able to visualize it.

MIYAZAKI: I thought everyone had that kind of experience, but I’ve since found out that it’s not that common. When the young staff members drew the images, there was nothing that made it seem like it was an offensive; it ended up being more like black squid-ink spaghetti. [laughs] But the young people at Ghibli are thoroughly accustomed to accomplishing tasks no matter how much effort it takes, so they worked on this tedious project without complaint.

—That must have been a lot of trouble to draw.

MIYAZAKI: It was definitely a lot of trouble. The gooeyness of Lord Okkoto in the latter half also took a lot of time. The staff really did well. You know cutworms that come out at night from the soil to eat up all the plants around them?

—Yes.

MIYAZAKI: My wife goes outside every night, flashlight in hand, to exterminate them. When she saw the film, she said I had made something incredible, that the Demon Spirit looked as if masses of cutworms were growing from it. [laughs]

—Didarabocchi, the night spirit, is also presented as a ghastly image, isn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: It is from the giant legends. It is so huge that it can’t be fully contained within Japanese tales. There are many fables in Japan about giants that are enormous—some are said to straddle the strait between Sado Island and Echigo Province. They are actually called Daidabōshi, but in different regions they are referred to as “Daidarabotchi” or “Deirabotchi.” These giant legends come from people who lived in mountain villages, who went into the dangerous mountains and forests and witnessed strange-looking people who cut trees, stoked fires, and made iron; many of those people had injured an eye or lost an arm or leg. These are really interesting stories, but they haven’t been treated in historical dramas. So no one has made films about them. I thought, why not take the challenge? and turned them into images.

—The kodama, tree spirits, are wonderful creations.

MIYAZAKI: I think everyone has the feeling that such spirits might live in the forest. The problem was how to express this feeling. I asked someone who can imagine all sorts of creatures in the forest to draw them, and they were what we got. Some say they look like mizukojizō, guardian spirits of miscarried children; others say they look cute. I can’t quite figure them out, but they turned into something delightful when animated. Essentially, they don’t do anything, and their presence is to be there as witnesses, isn’t it? If nature is seen to be either useful or not useful, these kodama spirits are not useful, and in a way nature is full of things that aren’t useful to us. This is why I think the solution to environmental issues must be to shift our perspective from preserving nature because it is useful, to preserving it because it is not useful. We have to discard our old way of thinking, of judging something useful or not, and realize that everything is encompassed in nature, including things that are not useful. I don’t mean to preach. I’ve done a lot of business treating the relationship between nature and human beings. In fact I’ve been able to make a lot of money from Totoro. [laughs] I made Mononoke because I felt I had to open the door to this most troublesome aspect of our approach to nature and deal with it head-on.

Depicting Jigo as the sort of company man we see so many of in this world

—It seems dealing with it head-on was more difficult than you expected.

MIYAZAKI: I really strayed and strayed. This meant I was never able to see the film as a whole from a bird’s-eye view. And because of that, I wasn’t able to decide, by viewing the whole, whether a scene I created was really needed or not. It was hard for me to complete the storyboards, and in fact I didn’t finish them until New Year’s this year [1997]. When they were done at last, the entire staff breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that the film would finally have an actual ending. [laughs] While I was still drawing the storyboards, they couldn’t see the ending. But once the storyboards were done, everyone’s work pace picked up. We were also lucky to have some support, so that what we feared would never be done in time for the release date was completed, to everyone’s amazement. We were able to finish things in a rather sober way, without hysterics. But as of April we still weren’t able to see the end point. I had grown a hermit’s beard, but I thought if I kept it I wouldn’t be able to finish the film, so I shaved it off. I thought that unless I became a worldling, the film couldn’t be completed. [laughs] I can joke about it now, but at that time I really thought it over in all seriousness and decided to shave off my beard. Now I feel I want to grow it out again. [laughs]

—I couldn’t understand the character of Jigo. What kind of being is he?

MIYAZAKI: I think he is the most common type of person in this world. He is an approachable person and will kindly answer you when you ask him something. He is able to fulfill his function well within an organization. Because he operates on what is advantageous or disadvantageous he isn’t troubled by any discord between the organization and people. He may feel discord, but it doesn’t bother him. He obeys orders from the organization without considering whether they are good or evil. His stance is that he has no choice but to follow orders. He is skilled in the ways of the world, and because he fully realizes the questionable aspects of what is being asked of him, he tries to get Lady Eboshi to do those things. He knows full well the horror of what he does, but we can’t paint him as an entirely evil person.

—Is he acting on someone’s orders?

MIYAZAKI: He is acting on orders from his masters, who are in turn agents of the emperor. What are the imperial agents and the emperor thinking? To my staff members, who asked who Jigo’s masters are, I explained: “Working at Ghibli, you’re a member of the Tokuma Group, yes? Do you know what the top leaders of the Tokuma Group are thinking, how they decide their policies, and what goals they have to further their operations? You can do your job without knowing those things, can’t you?” In the same way, Jigo doesn’t think about such lofty things and doesn’t get explanations. He also serves as the local commander of the riflemen.

—He’s a monk, isn’t he?

MIYAZAKI: In Japan, particularly in the Muromachi period, there were many suspicious guys. Jigo is half layman and half cleric, like one of those old mountain ascetics. They weren’t exactly monks. But they weren’t common laymen either. Their status wasn’t that clear. There were many like him in that period, and it was hard to figure out what they were about. If you look at old picture scrolls, you can see people in weird getups swaggering down the main road. It wasn’t easy to get hold of a large, oiled umbrella, but many of these guys dressed in rags seemed perfectly used to carrying them. In such a chaotic age there must have been all sorts of associations and groups. The umbrella gang and the riflemen group were examples. Though they didn’t do much in the film, the ox drivers were also an armed gang and not just a group of laborers. These were all men under a chain of command and armed in case they needed to fight in battle. What the top leaders are thinking is pretty much the same thing, so if you ask me to explain it, all I can say is watch the film. The children in the audience may not be able to understand this, but it shouldn’t matter much to them. But I had no intention of killing off Jigo. If we disown this kind of person, we would have to disown almost all human beings. [laughs] All the fathers nowadays are living like this. I know there may be some people who feel dislocated or who become psychologically ill, but aren’t most people who work for companies living like this? Even if people think things aren’t quite right, they still carry on and follow orders because it was decided by the organization. There have been recent revelations about wrongdoings by banks and securities companies, but these only became major issues because they were disclosed. If they hadn’t been exposed, I think people would have continued doing the same thing without realizing that they were engaged in wrongdoing. To me, Jigo doesn’t seem like such a bad person, and I did try to make him a person with complexities.

Japanese feel as if their place of origin is a green landscape deep in the mountains even if they have never been there

MIYAZAKI: I also made Lady Eboshi a complex character, and I made the wolf spirit Moro as complex as I could. Within Moro tenderness and savagery coexist with no contradictions. It is silly to see these two characteristics as always being in opposition to each other and to consider it necessary to get rid of one or the other or beat it into submission. Unless we accept violence as one of the attributes of humanity and not as an illness or something to be repressed, our understanding of humans becomes very narrow. After losing the war, in Japan, violence was treated as needing to be denied, and it was thought that if children were raised properly they would not resort to violence. But this misguided interpretation of human nature is now shown to be faulty on many counts.

—Major faults have been showing up since the Gulf War, haven’t they?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, the faults have come to the surface much more since then. Ashitaka’s position is somewhat similar to the one Japan faced in the Gulf War. We were unable to decide which side to go with at the time. We were appalled at Saddam Hussein, but we couldn’t justify being on America’s side either. As we dawdled over which side to take, we were forced to pay the price. [laughs] In the future, I think this kind of situation will arise more and more, domestically as well as in the world at large. In a case like the civil war in Yugoslavia, it becomes impossible to support any side, though it is not as if we must take sides. Ashitaka wasn’t able to support either side, but he wanted to save those he loved. Thinking that was all he could do, I made the last scene as I did. Someone who saw the film told me he felt sorriest for the Forest Spirit/Deer God.

—Since he was targeted even though he hadn’t done anything bad, I also felt sorry for him.

MIYAZAKI: We could feel sorry for him, but I think this goes beyond sympathy. The large green field that resurges so beautifully in that scene is what I think of as Japan’s present landscape. That kind of gentle landscape feels more comforting to Japanese than an overgrown forest. We can call that the face of nature, but if we take that green field as representative of Japan’s natural world from ancient times, I think we are misreading the changes in the spiritual history of the Japanese people. Japanese have eliminated the broadleaf evergreen forest areas and created a countryside landscape of gentle, dumpling-shaped hills. The process of creating these landscapes became definitive in the Kamakura to Muromachi periods. My interpretation of history is that within this process of decimating the forests, what came to fill the void was actually Kamakura Buddhism.

—I can certainly understand that the greenery in the last scene is the scenery that the spirit of Japanese people return to.

MIYAZAKI: The gods in Japan are neither purely good nor purely evil. The same god can at times be ferocious and at other times bring about gentle greenery. This is the kind of belief Japanese people have held all along. Even though we have become a modern people, we still feel that there is a place where, if we go deep into the mountains, we can find a forest full of beautiful greenery and pure running water that is like a dreamscape. And this kind of sensibility, I think, links us to our spirituality. I don’t know how many ethnic groups there are in this world, but I don’t think there are many that have this kind of sensibility. This may be a type of primitivism. Our ethnic character harbors the elemental power of the forest within a precious part of our spirit. This predates our concern about preserving the natural environment so that humanity can continue to live. No matter how much deregulation is urged, I think we should not discard this basic essence of our people. This collective ethnic memory is not something handed down from parent to child, yet it continues to be held by a large number of people who consider it to be something sacred buried in a part of their souls. What we believe in are not petty gods, the kind who guide you to heaven when you die, or take you to paradise upon death, or put you on a set of scales on judgment day. Deep in the forest there is something sacred that exists without a perceptible function. That is the central core, the navel, of the world, and we want to return in time to that pure place. This is why when Japanese reach a certain age we are all drawn to Ryōkan.1 [laughs] We have a high regard for his style of “poverty” and “purity” and we are drawn to “having nothing.” But that is not like having nothing in the middle of a desert; it is like having nothing while being surrounded by a healthy forest, pure water, and the richness of nature. I felt a strong sense of this when I visited Yakushima Island, where the water is abundant and the trees glisten. Many things grow on a single large tree there, and high in the branches of the same tree flowers of a different plant bloom. Many types of plants live on that one tree without sucking away its life. I suddenly felt that I should have come to view this landscape much earlier. I was moved, realizing that this scene was here all along, even before I came to see it. I wonder what this feeling is. This feeling of being moved in this way isn’t that of a modern person.

—I see. Well, this seems to be at the root of what spurred you to make this film. In Princess Mononoke, we see a complexity that can’t be analyzed by ordinary rational thinking, and we see that complexity as it really is. Unfortunately our time is up. Thank you for sharing your thoughts during this busy time for you.

Those Who Live in the Natural World All Have the Same Values

Interview by Kentarō Fujiki; Seiryū, Seiryū Shuppan, August issue, 1997

I want to live in harmony with all living beings

Nature is not just the forests and the trees. It includes all sorts of things. At times there is drought, famine, damage by insects, and damage by beasts—all of these are part of nature too.

Our ancestors cleared forests in order to stabilize their lives and secure a place to make a living. Cutting down trees wasn’t an end unto itself. Though we have been living by clearing forests, now the movement to preserve forests has grown. We have started to realize that we need to protect our forests because, unless we have forests, the conditions for our own lives will deteriorate.

This way of thinking is obvious and very simple to understand. But the problem of whether to preserve just the parts that are beneficial to us or to preserve nature including the parts detrimental to us is something we must reconsider very seriously as we think about the relationship between human beings and nature.

It is not simply a matter of which is good or bad. This is because how human beings relate to nature changes with the times.

When we think of the relationship between human beings and nature, we must keep in mind that human beings are suffering for sins committed in previous lives. Unless we understand this, we will make wrong judgments. In fact, we have made mistakes.

For example, recently some doctors have asserted that we “shouldn’t fight against cancer” as “cancer is part of one’s body.” When put that way, I can understand the “Don’t fight against cancer” way of thinking. Yet, if I were told I had cancer, I’m sure I would be quite agitated. I’m certain of that. [laughs]

Human beings are convinced that we can live healthy lives if we get rid of all bacteria and viruses. But isn’t that a wrongheaded view of nature? We humans are beings that should live in a balanced way with organisms such as bacteria and viruses.

Nowadays we tend to think of nature only in terms of its benefit to humanity. We don’t need mosquitoes and flies, so they are not part of nature and we can kill them. But I think that this sort of anthropocentric thinking is fundamentally wrong. People, beasts, trees, and water all are worthy of life. This is why we cannot have humans alone being able to live; we must make space for beasts and trees and water too. This is the way of thinking that existed in Japan in the past.

I have made the film Princess Mononoke based on this way of thinking, which caused me a lot of headaches. [laughs] I’ve completed the film, but I still don’t know what kind of work it has become.

Tetsuo Yamaori-san has said, “Japanese people see gods and Buddhas in many things in nature. Essentially, they are a religious ethnic group.” This is a type of animism, but not a religion in the Western sense. Japanese people have this kind of unnameable belief. For example, sweeping the garden clean is already a religious act.

Try taking a look at the world through the eyes of an insect

I have a mountain cabin, and when I have time, I go there alone. There’s no mistaking that going into the forest is extremely good for my mental health. After spending some time there, I become kinder to others, perhaps because I begin to long for people. I feel I want to talk to someone. My neighbors there may think of me as a weird guy who makes movies, but they associate with me in a pleasant manner.

At my mountain cabin, I cook meals, wash clothes, cut wood, wash the windows, take walks. My days are a repetition of those activities. Walking on the same road each day, the landscape I see can seem entirely new depending on the shafts of light and the way the wind blows. I’m always discovering new things.

But if I were told to give up everything and live in the mountains, I would refuse. It would be wonderful if I could, but I’m incapable of it. I have a friend who gave up everything and is now farming in Hokkaido, but he had the talent to do so.

For me, it is best to be at my “main house” one day, and my “other house” the next, and go back and forth like that. [laughs] My main house is … it’s my house in the city, after all. [laughs]

In any event, it’s better to have contact with nature, even if you have to force yourself to make time for it. If you keep making the excuse that you’re too busy, it will never happen. Many people think they’ll get into nature when they retire, but it’s much better to make it a habit while you are still young and healthy.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I like the kind of “outdoor life” that involves whizzing around in a four-wheel drive.

If you can’t go out, then you can at least look at the view from your window. I love the view from my window here on the second floor. It looks out onto the new leaves growing on the trees, through which steel towers for high-tension wires can be seen, and beyond is the wide blue sky. That sky over there changes day to day. What is important is not how many kilometers of space you have around you, but what kind of nature exists near you. This way, you’ll be sure to find a road that you like, which will lead you to taking walks in the area where you live.

You could look at nature not as a human being but as if you were an insect that flies through that space, and think about what you could see if you landed on a leaf.

I’m sure you would see an entirely different world. By acquiring a sense of nature from this viewpoint, even if we cannot change our outlook on nature, at least we can expand our outlook on nature.

Keep on living no matter what the conditions!

I didn’t want Princess Mononoke, the film that will be released this summer, to be a film that contributed to distrust of human activity. But I also threw away the perspective that humans were good. In each person there is stupidity just as there is wisdom. That is what humans are made of.

I cherish human beings. Selflessness and purity exist even in the pebbles lying on the ground. What differentiates humanity is our scheming and cunning, behaviors that do not exist in nature.

Everything we value comes from the natural world. When a ray of light pierces through a break in the clouds we feel a sense of magnificence, wondering if there might be something beyond the clouds, something beyond the power of humanity. It is an irrational presence that is overwhelmingly powerful. For example, it could be a giant serpent or dragon that calls forth a flood, or a gigantic tiger deep in the woods. Japanese people had a sense of nature as something that exists apart from the world of humans. That is why they took the attitude of being humble and modest in the face of nature.

But when humanity stood superior to nature, we began to lose our fear of our behavior. People from the olden days would no doubt see children’s atopic dermatitis and various other present-day illnesses as punishment for making light of nature.

Since humans are so cruel, I have tended to depict nature in a gentle way, but nature itself can be brutal. It can be irrational. It can be very capricious as to why one organism stays alive and another organism dies. Nature is totally indifferent to the good and evil of individual organisms.

For organisms, there is a difference between the death of an individual and the death of a species. All individuals die. Humans have concerned themselves with individuals, so it was inevitable that they broke with the natural world. Their actions to protect individuals forced a crisis onto the species. What kind of concept, then, are we to bring to unify the individual and the species? Actually, I have no clue. Animism seems to be an effective way of thinking, but it is certainly not a solution …

As I learned from the late Ryōtarō Shiba-san2, Japan’s population in the Kamakura period was about five million. The forests were verdant and the waters ran clear. In those days when a famine occurred, a vast number of people died. Within the beauty of nature, at times people faced misfortune. Even so, we have managed to survive until today.

This means to me that from now on as well, even if the world’s population climbs to ten billion or twenty billion and nature is destroyed and various problems arise, the human race may somehow be able to survive. At present the problems of nature are being emphasized, but in each period there were great difficulties that we survived. Incidentally, the tagline for my new film, Princess Mononoke, is “Live.”

I avoided having characters in the film engage in difficult reasoning. We are now living in an age when we can sniff out the lies in the excuses we hear.

We are finished with denunciations. It is time for each person to think about what he or she can do in everyday life. It is enough that people do only what they can. Saving trees and sweeping up one’s neighborhood are of equal value.

You Cannot Depict the Wild Without Showing Its Brutality and Cruelty: A Dialogue with Tadao Satō

Kinema Junpō, Special Edition, “Miyazaki Hayao to Mononoke Hime to Studio Ghibli” (Hayao Miyazaki and Princess Mononoke and Studio Ghibli), Kinema Junpōsha, September 2, 1997

SATŌ: I watched Princess Mononoke yesterday and was very impressed. I think it is a truly wonderful film.

MIYAZAKI: Well, I’ve been getting all sorts of comments. Just this morning I was in bed fretting that I could have done things differently. And when I thought of that I broke out in a cold sweat. So I think I’m in trouble. [laughs]

SATŌ: I think it is a landmark film in many ways. It was also interesting to me to see that you have moved forward, or perhaps dug deeper, into your themes in this film.

And, this is my own reaction, but I have seen films from Asia, Africa, and Latin America on my travels, and the films in those areas deal with a theme that is missing in films of the so-called developed nations. That theme is animism, which only appears as an exception in European or American films, but appears quite often in African and Latin American films. There is particularly a lot of it in Korean and Southeast Asian films. Here and there in your earlier films, you treat aspects of animism, but this film gives a compilation of that theme. This is an important theme, but one that has been missing from Japan’s film history. Also, films that depict premodern history have conventionally depicted peasants, while you have focused on ironworkers. Many ideas like these haven’t been dealt with in the past. Where did they come from?

MIYAZAKI: I first learned about the existence of ironsmiths who roamed the mountains when I was a student. Since then I have kept that as a motif in my mind, but it was hard to give it a form even though I wanted to. Actually, we already used a fragment of it in Isao Takahata-san’s Little Norse Prince Valiant.

I wanted to use ironworking for this film because the research on ironworking has come so far that there are now writings on the subject that even I can understand. Another reason is that, although I really wanted to make a film set in Japan, past films only showed the distinction between samurai and peasants. If I made a film about them, I would fall directly into the trap set by filmmakers who preceded me, which I couldn’t tolerate in myself. In particular, I really like director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), but though I like it I have felt it wasn’t a real reflection of Japanese history. I’m sure there were cases when peasants hired samurai, as there are records proving it. But his peasants are an image of the reality of farmers in the twentieth century Shōwa period from the Depression and militarist era to the immediate postwar times.

SATŌ: You mean they are servile and crafty.

MIYAZAKI: While that is interesting in its reality, for us it is a spell that blocks the way when we try to make period dramas. Sanpei Shirato3-san has pursued the archetype of that image of peasants in The Legend of Kamui. The result is that they must end up in failure; the people will inevitably die off. Ultimately, we cannot understand Japanese history by viewing it through class history. Then, what approach is there? I pondered for a long time, but I would get to the doorway and then retreat from making a film. Ghibli came to be labeled as a studio that makes films that are kind to nature, which made me feel uncomfortable.

The relationship between nature and human beings has a more fearsome part that could be termed karma. It is absurd to argue the merits of being gentle to the few surviving parts of nature after we have tormented it so thoroughly. I thought perhaps it wasn’t so during the Jōmon period, but apparently it was. Human beings have attacked and modified nature to make it convenient for us. This certainly turns nature into something pleasant and beautiful for us, but the real character of nature is more cruel and brutal. If we discuss environmental issues or issues of nature without mentioning the irrationality, cruelty, and brutality of life itself, it becomes a shallow and insipid exercise.

I was afraid that things would spin out of control if I opened that door and tried to present my viewpoint as entertainment. I believe that a piece of entertainment has an obligation to recoup the money spent making it. Since I spent ten years on this, I have to repay that loan. In opening this door, I had many discussions with my producer. We considered ourselves to be at the peak of our powers. By the peak of our powers, we didn’t mean that we were in our best condition; instead we thought our powers would weaken after this both financially and in terms of our energy. But now, others may carry on our tasks and rise to new peaks. Being at our peak in all ways, if we didn’t do it now we would never be able to make such a film during our lifetime. So we felt it was time to decide whether we would do it or not. My producer made a kind of threat. He said, “If you put all your efforts into making the film, I’ll run myself ragged selling it.” I countered, “I’m not guaranteeing anything. I’m leaving it up to you.” [laughs] I had no choice but to go through the doorway and make the film.

SATŌ: You frequently criticize yourself, don’t you? [laughs] This is something that struck me before.

There is no question that Princess Mononoke deals with the extension of the same topic as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. But perhaps with Nausicaä you ventured a little too far ahead, and having gone too far, you realized that what is actually in front of our eyes is more serious.

There is something else as well. I know that you are very uncomfortable being seen as a leader in the environmental movement. But whether you like it or not, your status has undeniably made you one of the leading figures who best express the tenets of this movement.

MIYAZAKI: My own selfish view was that we can’t continue to make films indefinitely. But if we made this film, if we put up all of Ghibli as collateral—though I realized by using two billion yen [$20 million] that it wasn’t much [laughs]—no matter what the result, we could gain the right to make carefree movies as in the past for the next ten years. I’m not interested in making them myself, but if someone at Ghibli wants to make a film like My Neighbor Totoro, I think that could be done without any guilt.

That is why, rather than offering self-criticism on films we have made so far, I thought it was necessary to go a step deeper into the rationale for the films we have made. Whisper of the Heart was considered to be a peaceful film, but the basis for it is the same. I made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as an entreaty, but I felt I needed to dig deeper this time. I still wonder if it was really the best to make them as entertainment. [laughs] It ended up that I had to make them, so I did.

SATŌ: Well, I think it is essential that the most important themes of each era be made into entertainment.

MIYAZAKI: Yes. But it requires an enormous amount of effort.

Princess Mononoke goes beyond the representational techniques achieved in Whisper of the Heart

SATŌ: In the film world overall, we tend to be self-deprecatory, thinking that we are not in the cultural mainstream. But there is no mistaking that film is at the leading edge of visual culture. You are indeed carving the way at its leading edge. And with Princess Mononoke you have gone beyond, to a new stage.

MIYAZAKI: I’m a pretty realistic person, so I always have in mind our capacity, budget, and schedule and try to make films within that framework, but I’m constantly overstepping those bounds. Even so, I set limits and have tried not to go outrageously overboard. In the case of Takahata-san, he doesn’t have those limitations in mind at all, so he has nothing to overstep. He insists that the producer should fit things into the framework … [laughs]

SATŌ: People may have said Whisper of the Heart was a very sweet film. What I noticed was the depiction of the town’s buildings, the swaying of the leaves on the trees, the grain of the wood in the interiors. Those were things that we thought could be represented in art or in photographs but not in animation. Yet you have proven that animation can express their inherent tactility in a way that goes beyond mere reality.

And now in Princess Mononoke, what is exceptional, along with the theme and the historical perspective, is how wonderfully the forest is represented.

MIYAZAKI: The background artists worked frantically on that.

SATŌ: Candidly speaking, Walt Disney was unable to create animation worthy of being appreciated as artwork, as paintings. The same with Osamu Tezuka-san. You are the first to have achieved this. Does it trouble you when I say so?

MIYAZAKI: It has been a consistent theme for Takahata-san and myself ever since we started working together on projects. It wasn’t as if we thought it through in a rational way at the time. We just felt that human beings live in the midst of all sorts of things, including a certain relationship to production, so it isn’t right to make films that only depict the feelings and thoughts and human relations of the main characters. What was their source of livelihood? That was something we discussed thoroughly even when we did a TV series like Heidi, Girl of the Alps and then decided to make films with some sort of rationale. It wasn’t enough unless we included the relationship to nature, the environment where the characters lived. At times it may be the season, or the weather, or the type of light. We felt we wanted to be humble in the face of the entire world, the vegetation in nature, and all of it. We are creating a fabricated world and everyone knows we can draw anything we want, but if we aim to give a sense of presence to that world we must approach it with humility toward things other than human beings. In terms of our artwork, I think we have stopped at the level of naturalism. It may be that Takahata-san and I have together incorporated this into our films. Looking at it now, this may be the most distinctive characteristic of our work.

SATŌ: Let’s speak of the glimmering of something as seen through water. I don’t think that can be expressed in oil painting, Japanese painting, or any other type of painting. This is because the material is different. This in itself isn’t your contribution, but because the screen shines due to its material, the glimmering shows differently. Few people ever imagined that the reflection of light on the water could be expressed through animation. This is truly wonderful.

MIYAZAKI: I appreciate your saying so. This is the result of our efforts in working with many background artists. We started thinking that water should be colored light blue. We thought that a lake needed to be always drawn the same way because if the color changed depending on the angle of view, the audience wouldn’t be able to recognize it. At some point, one artist, who was about my age but who died in his forties, said, “Water is black.” That suddenly changed our way of thinking. After that, we worked with background artists to incorporate the natural view into the frame. For this film set in the mid-Muromachi period, I wondered what nature and the countryside looked like in those times.

SATŌ: You can’t tell what it was like; no one can.

MIYAZAKI: That’s true. I would get excited when I thought about it. [laughs] Looking at what I came up with, it doesn’t seem that great. But there is a river and a road, which isn’t a gravel road. There aren’t any vehicles, so it can be a dirt road. Even so, there are wheel ruts, I would mutter to myself. But if you say they aren’t wheel ruts, they don’t have to be, so it’s all right. [laughs] If I try to include the plants growing there, I could create them as a product of fantasy, which can’t be done in live-action films. I had a lot of fun doing this. Imagining this boy walking where no one had walked before—just thinking about it was fun for me.

It was fun for me at the beginning, but when we got into the story, there was so much to deal with it was all I could do just to keep up. In drawing an evergreen broadleaf forest it would actually be too overgrown and dark to have such a landscape, but I think the initial entry into the forest turned out well. A background artist who was from Kyūshū drew that part. He drew his own hometown area. And the Japanese beech woods to the east were drawn by a background artist from Akita. We also went to Yakushima and Shirakami-sanchi for location scouting, which was fun as well …

Interesting viewpoint that depicts nature in contrast with the ironworks

SATŌ: To me, your decision to focus on the ironworks was very interesting. A while ago, Kunio Yanagita4 wrote a famous paper on Hitotsumekozō in which he gave various fanciful interpretations of the one-eyed boy monster. As a counterargument to this, Ken’ichi Tanigawa5 wrote that the one-eyed boy monster legends arose in areas where there were ironworks. He theorized that the figure came from the many ironworkers who injured their eyes from smelting work. That was the beginning of my interest in historic ironworkers. And it is worth noting that, in the process of ironworking and brick-making, the forests were cleared away.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I agree.

We are acquainted with many things that surround us—they may be embedded in difficult kanji characters or manifest as mysterious spells or religious incantations—which cause us not to see the real essence of things. We are enthralled at some ancient ritual on television or somewhere, but at the same time we can’t really understand it. The true essence of things seems to have gone far, far away and been turned into gods—and we have many of them—that we don’t really understand. The same is true for historic dramas. We’re fooled in a way by kanji characters … For example, if five or six ashigaru (light-foot) soldiers come suddenly on the scene, in a movie this signals that they are fodder to be killed. It is entirely different from five or six warriors appearing. No doubt the ashigaru rank changed depending on the historic period, but by the end of the Warring States period, they were regular soldiers, so they would have worn matching armor and couldn’t have looked feeble. But just by being written as ashigaru light-foot soldiers, they seem like they can be easily dispatched nobodies. [laughs] Why aren’t they referred to as regular soldiers, I wonder. These sorts of conventions have created the world of the period drama, and within the constraints of that framework history loses its objectivity and universality. I felt that I couldn’t recreate a period drama unless I took it apart. I started talking with Takahata-san quite a while ago about creating a different kind of period drama. But he bluntly told me, “When you say that, aren’t you just wanting to slice up Japanese history with modernism?” [laughs] While I felt defiant that that wasn’t the case, it took decades of grumbling for me to reach this point …

SATŌ: The brutality within the Japanese masses has been mostly co-opted by the genre of yakuza movies in recent times. But before the yakuza called themselves gangs, all sorts of workers were members of their own gangs or groups. Those workers formed autonomous groups, and when the interests of those groups clashed they would fight each other. So there was quite a brutal form of mass violence. This premodern behavior continued until modern times before it was relegated to the yakuza. As you said about Seven Samurai, in it the peasants were always prostrating themselves before the samurai … [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: That was a lie. [laughs] It actually might not have been a lie in certain instances at specific times and places. But it signified a powerful reality that embodied the postwar period when it was made. Even when we watch the film in times when that reality is no longer valid, it still excites us. But I couldn’t defend it if it were to be made in our time. My thinking was that if I just fiddled with the period dramas made by our predecessors to fit our current tastes, it wouldn’t mean that I had created a new work.

SATŌ: I can hardly recall any period dramas that have focused on classes other than samurai and peasants. The film Kujira Gami (directed by Tokuzō Tanaka, 1962) dealt with whalers, but that is about it. There have also been some set in ancient times that feature rulers and servile, slavelike people around them. The lives of ordinary people are difficult for us to imagine, neither have they been the focus of historical studies.

MIYAZAKI: It is very recent that things have changed, isn’t it?

SATŌ: Yes, indeed. It is only recently that there have been new studies on history.

MIYAZAKI: I am interested in the native people, the Emishi. There are no drawings of them and no surviving customs. They don’t appear in historical materials. Though they have been obliterated, they were Japanese people, as it were. They had an independent state before Japan became unified. I was interested in what their customs were like, but since we don’t have any records, it was a blank slate. [laughs] So I could do as I pleased. I thought their clothing must be like those worn by the minority tribes in Bhutan or Yunnan. They wore a kind of kimono. Along that line of thinking, their hair might have been in a topknot with the front part of their head shaved. I asked Ryōtarō Shiba-san “What did the top of their heads look like?” He answered, “I think they shaved.” And they wore head coverings. I had trouble figuring out what to do with the main character. Putting a topknot on him would suck me right into the period dramas of the past. So, taking advantage of the lack of historical references, I made it a Chinese-style topknot. I really liked working on the clothing of the girls. They wore black costumes, most likely decorating their collars with embroidery, though we couldn’t do that in animated drawings. I imagined these from what agricultural mountain tribes around Thailand wear … I had a lot of fun with this.

I was creating a historical period drama, but it was unknown territory for me. During the last few years, many reproductions of ancient picture scrolls have been published. With books even available on how to interpret them, we now have a wealth of historical material at hand. The young Ghibli staff, however, don’t know how kimono are worn; they match the edges together at the front like Western clothes. [laughs] And they tie the obi in the same way they would clasp a belt. The kimono sleeves and the hemlines of that period were short. It was only later in the Edo period that people became better off and the clothes became longer. But in making films, if we aren’t careful, we wind up with characters looking like Edo-period yakuza. For a scene showing the masses, in the past I would draw an original idea and then use that. It’s a bother to redo it. But this time I couldn’t work that way. We did have people with all sorts of opinions asking why the girls looked sweet but the males all looked disreputable. But I couldn’t attend to that kind of detail. It was all I could do to finish the film. In the end I think it was the young staff who were most stressed out and hardworking.

Another factor was that we made 130,000 cel drawings for this film, which is 1.5 times the number for a feature film. Though it is a long film, I wish I could have used another 30,000 cels. But that would have been impossible. We really had reached the limit of our abilities.

In talking with an American staff member who came for the promotional campaign, I realized that we are so fortunate to live in these islands. That is because there are so many motifs lying around that we can excavate. Thankfully, our predecessors have only depicted peasants and samurai, so there is a wide range of other subjects that we can deal with in period films. If we dig into those, I think we can find things that will be visually interesting. But the structures in that era were so shoddy, there couldn’t have been such a large building for ironworking in those days. So, reluctantly, I decided to tell a lie to make it more visually enticing. [laughs] As I was making this film, I realized that our ancestors weren’t so boring and that Japan has a wealth of material that we can use scattered around these islands.

Visualizing my own uncontrollable “fury”

SATŌ: I loved the way you showed gods as concrete images.

MIYAZAKI: Well, we were alternately audacious or fearful, since no one knows how to show them. I didn’t know either. When asked if certain drawings were all right, I would answer, “Well, I’m not sure,” as we plodded along on the film.

SATŌ: I have seen a Nigerian film that shows a water god. The idea of giving concrete form to gods remains strong in many developing countries. A Brazilian movie tells the story of a man accused of heresy by the church for combining the souls of an animal and a human. This is a very important theme, and I am impressed that you dealt with it.

MIYAZAKI: Thank you. Until just a little while ago, Japanese people thought there were monstrous serpents or terrifying things deep in the mountains. At the same time they thought that by going deep into the mountains on this island, they would find steep mountains and dark valleys where pure water ran, and that just going there would purify the soul. Japanese people continue to embrace the idea that somewhere on these islands there is a world apart from the one sullied by humans. And this is where we go in search of our spiritual core.

I know I may be misunderstood, but we have placed the Imperial Palace in the middle of Tokyo, and placed the emperor, in this case Emperor Shōwa, there and placed the burdens of the country on him as he plants ceremonial rice. All around the palace grounds we have carried out brutal economic activities while relying on the sense of security the emperor gives us. I am appalled at this country of ours. This is not to judge whether it is good or evil. I think we must be a people that has attached to the ecosystem a darkness from deep inside our souls, a darkness that can’t be explained. It seems to be a system that is becoming, in the currently popular phrase, more and more Latinized. Latinization leads to destruction of the ecosystem because it means becoming hedonistic. When I go to Provence or to Italy, it feels good to be among people who are living so hedonistically and positively, but toward the north of France, perhaps because more nature remains, the people harbor a sense of darkness. I’ve heard that there are many young people who commit suicide in northern France, whereas few do in southern France.

SATŌ: It is true that when I go to Europe I notice that nature is well maintained, but the trees along the side of the road are mixed, whereas in Japan they would all be cedars. And those miscellaneous trees remain in a very natural form.

MIYAZAKI: In Japan we are still affected by the enormous shock of defeat in the Pacific War, which was a senseless undertaking. As a consequence of that shock, many Japanese larch and cedar trees were planted all over Japan. We know that is what happened, so the question is: Now what do we do? Where do we go from here? Are we able to feel that we are killing off too many living things in a wasteful manner, regardless of whether something is useful for humans? We do have the vague belief that the tranquil spring that exists deep in the mountains is very precious for us, even if we do not label it a religion like Buddhism. When we become aware of that feeling, even without some complex philosophy, we want to take a risk and leave a space in this world where other living things can exist. This is what should be at the core of our thinking about Japan’s environmental problems. To my way of thinking, there should be a way other than the German way of doing everything to control the environment in order to make people happy. It wasn’t as if I thought of making an environmental film for this project, so I put in the brutal and senseless parts of nature as well. It would be so easy to create a scheme that depicts humans as inane, with bad people cutting trees down and good people protecting the trees. But that would be entirely unrelated to the essence of human beings. It is more likely that those people who were hardworking and kind to their neighbors were the same ones who, in an effort to improve living conditions, carved up the mountains and dispersed the animals.

SATŌ: Ironworking in those days was an advanced technology, so I would think the brightest people would have participated in it.

MIYAZAKI: On a different topic, there are quite a few folktales about princesses with birthmarks. In Japan there are many scary stories that have come down to us that have figures like a princess with a birthmark on her face, or the one-eyed boy monster we talked about before, or a giant like Didarabocchi. They just appear without any logical role. They don’t end up happy, neither do they necessarily affect the story’s conclusion. I wanted to incorporate something like that, but I worried that a girl with a birthmark on her face wouldn’t show well as a picture, or that it was not really appropriate for entertainment. As I thought about different approaches, the bruise ended up on the boy’s arm. Princess Mononoke’s face is decorated with tattoos. I had only seen tattoos on an old woman, which seemed eerie to me. But I thought putting tattoos on a young maiden would be seductive and pretty. At least that’s how it was in my own fantasy. [laughs]

SATŌ: The wild boar Demon Spirit extrudes wormlike things from his body, doesn’t he? That was startling to me. What was that?

MIYAZAKI: Since I get that sensation, I thought everyone did. [laughs] When I am suddenly struck by a sense of vehement fury, I feel like something black and viscous is oozing out of my pores and other holes of my body. I feel that I can’t control it. In an instant I become so vicious that I wonder at the rage that comes spewing out from inside myself. I’ve recently been able to control it much more. I thought everyone had that sensation. When I assigned some young people to draw this, a very innocent person worked on it, so it turned out to be a gentle form when it should have been monstrous. When the staff saw the dailies, they laughed, so we had to fix this problem. After that, I tried to make some form out of it by different means, but none of us has actually seen a demon spirit. Yet, I’m always wondering what it would be like if we could see it. If a condominium is built on a rice paddy where children used to play with crayfish, they continue to think there are many crayfish buried under the building. They wonder if the building might start leaning eventually due to the curse of the crayfish. [laughs] There is no way that it would lean, is there? In western Japan there are cases where an attempt to cut down an old tree caused so many things to happen that the road plans were changed to avoid cutting down the tree. I’m sure similar things have happened in eastern Japan as well. The conviction that other living things have a mystical power and that we shouldn’t provoke them was firmly entrenched, particularly in western Japan. The older the region, the more this proves true.

SATŌ: I see.

MIYAZAKI: We have become indifferent to this sort of thing. We no longer think it exists. We have made this world into something clear and simple that can be dealt with in pluses and minuses, profits and losses. Take the violence that we talked about before. We cannot understand human beings if we insist that violence isn’t an inherent part of humanity, and that it is only when their frustration level reaches its limit that people act violently. People do have violence within them. Human society creates a safety valve for violence. I think in order for things to go well, people must occasionally participate in festivals where they have major fights, where they engage in violence to the point of some people dying. If those are tidied up and tamed, the frustrations fester and come out in negative ways.

SATŌ: We are gradually forgetting the brutality of animals, just as we are forgetting the trees and rivers. Nowadays animals are almost all domesticated or turned into pets. Occasionally monsters appear in mass culture, and they are fearsome at first. Godzilla was scary at first, and so was King Kong. Then they are tamed to be aimed at children and end up being cute, like Mothra.

You have drawn charmingly cute animal sprites in the past, but this Demon Spirit is frightening. It is evil and frightening.

The film’s tagline ended up being “Live”;
this is the perspective essential in the coming age

MIYAZAKI: In the end, we must decide whether we want to write history from the perspective of hatred and unresolved dissatisfactions. I think we must leave those who died to themselves, and those who live on must relate the doings of the world first and foremost from the perspective of being alive. After a couple of dozen phrases suggested by Shigesato Itoi6, we finally lighted on the simplest: “Live.” It made me realize that we need this perspective to live in the coming age. My time will be up soon, so I might not have to follow this exhortation. But in Whisper of the Heart, at a time when a boy and girl are about to embark on their lives, I could easily cheer them on. I don’t think that is a lie at all, but I also know full well what awaits them in the town they are looking down on. So I think, as adults, if we don’t touch on those things and only go so far in divulging information and just cheer them on, it smells like a lie. That is why I thought that if I can make Princess Mononoke to my satisfaction, I would be able to fill in the background for the reality in the film Whisper of the Heart … Though I’m sure the audience doesn’t see it that way.

SATŌ: I didn’t think Whisper of the Heart was at all disingenuous.

MIYAZAKI: Neither did I as I made it. I do think there are boys who think that way and girls as well. I don’t know if they are consciously thinking so, but there are many children who feel they were born in an unlucky time. So they become ill for no reason. And the only method left for them to deal with this is to wash their hands, wash their hair, and keep clean. They feel they have to shampoo their hair every morning, wash their hands, brush their teeth, change their clothes for everything, and keep tidy. Yet their view of nature is betrayed by the likes of E. coli O157. They come to realize that staying clean is insufficient to be normal and healthy; that we are basically not normal beings. Unless we go back to this perspective on nature, we cannot even understand the diseases we face. Fifty years after the war, we have returned to this point. We have come back to it; we have not started something new. For a while we thought we could control everything. If we pared away what was bad, humanity could become admirable. If we conquered poverty so that we were not humiliated by money or tormented by material things, we thought we could become healthier human beings. But we found out that those actions would make us sicker. Our time is one that has come full circle to yield these conclusions. Unless we go back to this perspective on nature, we cannot even understand our diseases. When I thought of making a film that deals with these matters set in a city, Whisper of the Heart is what came to mind.

But I couldn’t just keep making that kind of film. Even though we say the target audience for Princess Mononoke is upper elementary school and older, we haven’t really thought about a target age. Because there are scenes that might be too traumatic for young children, we thought it would be better not to have them see it. It all depends on what kind of impression children who see the film will have, though I have absolutely no idea what that will be. I still wonder, since I have no idea of the response, whether it really is entertainment, and whether we will be able to recoup our expenses.

SATŌ: Well, I think it is plenty interesting as an action film. Particularly as the animals have such a commanding presence, it follows in the mainstream of past action films, or should I say popular entertainment films. That wolf spirit, which is larger than an ox, was a great concept.

MIYAZAKI: There’s a stuffed specimen of a Japanese wolf in London. It’s quite small. I think wild animals become smaller when their environment worsens. The wild boar of old must have been much larger than the boar we have now. After all, there are heroic tales of men riding on the backs of boar as they speared their enemies. But when you see wild boar these days, they seem to be ready to cook, which makes me feel sorry for them. I imagine that animals that lived in densely natural surroundings must have been much larger. When I heard about yaks, I was told that those in the wild are twice the size of domesticated yaks. I was so moved when I saw an image of a yak in the Tibetan highlands, standing against the sky. Wild animals have within them a streak of cruelty. That aspect of animals is perhaps why we use wild as an adjective to refer to them. It is a mistake to whittle away those aspects and trivialize the wild by making the wild merely sweet, brave, and pure. We would not succeed unless we depicted the wild with brutal and merciless aspects. The staff wondered if it were really Japan. [laughs] I told them, “Of course it’s Japan. The Japan you know came about after this time.”

Depicting animals in such a commanding way has contributed greatly to modern civilization

SATŌ: Our knowledge of Japan may be an image shaped by kabuki drama and traditional storytelling arts.

MIYAZAKI: It is Japanese who conduct ceremonies for sanctifying the ground and then move rocks or cut down trees. They do a simple ceremony pouring sacred sake or such, but those are simplified, pro forma rites. These rituals became a mere formality from the Kamakura period. Kamakura Buddhism’s endorsement of a human-centered society was a major religious revolution for Japan. This is just my own way of interpreting history.

SATŌ: That’s quite interesting to hear.

MIYAZAKI: This led to the Muromachi period, where we see the chaos of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. In certain ways, it was during the Muromachi period that the Japanese national sensibility and way of thinking was consolidated. From then there was no turning back. This has had a hold on Japanese since that time. It seems to me that it was around then that people came to believe that there is a place of steep mountains and deep valleys where purity exists, and though our world is impure, when we die we will go to paradise. This sense of having no way of being saved on earth, I believe, has its origin in the chaotic state from after the Kamakura period. We are feeling ever more desperate in the modern age.

Some people think that Japanese treated nature very gently up to a certain period, that is, until toward the end of the war, and that it was during the postwar period of rapid economic growth that they grew cruel. From certain phenomena it looks that way, but I think we have always been cruel toward nature. The mountains were repeatedly denuded, trees were planted for their economic value, and the thickets of mixed trees in the Tokyo area were the most beautiful from the latter nineteenth century until the 1930s, when the use of city gas became widespread. Because the economic efficiency of the trees was high, they were well maintained. At the same time, people like Doppo Kunikida7 began to acknowledge these woods as things of beauty. From these factors, we can deduce that Japanese people have not suddenly become callous, but that we have been doing similar things all along. That made me feel relieved. [laughs] I could be somewhat calm and collected knowing that we can change our way of doing things. I can’t deal with the entire world; the only course I can take is to decide to live in this island country full of its messes. If we look at what we had thought was an ugly town from a different perspective, we can see its use as a setting for a story. This is the theory I had for Whisper of the Heart.

SATŌ: I mentioned earlier that the animals had a commanding presence. They were not simply brutal or terrible, but also possessed a certain dignity. Your creation of animals with so much dignity is a major contribution to our modern civilization.

MIYAZAKI: Thank you for saying so. But I meant to give dignity also to the humans. [laughs]

SATŌ: Yes, to humans as well.

MIYAZAKI: I like Lady Eboshi’s character. She’s the epitome of a twentieth century person. To people from earlier periods, modern people must seem like the devil. They clearly distinguish between their aims and means and will use any means to reach their goals, while at the same time holding on to something pure. That is like the devil, isn’t it? The devil is so dashing in the way he strides about.

I read a Victorian novel in which the devil appears as a very attractive character. In this story the devil comes to buy the soul of a man who stole a church bell. Though it was his first time at the local inn, he was as familiar with it as if he lived there. With his joviality and generosity, he bought rounds of drinks and told jokes, enlivening the mood at the inn. Later that night, the innkeeper looked out the window to see him standing outside and negotiating with someone. The next day he had disappeared with the thief’s soul. When I read that story, I thought this was exactly like a modern person. And I wondered if it might be problematic to depict such a person as a man. So in the end it became a woman. What I wanted to show was that type of devil. I’m not interested at all in a devil that is incomprehensible, as in The Omen. To me, the interesting motif was that the devil is a figure that resides within the type of person idealized by modern people.

SATŌ: Lady Eboshi was fascinating. Also, the action scenes themselves were well done.

MIYAZAKI: For me, watching the completed film on-screen is tough. I’m basically three quarters an animator, so I see more and more parts that I think didn’t come out right or that I had to give up on. The guy who drew the action scenes is feeling low, cringing now. [laughs] I told him that he did as much as he could, all the way to the very edge. When someone doesn’t go all out and leaves some of his energy out of his work, then it takes longer for him to recover. Since he worked full tilt on it, I think he’ll be all right.

SATŌ: From the time the trailer was released, the film was said to be very violent. There are definitely brutal scenes, but they are thrilling.

MIYAZAKI: Well, I don’t like splatter effects. But blood does flow within human beings. I think there is nothing wrong with showing blood when it needs to be shown. Certainly if someone’s head is cut off blood will spurt out because the carotid artery runs through the neck. We can see this in old paintings, but just showing it was not my purpose. I had intended to make it a more gruesome story. But as I developed it, I came to realize that, inside, I wanted to punish human beings. Part of me is disgusted with hordes of people. I thought I shouldn’t do that scene. I consulted with my producer as to whether I should include that scene. He’s a strange one and told me, “I like that part.” [laughs] I couldn’t give it a full treatment though.

There are quite a few holes here and there in this film. I’m asked, what is the imperial masters’ group? But this isn’t the kind of thing that the director should have to explain; the film itself has to be persuasive enough. [laughs] There are so many parts like this that aren’t taken care of. If you try to explain it all within the film, the scale of the film shrinks.

SATŌ: This is truly a film that can’t be wrapped up in a tidy package. So many themes spill out from the screen they can’t all be resolved.

MIYAZAKI: I don’t know how people in other countries will view this film. The Chūgoku region in western Honshū, especially around Izumo, is a place where ironworkers continually carved away the mountainside. But if you visit there now, the valley of the Hii River is really lovely. The mountains are gentle. The valleys were all buried and flattened out. The natural landscape of that area has been severely transformed over time. I realized there were blessings of nature there. In other places there aren’t any. Some places in China have become denuded, rock-filled mountains that can’t be reclaimed. No, maybe with effort they can be reclaimed.

I think it is a grave mistake to think that for four thousand years of China’s history those mountains were always bald. I have my own theory that there were plenty of trees until the Han Dynasty (200 BCE–220 CE). So if China is going to make a historical film, it should be made from that perspective. That would be a true change for China. If China continues to stay on the level of saying this and that about Deng Xiaoping 8 or Zhuge Liang 9 [Kongming], it won’t bode well for the human race. We need to see things from the perspective of environmental archaeology; including, for example, how the Musashino plain in Tokyo came to be the way it is. I don’t know if it’s a subject that can be treated as entertainment, but there are too many unknowns to make a demanding academic film about it. It would be fun to make a short film that could present almost in a joking fashion what the area may have been like.

SATŌ: That reminds me of your conceptualization in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The theme that you present is consistent, but in Nausicaä it went a little too far ahead, and now it seems you are revisiting the theme in a deeper way. That was very interesting to me.

All in all, this film has brutality, dignity, and purity along with the most grisly, nasty rage at the same time. I am amazed that you were able to make this film with all of these factors pitted against each other.

MIYAZAKI: Thank you so much.

SATŌ: Thank you for your meaningful comments.

Tadao Satō Born 1930, Niigata Prefecture. Film critic. President of Japan Institute of the Moving Image. Graduated from Niiigata Technical High School (now Niigata Kōshi High School). After serving as editor-in-chief at Eiga Hyōron (Film Criticism) and Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought), turned film critic. In 1995, Nihon Eiga Shi (History of Japanese Film) (four volumes) received Mainichi Award for Publishing Culture and Minister of Education Award for the Arts. Recipient of Order of the Rising Sun Fourth Class, Medal with Purple Ribbon, Korean Culture Award, Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (France). Author of many books, including Nihon Eiga no Kyoshōtachi (Masters of Japanese Cinema) (three volumes; Gakuyō Shobō); Waga Eiga Hihyō no Gojūnen: SatōTadao Hyōronsen (My Fifty Years of Film Criticism: Selections from Tadao Satō’s Criticisms), Kusa no Ne no Gunkoku Shugi (Grassroots Militarism), both Heibonsha; Zōhohan Nihon Eiga Shi (Enlarged and revised edition: History of Japanese Cinema) (four volumes; Iwanami Shoten); Eiga de Wakaru Sekai to Nihon (Understanding the World and Japan through Cinema) (Kinema Junpōsha).10

Princess Mononoke and the
Attraction of Medieval Times:
A Dialogue with Yoshihiko Amino

Ushio, Ushio Shuppansha, September 1997

Forests disappear in medieval times

AMINO: I attended a screening of Princess Mononoke the other day. Actually, as I hadn’t watched a film in a movie theater for over ten years, it was a “great feat” for me. [laughs]

I understand this film is set in the Muromachi period, during the fifteenth century, when Japan was transitioning from the medieval to the premodern era. What caught my eye was that there were hardly any samurai and peasants, the usual characters who appear in period dramas. They are merely seen at a distance in this story. In their stead are ironworkers and the wolf spirit and wild boar spirit, the spirits of nature itself, living in the broadleaf evergreen forest.

MIYAZAKI: For me, the usual period dramas featuring samurai and peasants or townspeople make history boring and our country seem uninteresting.

I was curious about the people who roamed the mountains and produced iron. Not having any knowledge or informative books within easy reach, my imagination ran away with me. I know that there weren’t any huge ironworks like the one in the film, even later in the Edo period, but I thought, Why not go for it? [laughs]

Among my staff there were some who complained, “This isn’t the real Japan.” [laughs]

AMINO: You’re being overly modest. I was impressed that you thought hard about so many things and that you did your research.

MIYAZAKI: Well, according to my producer, I’m working “mostly by instinct.” [laughs]

Since coming across Sasuke Nakao-san’s view of the “composite culture of the broadleaf evergreen forest,” I have continued to be stimulated by his theory. In olden times, a quarter of the western part of Japan’s main island of Honshū was covered in a broadleaf evergreen forest. How did that forest disappear? I kept wondering about that.

I guessed that it must have disappeared by the Muromachi period. By that era we had decided to place humanity at the center of the universe, which had given rise to Kamakura Buddhism. Piling imaginings upon imaginings, I made the setting the Muromachi period.

Lady Eboshi is a twentieth century ideal

AMINO: The story of the film is very intriguing. The character of Lady Eboshi, who leads the ironworkers deep in the mountains, is powerful. She puts to work women and those who appeared to me to be outcastes and ox drivers—those who do not fit into the social order—and earns their respect. She looks like she might have been a courtesan or a court dancer, and I wonder what made you feature such a female character?

MIYAZAKI: There is a legend of a peerless beauty named Tate Eboshi who vanquished Akuro-ō. And the village of Eboshi is where my mountain cabin is located. [laughs] So the starting point was something as simple as that. She might have been sold abroad and become the wife of a Chinese pirate boss, where she honed her talents, killed her husband, and then absconded with his treasures to return to Japan. [laughs] That’s about the level of our ideas.

AMINO: Some mountain spirits are also called okoze, or “ugly women”; but Kanayakono-kami, the ironsmith goddess, rides on a white heron. That’s not where you got your image?

MIYAZAKI: Actually, initially we were considering making the character a man. But when I asked around among my staff, they said, “We’d rather draw a beautiful woman.” [laughs] And Lady Eboshi is dressed like a court dancer because they wanted her to look beautiful. [laughs]

I think of Lady Eboshi as the ideal of a twentieth century person. She differentiates between her ends and her means and engages in risky actions, but she doesn’t lose her ideals. She is strong in the face of setbacks and is able repeatedly to get back on her feet. That is how I imagined her.

AMINO: The main male character is the boy Ashitaka, who was in line to become the chief of a tribe of Emishi. This tribe lived hidden in the northern wilds after defeat in the battle against the Yamato people who represented the “Japanese state.” With an Emishi as the hero, you have decentered the Japanese state. This coincides with my own theories.

MIYAZAKI: I played around with how the Emishi appear. The Hayato tribe used shields, so I assumed the Emishi also used handheld shields. I filled in with my imagination the areas I wasn’t sure of.

AMINO: It’s better to go ahead and use your imagination in areas where we don’t have clear records. It’s refreshing for those of us who cling to historical facts. [laughs]

“Villagers” also carried swords

MIYAZAKI: I assume many people must have carried swords tucked into their sashes around the fifteenth century.

AMINO: Everyone was armed in that era. It has been recently confirmed that even in the Edo period villagers all had simple swords. They were different from samurai swords, but they were armed. Sometimes they also had rifles.

MIYAZAKI: Hideyoshi11 ordered disarmament, but it wouldn’t have been thoroughly implemented right away. I wonder when the convention of armed samurai and unarmed peasants that we see in period dramas was set.

AMINO: It was probably after the start of the modern age. This artificial construct of the disarmed peasantry and armed samurai has strongly influenced period dramas in film. As Hisashi Fujiki12-san has written, director Akira Kurosawa’s setup for Seven Samurai is totally bound by this format. The responsibility of historians lies heavily in presenting this view.

MIYAZAKI: Seven Samurai is a film that reflects the reality of men who, upon their return from the Pacific War, went out to the countryside to buy produce because of food shortages in the cities, and there came up against the attitudes of farmers. It was made in such an entertaining way that it has cast a spell on Japanese period dramas, crystallizing the historical view of class struggle between samurai and peasants.

AMINO: I was also very moved by that film. But the idea that villagers couldn’t carry arms is not factual at all. And there were many occupations among the agrarian class. Villagers did not solely mean farmers; they even included gamblers.

MIYAZAKI: The agrarian class was defined broadly and included various occupations, didn’t it?

AMINO: Yes. Among the agrarian class of villagers were traders and craftsmen of various occupations, with farming being one of them. This is why it is wrong to think that peasant revolts were incited by destitute farmers. Evidence has disproved this interpretation of history. During the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, the Chichibu Incident13 revolt was led by a gambling boss, Eisuke Tashiro.

By the way, there aren’t any gamblers in Princess Mononoke, are there?

MIYAZAKI: No, but it was pretty much a gamble for us to make the film. [laughs]

Who set the status classes of samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants?

MIYAZAKI: The term peasant has become so demeaning we can’t use it these days. Who was it that made up the class division “samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants” anyway? Was there a statesman who was so capable that he could divide up the social classes and enforce it?

AMINO: The social division of “samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants” was an ideology and not a representation of reality. Confucianists brought to Japan what was in place on the Chinese continent, and it has often been used as an easy way to explain society, but it is not factual. The basis of the class system in the Edo period consisted of three classes: samurai, townspeople, and peasants. A segment of professionals, including Buddhist and Shinto clerics, and low-status outcastes were in separate classes. But this doesn’t allow any place for those who gained their livelihood from the sea or the mountains. In that period, nearly all of the places officially recognized as cities were where castles were located; other towns, even fairly large ones, were categorized as villages. Wajima on the Noto Peninsula and Kurashiki on the Inland Sea were substantial towns but classified as villages, and the traders and ship owners all classified as villagers or poor peasants.

MIYAZAKI: If they weren’t in the recognized towns, they were all “poor peasants” who only had water to drink, no matter how large their economic influence? I thought the idiom “poor peasants who only have water to drink” emerged because they were so destitute they didn’t have anything to eat and had to survive by drinking water. [laughs]

AMINO: Those who weren’t able to own land, as well as those who didn’t need to own land, such as major traders and owners of shipping fleets, were also in the poor peasant class. If we take this view, our image of Edo period society changes greatly.

It used to be thought that farmers were 80 percent of the population, but actually even if we are liberal with the definition, they were only about 40 percent. What has led us to think there were so many farmers is that when the Meiji government created the family registry system, the classes were divided on the basis of “samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants.” Along with the peasants, those in seafaring and forestry, and merchants and artisans in the “villages,” were put into the “farmers” category.

MIYAZAKI: So it was the Meiji government that divided society into “samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants.” [laughs]

AMINO: We could say that. When an Ikkō Buddhist zealots’ uprising occurred and the Kaga domain became a land of “peasants,” it was assumed that a peasant rebellion had established a peasant kingdom. Of course the Ikkō uprisings were not unrelated to peasants, but the places visited by priest Rennyo14 were all cities. Kaga was also a region that was wealthy due to the activities of merchants, ship owners, and handicraft artisans. It was actually those city dwellers who supported the Ikkō uprisings.

Money was held by women

AMINO: Recently, some historians have begun to use the term “places of social exchange” to indicate places that were not cities but operated under similar conditions as cities. In this film the ironworks is unquestionably a “place of social exchange.” I think this is an apt analogy.

MIYAZAKI: Showing a realistic ironworks would have made it look too impoverished. So I went overboard to make it excessive. [laughs]

The image of the blast furnace at the ironworks is from a photograph taken during China’s Great Leap Forward that I saw in my childhood. That picture of so many blast furnaces on the yellow earth was striking to me. I learned later that Japan’s blast furnaces didn’t look like that, but I really wanted that effect for the forge. [laughs] In my mind they were huge, but I understand they were actually rather small.

AMINO: It would have been after the Muromachi period that large iron forges like the one in the film were built. Iron can be made rather easily with small furnaces. Until the early medieval period, farmers often made iron tools. There was a close relationship between ironworkers and itinerant mountain priests, and after the Muromachi period, it seems mountain priests roamed the mountains looking for places to mine metals.

MIYAZAKI: It’s very interesting to hear that mountains were carved out to make iron, but I wonder what process the manufactured iron went through to reach the hands of consumers. Was money used, or was it bartering with goods?

AMINO: By the Muromachi period there was a monetary exchange economy. It was not only cash exchange, as promissory notes came into circulation in the fourteenth to fifteenth century. So large amounts of cash did not need to be transported.

MIYAZAKI: They were really advanced, weren’t they? I was under the impression that promissory notes weren’t in use until the Edo period.

AMINO: That exchange system became more stabilized in the Edo period, but promissory notes were used during the Muromachi period. I should also mention that money was held by women from income they generated via sericulture. This was the norm through the Edo period.

Since land was the officially registered property, the fields were in the men’s names. However, movable property like currency and clothing was managed by women. The Portuguese Jesuit missionary Luis Frois (1532–1597) observed that in Japan husband and wife held assets separately and the wife lent money to her husband, charging a high rate of interest. I think that was really the case. A woman who earned money on her own wouldn’t give it over easily to a man, and it wouldn’t be strange for her to demand interest for the money she lent him. [laughs]

The foundation of public order, though, was land. When viewed through the perspective that status derives from ownership of farmlands, women tend to disappear from the records.

MIYAZAKI: Hmm, it’s quite different from the history we learn from textbooks. [laughs]

Do battle scenes in period dramas show what really happened?

MIYAZAKI: Human beings have done a lot to change nature. But we forget that and think that the landscape we see now has been that way from a long time ago. Chinese people think that Confucius wandered around the same landscape they see now. If we take the Great Wall as an example, during Confucius’s time that area was full of vegetation. It was later that the greenery disappeared.

AMINO: The landscape of the Japanese archipelago was also very different from what it is now. In your film there are forests, but until medieval times the Japanese archipelago was full of water. Those places we call lovely rice fields (biden) used to all be inlets or wetlands. The biden region in Niigata was a watery lagoon in the past. The same was true of the Kantō plain and the Osaka plain. The town of Miwa in the inland area of Ibaraki Prefecture has no water around it now, but in the sixteenth century a ship battle took place there.

MIYAZAKI: That is why battles like the ones at Kawanakajima were very different from what we see in movies. That area has ridge paths between rice fields and holes in the ground, making it impossible for horses to charge straight ahead. If they tried that, they would break their legs. [laughs]

What’s more, the short-statured Japanese horses couldn’t possibly run with such speed carrying a samurai in full armor on its back. In reality, the horse would be panting in three and a half minutes. That means battle scenes like the ones in Kurosawa-san’s Kagemusha (1980) and Kadokawa Films’ Heaven and Earth (directed by Haruki Kadokawa, 1990) are false. It would have been impossible for them to charge like the light cavalry did across the plains of Europe.

AMINO: For one thing, there aren’t any places like that in Japan except in Hokkaido.

I think the forest scenery was quite different from today as well. Surprisingly, there are many old place names incorporating the words for plain (no, ya) or field (hara) in various locations. My thought is that most likely a field (hara) was where grasses grew with a view across the expanse, whereas in a plain (no, ya) much taller grasses grew. It is hard to reconcile the current scenery of those areas with that image.

However, in Japan’s case, there aren’t that many place names with the word for forest (mori). Instead, there are many places named woods (hayashi, rin) and mountain (yama, san). When we say mountains and woods, it may seem that there is a mountain covered with woods, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. They called woods in the flat areas “mountains.” There are many such “mountains” in the Kantō plain.

Nature became no longer frightening in the Muromachi period

MIYAZAKI: I’ve thought all along about the form forests must have had. When I look at gardens of the estates of Heian period (794–1185) courtiers, I wonder why they made dry gardens. It was probably because when they took one step outside their walls, they had a view of steep mountains and deep valleys. It was when that view disappeared that they replicated the steep mountains and deep valleys inside their gardens. That’s my own unfounded theory. Gardens were laid out in the capital’s Higashiyama district because that area became developed, and that, I think, was in the Muromachi period.

AMINO: The dry landscape gardens that symbolized steep mountains and deep valleys were created in the Muromachi period. Commerce and finance also became developed during the Muromachi period.

When society as a whole becomes wealthy and currency starts circulating, practical calculations begin to be made, while at the same time the desire for riches becomes very strong. That desire goes over and beyond the fear of nature. Until then, people considered mountains and the sea to be the dwelling places of gods with powers beyond those of humans. When they entered those worlds to hunt in the mountains and fish in the seas, they would always make an offering to the gods, to repay the gods in some way.

MIYAZAKI: That’s true. They still felt fear and reverence.

AMINO: It was the same with moneylenders. Because they were lending something that belonged to the gods or the Buddha, they were able to collect interest as a token of thanks. That is why they couldn’t charge interest fees above a certain limit.

Chestnut trees had been planted consistently since the Jōmon period; throughout ancient and medieval times all hamlets made a conscious effort to plant chestnut trees. The state has records of the acreage of chestnut orchards. It has been thought that forestry began in the Edo period, but actually, repaying nature for felling trees by planting new trees in their stead has been going on since ancient times. That sensibility clearly started to disappear in the Muromachi period when currency began to be circulated and promissory notes came into use. The intent became to make money. Until then, these activities occurred on the border between the worlds of humans and gods, in areas with a sacred character. And ironworking was one of those activities.

Focus on agriculture destroyed nature

AMINO: In the olden days, the way of life of the Japanese was in fairly good harmony with nature. That balance started to become disturbed in the Muromachi period, and by the later Edo period the concept that growing rice makes money so agriculture must be developed became strong. That idea led to the reclamation of lakes and lagoons to develop rice fields, which disturbed the balance of living organisms as a whole.

MIYAZAKI: There’s an essay written by Shūgorō Yamamoto15-san in 1953. That was when Japan was facing food shortages, but he wrote against destroying land to develop rice fields and warned that it would be an irreparable mistake.

AMINO: The focus on agriculture also came in from Europe in modern times. I question the validity of the interpretations of European historians. Forests, rivers, and seas have various significances, but these have been ignored. The image of European history that has been introduced in Japan, at least, is biased, and I think that has exacerbated the existing distortion in modern Japan’s history studies.

To reverse this argument, I think we have undervalued ourselves to a great degree. The vocational competence of Japanese commoners and the system of commercial accounting practices in the late Edo period were at a very high level. This is why, when they came into contact with Europe, they were able to convert Western concepts into existing Japanese terms. We can see the proof of these abilities in the Japanese terminology used in commerce.

MIYAZAKI: Yes. Words like promissory notes (tegata) and currency exchange (kawase) aren’t direct translations.

AMINO: Securities-related terms, such as opening session of the stock market (yoritsuki), and closing (ōhike), transaction (torihiki), market price (sōba), and merchandise certificate (kitte) are all old words.

It was the same in the world of craftsmen. When Western-style architecture came into Japan, Japanese carpenters mastered the techniques in five to six years. Suddenly they were constructing outwardly Western-style buildings with Japanese techniques. The rapidness of Japan’s modernization was not a miracle at all. It was not accomplished by a small group of important personages. Rather, Japan was able to digest what came from the West because the villagers and commoners in Japan had a high level of technical competency. That basic foundation was already there, and the starting point for it was the Muromachi period.

We need to make a scrupulous review of such historical facts and reevaluate our history.

MIYAZAKI: If we do that, the world of entertainment will change drastically. [laughs]

Yoshihiko Amino Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1928. Historian. Graduated from University of Tokyo, Faculty of Letters. Majored in Japanese medieval history, Japanese sea traders’ history. Career spanned researcher at Institute for the Study of Japanese Folklore, teacher at Kitazono High School, Tokyo, Assistant Professor at Nagoya University Faculty of Letters, Professor at Kanagawa University Junior College, Research Professor at Kanagawa University Economics Department. Publications include Zōho Muen, Kugai, Raku (Expanded edition: Muen, Kugai, Raku), Ikei no Ōken (A Different Royal Prerogative) (both Heibonsha Library); Nihon no Rekishi o Yomi Naosu (Reinterpreting Japanese History) (Chikuma Shobō); Chūsei no Hinin to Yūjo (Outcastes and Prostitutes in Medieval Japan) (Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko); Amino Yoshihiko Chosakushū (Collected Works of Yoshihiko Amino) (eighteen volumes and appendix, Iwanami Shoten). Deceased in 2004.

On Japan’s Animation Culture

Yomiuri Shimbun, evening edition, August 8, 1997

—Works of Japanese animation have recently become popular in Europe and America. With director Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) rising to number one on the US video chart, for example, we could say that Japan’s anime culture is becoming accepted internationally.

MIYAZAKI: Certainly, some of those Japanese videos, TV series, and films are being welcomed, particularly in the US, UK, France, and Italy. This is startling, even for those of us who are animators. But if we take a rational look, this doesn’t mean that Japanese animation has been accepted by the average household in the West. Youth culture everywhere is made up of a mosaic; Japanese animation has just been inserted into one of the infinite numbers of mosaic fragments. Deluding ourselves that this is “the curtain rising on a major period of Japanimation” is merely turning our ethnic inferiority complex inside out.

—Doesn’t the decision by Disney to distribute Princess Mononoke worldwide prove that Japanese animation is of a high quality?

MIYAZAKI: This agreement was reached between Tokuma Shoten, one of the producing companies, and Disney practically before we realized what was happening. But Disney is quite a severe taskmaster, so if the film doesn’t do well commercially, I’m sure they’ll quickly pull out. This shouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, just as with the delusion that “Japanimation” is foremost in the world. It seems odd to get so excited by this.

—You have always said that what you want to make is “films” and not “anime.” But what is popular abroad seems to be anime. What do you see as the problem with anime?

MIYAZAKI: The major source for Japanese animation is manga, whose greatest characteristic is its method of expression centered on emotions. In order to express emotions, space and time are freely distorted; in effect, manga does not deal with realism. Anime has changed as it has been influenced by manga, becoming stereotypical and locked in its own enclosed world. People who go to see a film aren’t able to figure out what is going on when they watch anime. I can’t imagine that those kinds of anime can open up the future for Japan’s animation.

—Do you mean that anime is confined to a world based on numerous conventions shared between the creators and the fans?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, that’s what I mean, and it’s not interesting to me. People who like that sort of strange treatment happen to have cropped up in the West. This isn’t a reason to celebrate that “the word otaku has become recognized the world over.”

—Have you attempted to break through that situation with Princess Mononoke?

MIYAZAKI: We have consistently tried to make “films,” not “anime.” That is, to express time and space with more universality. We try to find ways of representation understandable to a country grandpa watching our film for the first time.

—That is what you mean by realism, isn’t it? What is it that has caused anime to become its own specialized world?

MIYAZAKI: Isn’t it because Japanese pop culture today has manga as its starting point? Films and stage plays are made based on manga. Of course, manga were originally influenced by films. The manga format is so readily comprehended that it has become Japanese culture’s common denominator. That is the peril faced by Japanese culture.

—The common language of the creator and the viewer has become their “manga experience.”

MIYAZAKI: I think the expressive format of manga has permeated the culture widely and deeply, much more than Japanese people themselves realize. Of course the possibilities of expression opened up by manga are great. So it is ridiculous to discard all that heritage. But I have doubts as to whether the manga world can be our teacher or our starting point. This relates to the absence of a sense of reality when Japanese become conscious of hard facts. Even when people should fight against each other, when they should clash with each other, they lack a certain realism. But, as this is something I also like about the Japanese, my feelings tend to be mixed.

—You became an animator after you had wanted to become a manga artist. How should we seek new ways of expression within our current cultural state?

MIYAZAKI: Just as Tezuka-san couldn’t escape Disney’s spell while respecting Disney, I too am mired in the spell of Tezuka-san for drawing and director Akira Kurosawa for filmmaking. But I am hopeful that the next generation will break that spell.

—Does that mean you have hope for young creators?

MIYAZAKI: Young people these days are growing up at a time, different from the past, when it is hard to see what is to come. I am sure that some of them will recognize the flimsiness of the current ways of expression and want to make films, not “anime.” They should never give up their efforts to create new, compelling characters, and they should always challenge themselves to depict humans with greater universality and depth. But this is totally unrelated to Japan’s animation industry spreading throughout the world.

A Child’s Five Minutes Can Be Equivalent to a Grown-up’s Year

One Book I Recommend: Takara-sagashi (Treasure-Hunting)

Kodomo no Tomo (A Child’s Companion), Fukuinkan Shoten, October 1997

There are so many illustrated children’s books that I like, making it hard to choose only one. One that I had so much fun reading with children was Takara-sagashi (Treasure-Hunting, Rieko Nakagawa, illustrated by Yuriko Ōmura; Fukuinkan Shoten, 1964). A child meets up with another child, and instead of fighting right off, they compete with one another. One says he has a really strong older brother while the other boasts about himself. This keeps escalating … The races run by Yūji and Gick and their competing feats of strength reminded me of the antics in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Coupled with the pictures, Treasure-Hunting is a unique book.

Because I make animated films aimed at children, I know that there is a considerable gap between what grown-ups think is good and what kids think is good. Treasure-Hunting is a work that children really enjoy. A number of episodes stick in my mind. The scene when they are jumping high, or the flowing lines when the two of them are running … Looking at the pictures, I start giggling in spite of myself. The characters are so earnest. When compared to the same author’s Guri to Gura (Guri and Gura) series, the characters may not be as developed, but Yūji and Gick are fun, and the drawings are free and easy, and it feels good to read the story. At the end, they settle down and eat their snack. This type of work is fully complete on its own, and it’s impossible to explain in words how much fun it is.

In terms of the relationship between illustrated books and animation, we wonder if it makes sense to animate a good picture book. Picture books are full of blank spaces, they can be read from the end, you can look at just your favorite parts, and they can be kept at your side to read over and over again.

My animation staff and I have talked about what can be done to turn this book into a film.16 We agreed that children who see the film should be able to enjoy the book again when they go back and read it. The animated film shouldn’t be so stimulating that the book seems boring on later readings. I think the film and book can complement each other.

Yet, switching on a video and opening up a book are fundamentally different actions. A moving image is a unidirectional stimulation that progresses at a set speed whether one is watching it or not. But a picture book is different. These days, when children are more and more reliant on moving images, shouldn’t they take the time to enjoy picture books within their real-world life? Time just to stare out into space or pick at the fluff on a tatami mat is precious for a child.

In this world of a flood of unidirectional stimulation of images telling them to “look this way,” children must be allowed to seek out what they want to do so their desires will not be quashed. It’s hard for kids to live in our present conditions. But nothing will come of it just by complaining about this. As to what we adults can do, I have decided that I want to give pleasure to the children I come across.

When my children were young, I was never at home while they were awake. So when I finished making a film and had some time, I would entertain them extravagantly.

I had a great time when I took about ten children, including my sons and nieces and nephews, to Taketomi Island in Okinawa. I was the sole adult. They told me when they grew older that they thought it was a paradise. They said they wanted to save up their money and go again. Normally they were always squabbling, but during that trip, the older kids took care of the younger ones, and the younger kids listened to the older ones. It wasn’t that these kids were special. For children, paradise is still the world of Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons.

I told the children a scary story at bedtime. They got all excited, saying “I’ll be too scared to go to the toilet!” That made me go further, and I produced a chilling laugh, “Hee, hee, hee …” to escalate things. This made them even more frightened. We don’t have that kind of fun after we become adults. To these children I was the uncle who took them on their first bullet train ride and their first airplane ride. Looking back on it, I got to play all the good parts.

I want to continue to be this sort of “weird old man.” Children are adventuresome on their own as they try to comprehend the wonders of this world, and that’s best for them. This means there should be many more strange things around children that they can’t understand.

What is gained in childhood, though hard to fathom the form it might take, has a decisive influence on that child. For that child, five minutes can have as much value as one year for a grown-up.

I Want to Fill the Space Between Myself and the Audience

Interview by Jun Watanabe, reporter

Hokkaido Shimbun, evening edition, March 6, 1998

—The animated film Princess Mononoke, released last summer, has earned over ten billion yen [$100 million] and broken domestic box office records, and is still enjoying a long run in theaters. With its weighty theme of “nature vs. humanity” there are no superheroic moves by the main character, and the conclusion is ambivalent. Criticism is split among those who see it as being “too soft,” and those who maintain it “raises serious issues.” It is not the type of “heart-pounding, exciting manga film” of past Miyazaki animated films.

MIYAZAKI: Since this was a story I wanted to tell even if I broke the rules of “the nature of entertainment films,” I purposely went outside conventional boundaries. I am always betraying the path I took in my previous film. After the action-adventure film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, I made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which people die. I don’t think this time is any different. I’m convinced it would have been the end of me if I had made Totoro 2.

The conditions were sufficient with a production budget of 2.35 billion yen [$23.5 million] and a two-year schedule. Any problems in the film are due to the limits of my talents and those of my staff. Even if we had been given more time and money, I don’t think we could have done more. I can state with confidence that the film’s conclusion was the only one possible.

It may take about five years for critical assessment of this film to be made. I was immensely pleased when I received a comment, from an adult, that his reaction to the film was “No matter what sorts of defeats we face, we must live on.” With so many people seeing the film, I think it serves it well to be viewed in a variety of ways.

—Since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, you have been able to make films of your own with investment from the major publishing company Tokuma Shoten. In the midst of the flood of thirty-minute weekly animated programs on television, it appears that you are the exception in making animated films under favorable conditions.

MIYAZAKI: I could make a program with twenty-six episodes—six months’ worth. That is, if I were given two years to prepare for it. But where would the money for something like that come from? [laughs] The current conditions don’t allow decent animated shows to be made. In television, after a lot of planning and sales concerns, if the first episode has a low viewer rating, they move right away to start on the next plan. There is no way to nurture planning abilities under such conditions. So, they look to manga for stories. It sounds good when they call it “media mix,” but it’s just an aggregate of individual greed.

Unlike the days when I was putting all my energy into making Heidi, Girl of the Alps, outsourcing the difficult animation drawings to foreign countries has made things easy. I can’t say which way is better. But making animated programs aimed at profitable safe-plays will only sap the energy of young animators without allowing them to learn anything. This is why we have chosen to continue to betray our audience with each film.

At Studio Ghibli, the old main staff is departing, and those in their early thirties will form the new core group. I will also retire from Ghibli and participate from the outside. I’m looking forward to seeing how the staff will react to me as I meddle in their work.

—The “Miyazaki brand” known to be safe for children to watch has become well established, and lower cost video editions of Kiki’s Delivery Service and other past films have become hits. But you are not particularly satisfied with past results and are already working on your new project.

MIYAZAKI: My producer’s daughter’s friend saw Kiki’s Delivery Service and said, “I want to keep on watching to see what happens next.” She was envious of the main character, a young witch, who met up with all sorts of tribulations and had such dramatic experiences. I thought this didn’t bode well.

Young people these days have no motivation to carve out their own lives the way the heroine did. Even if I depict the growth of a person, it is dismissed as “just a movie.” When I was young, poverty encouraged us to have a passion for life, but today’s Japan is among the wealthiest economies in the world. This has widened the gap, or blank space, between the story and the audience. It’s not an easy problem to overcome.

But the reason I said blank space rather than wall is that I think we can definitely bridge this divide. Films have the power not only to salve our discontent with the world but to make us realize the yearnings within our hearts. I am now thinking of creating a film for preadolescent girls around ten years old. If they can enjoy this story—a story that isn’t motivated by falling in love—then I will feel victorious. [laughs] If they say, “Oh, it’s just a movie,” then I will feel defeated. It’s a life and death match. At the earliest, it probably won’t be ready until the twenty-first century.

Forty-four Questions on Princess Mononoke for Director Hayao Miyazaki from International Journalists at the Berlin International Film Festival

Roman Album Animage Special: Hayao Miyazaki to Hideaki Anno (Roman Album Animage Special: Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno), Tokuma Shoten, June 10, 1998

—What was the original idea for Princess Mononoke?

MIYAZAKI: I thought it strange that when Japanese movies dealt with history, they always had the capital city as the setting and only showed samurai and other conventional social classes. For me, the real main characters of history were those who lived in marginal areas and in the plains and had a richer and deeper life than we realize. One of my ideas was to unearth those hidden aspects by making those people the main characters and placing the setting someplace other than the capital.

The other idea came from my feeling that, in this age, we have begun doubting the very existence of humanity. These doubts have now spread instinctively to our children. I found I must come up with an answer as to my thinking concerning these doubts. The main reason I made this film is because I felt children in Japan harbor doubts as to why they need to live.

—Does that mean Princess Mononoke is a film for children?

MIYAZAKI: I had thought at first to make it a film aimed at teenagers. But in the process of making the film, rather than thinking about whom I was making it for, the more pressing issue became whether I would be able to finish the film at all. And I lost sight of whom I intended as my audience. People of differing ages came to movie theaters to see the film. From the responses I heard, the reaction of teenagers was closest to my own intention. So I realized that my initial idea was on target.

—Do you think it will have as much success abroad?

MIYAZAKI: I’m the type who comes up with the worst possible case when I try to predict the future. That means I won’t be surprised no matter what happens, since I’ve already predicted the worst. [laughs]

—Having seen the film, it seems you have been influenced by director Akira Kurosawa.

MIYAZAKI: I love director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Even though I love it, the Japan that he depicts in that film is not the real Japan. My perception of Japanese history is different. That is why I felt I needed to make my own period drama with historical Japan as the setting, and why I worked hard at it.

The samurai who appear in Seven Samurai are modeled on the Russian intelligentsia and also on the many laborers who were in dire straits after Japan lost the Pacific War. In historical Japan there were no such samurai and peasants. In fact, peasants were samurai in many cases. They all carried weapons. To Japanese who had lost the war, Seven Samurai had an intense reality. But now, as the twentieth century is about to draw to a close, I thought it would be a mistake to use the same model in making a film set in historical Japan. Director Akira Kurosawa’s film is so powerful it cast a spell that everyone has fallen under, giving us a strong impression that it is true to Japanese history. It took me a long time to break that spell.

We need to think more deeply about the existence of human beings as living creatures

—In making Princess Mononoke, what was most difficult for you, technically or in terms of content?

MIYAZAKI: It was solely the story. [laughs]

—To what do you attribute the story’s difficulty?

MIYAZAKI: There is a certain formula for creating a story. Most stories can be made by fitting them into a formula and varying the flavoring. But for this film I thought I couldn’t follow that formula, so I struggled with it.

This struggle influenced the entire film. There were many parts of the film where normally I would have added a few more shots to express the main character’s emotions more clearly, but for this film I felt I shouldn’t. This is because this film is not for people who are psychologically healthy and strong. I thought that my depictions would allow those people who feel plenty of pain and hurt to fully understand the hurt felt by Ashitaka and San. It was only after I finished making the film that I realized healthy and happy people wouldn’t understand that part.

—This film seems quite different from your previous films.

MIYAZAKI: It seems to me that this is where I have inevitably ended up as an extension of the films I have made so far.

—In Princess Mononoke what part is fiction and what part is reality?

MIYAZAKI: It is true that the viewpoint of Japanese people toward nature changed significantly in the fifteenth century. But pretty much the rest is fiction. They did forge iron in those days. It was a time when iron was made by carving away mountains and felling trees to make charcoal. But there weren’t such large ironworks, nor did women work in them. Mixing fiction and nonfiction in a film to dupe the audience is the real thrill of my work.

—What commonalities do you find between the fifteenth century and the present?

MIYAZAKI: They say that the ways of thinking and the sensibilities of present-day Japanese were formulated around the fifteenth century. The fifteenth century saw a great advance in industry. Along with this economic growth, much of people’s behavior was void of ideology and ideals.

—Does that mean that in this film you use the past as the setting but are criticizing present-day Japanese society?

MIYAZAKI: Rather than it being a criticism of present-day Japan, I think we need to think more deeply about the existence of human beings as living beings. The result may be a criticism of the current state of Japanese society. However, as nothing new comes out of mere criticism, we need to come up with a new perspective.

I never dreamed of making a film based on myth

—It seems like Princess Mononoke is based on Japanese mythology.

MIYAZAKI: It is influenced more by the story of Gilgamesh rather than Japanese mythology. Also, this isn’t mythology, but Japanese peasants and those who lived in the foothills in olden times thought that the mountain-dwelling ironworkers were monsters. There are still legends here and there that feature princesses with burn marks, or giant men who have lost an arm or a leg due to accidents while they labored. In Japan those legends are most common in areas where there were people who wandered the mountains making iron. These legends were an influence on me.

—Were there specific things that you used from Japanese legends?

MIYAZAKI: For example, for the Forest Spirit who takes the form of a deer, there is an old folk dance in which the dancers wear antlers. And for the giant Didarabocchi there are many giant legends all over Japan. But I didn’t use those giants as hints for the images. To the contrary, I was intent on giving them a different form, and I put a different meaning onto the word didarabocchi. It is true that I received some ideas from these legends, but I never dreamed of making a film based on myth.

—Are the Forest Spirit and the kodama creatures from your own imagination?

MIYAZAKI: I gave them a certain flavor, but I think there were many creatures like them. Peoples who live in countries covered in forests all believed in those types of creatures. Just as they remain for the Celtic people, it must have been the same for the Germanic people as well. As human beings became more powerful and the darkness of the forests began to disappear, those types of creatures came to exist only in fairy tales.

The kodama came from the eeriness and mysteriousness of the forest

—My curiosity was raised by those kodama. Please tell us more about them.

MIYAZAKI: I wondered how to give shape to the image of the forest, from the time when it was not a collection of plants but had a spiritual meaning as well. I didn’t want the forest just to have many tall trees or be full of darkness. I wanted to express the feeling of mysteriousness that one feels when stepping into a forest—the feeling that someone is watching from somewhere or the strange sound that one can hear from somewhere. When I mulled over how I could give form to that feeling, I thought of the kodama. Those who can see them do, and those who can’t don’t see them. They appear and disappear, as a presence beyond good or evil.

—Have you ever seen or felt kodama?

MIYAZAKI: I have felt that “there is something in the forest.”

—A feeling that there is a living creature there, observing you?

MIYAZAKI: Well, it’s a feeling that “something is there.” It might be life itself. I understood this when I saw that my young son, who had gone into the forest with me, suddenly became frightened. In Japanese mountain villages there are many forbidden areas that people never enter. This is because even the men who normally go into the mountains alone with no fear are overcome by great apprehension when they approach these places. There are various scientific theories about this, but it is not a matter of the presence of a particular beast or bird or tree.

People who live in cities also have a chance to experience this kind of forest spirit. They can go to villages in Japan where there are small Shinto shrines placed in the areas where it seems like some presence might be felt. So people go there to pray, “Please stay calm,” or “Please don’t harm us humans.” They are not praying for their own souls to be saved.

Ashitaka repeatedly says, “Quiet down, quiet down,” and that concept of quieting down is central to the Japanese perception of nature.

No one can explain why calamity befalls one

—About the Demon Spirit, why does something that was a forest spirit become a demon spirit?

MIYAZAKI: One reason is the concept of the absurd. It is the same as wondering why someone else becomes sick but I don’t. If we explain it by modern medicine, we can say, “He had an infection here.” But we can’t explain why he was infected and why I wasn’t infected, can we? We can’t explain why calamities befall us.

There is another very important theme in Princess Mononoke that deals with how to control the hatred in us that has become uncontrollable. The problem presented to me was whether San’s hatred of humanity could be softened by Ashitaka’s love.

San’s hatred of humanity could not be erased. But she was able to accept Ashitaka. He tells San that even if she can’t forgive humanity the two of them should continue to live. I expect San will repeatedly break Ashitaka’s heart after this. [laughs] Having said they should live on, Ashitaka has chosen a path full of ordeals. He is a youth who has decided to live in the most difficult place possible. That is, he wants both the people in the ironworks and San to live. He wants the mountain to live. Knowing that iron-making must continue, he faces the modern dilemma of how to live as a modern person. He’s in for a hard time. [laughs]

The people in the ironworks are kind, but when San breaks in, they become very brutal. They surround her, taunt her, and try to kill her. Yet they are ordinary people. Seeing this, Ashitaka does not denigrate everything about them. Even though they have these traits, he tries to accept them. And he tries somehow to control the power of the curse on his arm, the hatred that explodes inside himself, that he cannot control. But I didn’t explain any of this. The more I explain, the more false it becomes. And I have no way of replying to children who, having seen the film, ask why Ashitaka can control his hatred when they are unable to control theirs. That is the very reason I wanted to make this film.

San and Ashitaka are fully alive within children

—All the women in Princess Mononoke, not just Lady Eboshi, are very strong characters. My impression was that Japanese women are not like that.

MIYAZAKI: Japanese themselves have thought from a long time ago that women in Japan were gentle. That is a lie. Men began to pin women down and make them submissive when Japan met up with America and Europe and had to modernize. It was then that men insisted on the wholesale approval of their self-centered economic activities. Until just before that time, women actually had many rights and were very active.

When we look at Japanese history, until about 130 years ago, Japanese women were powerful, free, and generous. They engaged in productive economic activities and held various important roles. Of course few women were national power holders, but in daily life women held plenty of power and asserted themselves.

—Lady Eboshi is depicted as a very revolutionary character, and yet she carves out the mountain and destroys nature. What is your thought on this combination of characteristics?

MIYAZAKI: It would be easy to solve the problems of human beings were we to label those who decimate forests and destroy nature as evil, base, and savage. On the contrary, the tragedy of human beings is that the people who try to push forward the most virtuous parts of humanity end up destroying nature. Unless we look at this aspect of the human experience, I think our view of history—no, our view of the earth—becomes distorted.

This means it is a mistake to think that if we solve the earth’s ecological problems, human beings will become happier. It is necessary to solve the ecological problems, but at the same time we need to realize fully that human beings are a tragic presence in the world. The value of life is the same for animals, humans, and plants. We must understand that human beings are a part of nature, are the ones who have destroyed nature, and are the ones who live within the nature they have destroyed. We need to consider the ecological problems more seriously with this awareness of the effects of the actions of human beings.

—Are San and Ashitaka counterpoints who stand respectively on the side of nature and on the side of humans?

MIYAZAKI: San does not represent nature; she harbors anger and hatred toward the behavior of humans. That is, she represents the doubts that human beings who are living now have about human beings. San and Ashitaka are fully alive in the children living around us. Though grown-ups didn’t get this, when Ashitaka told San to “keep living,” many children decided in their hearts “to live.” I received many letters saying so.

Human history repeats itself over and over again

—It seems your intent is to express the relationship between humans and nature in this film.

MIYAZAKI: Actually, I wanted to tell what human beings have done, what human history has been.

—This film depicts the relationship between nature and human beings not as a simple conflict but as a very entangled interaction.

MIYAZAKI: While one facet of nature is wonderful, gentle, and inspires good feelings within us, another facet is that of a frightening and brutal cruelty. Civilization has tried to tame this aspect and as a result risks destroying nature itself.

A film that does not accurately depict our perspective on nature would be boring. This is why I didn’t want to look at nature from the currently trendy ecological perspective. Rather, I wanted to show nature the way humans have faced it.

—Do you think the Japanese audience sees this film as a message on the natural environment?

MIYAZAKI: The people who see that message are most likely those who had decided to do so before they watched the film. I didn’t make this film to be a message about the natural environment. In fact, I meant to state my objection to the way environmental issues are treated. That is, I didn’t want to split off the global environment from human beings. I wanted to include the entire world of humans and other living creatures, as well as the global environment, water, and air. I also wanted to delve into whether people can overcome the hatred that has gradually grown inside them.

I wanted to break down the dichotomy of wonderful nature and foolish human beings

—In the film’s last scene, the forest regenerates. Why did you end the film that way?

MIYAZAKI: Nature doesn’t become completely barren like a desert after humans have destroyed it. Nature repeatedly regenerates itself. What is important is what humans learn from that process. If we cannot recover from one mistake, most likely the human race would have become extinct a long time ago.

When Japanese nowadays talk about nature, they often say nature has declined and that fifty years ago nature was much richer. But nature fifty years ago was one in which many trees had already been cut down and other trees planted in their stead.

True nature contains much that is fearsome. It is not nature that has regenerated by the efforts of civilization.

If, when we talk about ecology, we say that the nature before our eyes has been destroyed, it shows that we have not thought deeply about the relationship between human beings and nature.

Nature regenerates at the end of the film. This is the same process that occurred in Europe due to reforestation efforts after the industrial revolution had decimated forests, and also in Japan after many trees were felled to make iron. These forests may be full of light, but they are not the same as the primeval forests teeming with life. Unless we bear this in mind in thinking about nature and human beings, I don’t think we can correctly think about the future.

What human beings have done to escape misfortune has spoiled the earth

—It seems that in this film there is much fighting among human beings and between nature and human beings, without any attempt at talking things over.

MIYAZAKI: We don’t talk things over in reality, do we? [laughs] But, actually, the only recourse we have is to talk things over. This is why Ashitaka chose the most difficult path. It is the same for our world in the future. We have come to the point where we must select the most difficult path.

—Does the fact that you spend time in the mountains affect your thinking about nature?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I think it does. The mountain areas are becoming more developed, making the sense of crisis and disquiet stronger the farther we go into the mountains. In other words, the sense of crisis that nature is being destroyed is stronger at my place in the mountains than at my house in the city. So I can’t be calm. [laughs]

—Are issues of the natural environment raised in Japan due to the characteristics of Japanese geography?

MIYAZAKI: I think geography plays a part. But the strongest reason for the sense of crisis is that a very precious part of what is in Japanese people’s hearts concerning nature, our identity, is being destroyed.

Japan is still full of forests. There is also a lot of greenery. But we feel a sense of crisis in the very existence and treatment of that greenery. If we think only of Japan, in fifty years’ time I think Japan will be a much calmer country rich in greenery.

When I was young, I thought, “Japan is such a foolish country. It’s the most foolish country in Asia.” Then I realized that our neighboring countries, Korea, China, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, were all foolish just like Japan. It worried me that these countries’ efforts to become wealthier and escape the misery of poverty had the result of making a mess of our planet. I was more carefree when I thought it was just Japan that was so stupid. If things go on this way, I could not help but conclude that the entire human race is foolish. As adults we must respond to our children’s question of how to live on a planet that is burdened by such problems. I made this film out of my sense of obligation to give a response.

—Is that a way of dealing with the inconsistency of developed nations saying it is wrong to cut trees in Brazil despite their having done the same thing?

MIYAZAKI: No, that is not it. I wanted to make a film that pointed out that although humans are not wise and celebrated beings, we must still continue to live.

The heroine of this film disavows humanity. She thinks humans are despicable beings. This is an issue relevant to many people who live in this world. They can’t consider humans to be worthy. They are beginning to think that the most despicable creatures on this earth might be human beings. This is something that was unthinkable in the nineteenth century.

We don’t have a response to that. I don’t think I have the correct answer. All I am attempting to do is to suffer together with others as we face this issue.

—I would like to ask about animism. What are your thoughts on religion?

MIYAZAKI: There is a religious feeling that remains to this day in many Japanese. It is a belief that there is a very pure place deep within our country where people are not to enter. In that place clear water flows and nourishes the deep forests. I share this feeling—an intense religious sensibility—that returning to this place of purity is the most marvelous thing. There is no holy book and there are no saints. This feeling is not recognized as a religion on the same level as the world’s religions, but for Japanese it is definitely a religious feeling.

The forest that is the setting for Princess Mononoke is not drawn from an actual forest. Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.

I wanted to show the dual aspects of good and evil that exist simultaneously within us

—This film has parts that are difficult to understand, and violent scenes. What are your thoughts about this?

MIYAZAKI: I made this film fully realizing that it was complex. It is arrogant to think while making a film, “The audience may not figure it out,” or “It’s not possible to understand.” If one depicts the world so that it can be figured out or understood, the world becomes small and shabby. People who are living in our modern times, including those who have seen the film, have the sense that “the world can’t be understood by a simple diagram.” So the more you explain it in simple terms the more suspect it becomes. I came face to face with this problem and decided not to explain everything.

For example, the wolf spirit Moro is very gentle, yet also brutal. She wouldn’t be understandable without showing both of these parts. For her, San is both a cherished daughter and an ugly creature, because Moro finds human beings despicable.

Making the film became difficult in the extreme because I wanted to show both sides of things—the good that is always accompanied by the bad—at the same time.

—So your intent was to present the duality in the characters?

MIYAZAKI: This film was not made to judge good and evil. Both good and evil are inside human beings. That is how the world is, I believe.

—It seems to me that it is too violent for children to watch.

MIYAZAKI: I am fully aware of that opinion. But children most certainly already have violence within them. Unless we touch upon that, I don’t think the film can be convincing to children. And I don’t think this is a film that shows violence for the sake of enjoying violence. This is why I don’t see a problem with it.

—Weren’t children in Japan shocked by the violence?

MIYAZAKI: I think it was shocking to them. I think it was upsetting to them. Yet all the people who saw the film understood that it was not violence for the sake of violence. Inside normally gentle children there is an accumulation of violence and hatred in a form that they cannot control—that is the condition of our current age. That is why children can’t be placated with only candy and chocolate. I wanted to communicate to children that even if there is bloodshed, there are beautiful things.

Most of Ashitaka’s actions are his dealing with how to control the hatred growing inside him. This is the same as Japanese children today feeling conflicted about the violence that they harbor within themselves—feelings such as why others are impatient with them, why they feel hatred toward others, or why they can’t make friends.

Not only are they concerned about their own violence, they have doubts as to whether human beings are celebrated as living beings. Neither adults nor the Ministry of Education have answers to these doubts. They only try to teach children how to live in a clever way and have an easy time throughout their life. When they tell children they should study, Japanese parents don’t say their children should study because gaining knowledge is important. The result of decades of this has been a society that has reached a dead end.

Violence is a human attribute, something inherent in us. Those who can’t control it end tragically. There is an increase recently in the number of people who say they hate all others. One of the motivations to produce this film was to delve into whether human beings can control that hatred and dissolve it. That is why I had absolutely no hesitation in putting the issue of violence into this film. Moreover, I can say with confidence that there have been no instances of children copying actions they saw in Princess Mononoke and hurting others.

The hallmark of Studio Ghibli films is the depiction of nature

—I felt the artwork in Princess Mononoke was wonderful compared to previous films. Is that due to technical improvements? Or was it your intention as the director?

MIYAZAKI: The major characteristic of Studio Ghibli—not just myself—is the way we depict nature. We don’t subordinate the natural setting to the characters. Our way of thinking is that nature exists and human beings exist within it.

That is because we feel that the world is beautiful. Human relationships are not the only thing that is interesting. We think that weather, time, rays of light, plants, water, and wind—what make up the landscape—are all beautiful. That is why we make efforts to incorporate them as much as possible in our work. At times, though, we do wonder why we make it so hard for ourselves. [laughs]

—If you are so concerned with nature, why not make live-action films?

MIYAZAKI: Japanese live-action cameras fail when they shoot Japanese scenery. When films were made in black and white, monochrome helped directors like Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi to make very moving films. When color came into use, the scenery became boring. I think that is because Japanese films have been incapable of capturing scenes in color. They are not stimulating. They are shallow. The islands we live on have so much depth and beauty. My feeling is that even our inept drawings are better at expressing these qualities.

And there’s one more thing. We have destroyed too much of the landscape. So it would involve a lot of work to take live-action shots. We’d have to erase telephone poles, and the building on top of the mountain over there. We’d have to scrape off the concrete that lines the riverbanks. It would be difficult to do all that.

—Have you ever thought you wanted to make a live-action film?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t think I have the talent for it, and there aren’t wonderful actors in Japan. The faces of Japanese these days wouldn’t make good pictures. In about five years someone may come along whose face looks good on camera. [laughs] None of the faces right now look like they are seriously confronting life head-on. So I don’t see any Japanese actress whose face I like. Of course, if an actress were sitting right beside me, I’d probably like her face. [laughs]

—Is the advantage of working in animation the fact that you can depict nature?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it is. That is why when I drew the outskirts of a small fifteenth century Japanese town and it turned into a film, I thought, “Live-action directors can’t shoot this,” and was very pleased. These aren’t special shots, so I don’t think the audience notices them. [laughs] But I was very happy with the result.

My dream is to make an animated film where a small-eyed main character is considered adorable

—I would like to ask about matters of technique in Princess Mononoke. The characters’ eyes are very large. Why is that?

MIYAZAKI: There are two reasons for that. One is that even Ghibli films have not been able to go outside the confines of Japanese popular culture. This is because if we deviate from popular culture, we run a big risk in terms of commercial viability. The other reason is that we think large eyes are beautiful.

My dream, though, is to create animated works that would make the audience feel that a small-eyed main character is truly adorable. This would surely entail spending more time observing children and expressing the way they are in order to draw pictures to animate the way they move. This is a new area that the young animators who come to Ghibli must take up. Because this deals with how much we can deviate from generally accepted popular culture to create our world, it is an important and appealing topic to be addressed.

—How do you feel when people call you the “Disney of Japan”?

MIYAZAKI: Walt Disney was a producer. I’m a working animator and a director, so I don’t like being compared to him. I have met some of the men called the “Nine Old Men” who worked with Walt Disney, and I respect them.

—What do you respect about the “Nine Old Men”?

MIYAZAKI: Their character. This may be too abstract, but that was it. I don’t know what each of the men did, but their confidence and pride in creating a certain era was wonderfully evident when I talked to them.

—Many animated films must have been influenced by Disney. What influenced you?

MIYAZAKI: The generation ten years older than my colleagues and me was influenced by Disney. The earlier Disney films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Pinocchio were all wonderful in terms of technique. But their depiction of the inner thoughts of human beings was so simplistic that I didn’t enjoy them very much. The films that had much greater impact on me were works like La Bergère et le Ramoneur (English-language release, The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird) (Japanese title, Ō to Tori; The King and the Bird), the Soviet-made Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen), and Hakujaden (Tale of the White Serpent; English-language release, Panda and the Magic Serpent), a story about a white serpent made in Japan. That is because they depicted what is in the hearts and minds of human beings. Deeply moved by these films, I was convinced that animation was the best method of expressing what is inside people’s hearts and decided to enter this field.

—What do you think is the future of the film industry?

MIYAZAKI: The best thing for films would be for those who watch films in movie theaters to get angry if the movie is boring. You can turn off the television and stop reading manga or books if you don’t like them. But with films, most everyone watches until the end. That is why when a film is enthralling it is enthralling, and when people get angry they get angry. This means there is still room for criticism. Critics can get angry at a film. That is the greatest potential of films. Others have concerns whether films will survive as a business, but to my mind films will not disappear because they give us the chance to get angry or be happy.

—We hear that Princess Mononoke will be the last film you direct.

MIYAZAKI: I was originally an animator, and as an animator I have produced and directed films. But being an animator is becoming too much for me. That is why this will be the last film that I make as an animator.

—Are you thinking of new projects for the future?

MIYAZAKI: I am thinking of them, but I have to reflect on my physical stamina and ask myself, “Hey, can you still do it?” As I get older, it should become harder for me to work, but I find I want to do more. [laughs] That’s what I have to watch out for.

Animation and Animism: Thoughts on the Living “Forest”

A Discussion with Takeshi Umehara, Yoshihiko Amino, Seiryū Kōsaka; Moderator: Keiichi Makino

Kino Hyōron, Rinji Zōkan: Bungaku wa naze manga ni maketaka!? (“Why Did Literature Lose Out to Manga!?” special issue, Kino Criticism), Kyoto Seika Daigaku Jōhōkan (Kyoto Seika University Information Hall), October 25, 1998

MAKINO (Moderator): Thank you all for coming to Kyoto Seika University today. In truth, as I doubted whether we could hold this discussion with these members, I am filled with astonishment and joy. The impetus for this gathering was Miyazaki-san’s Princess Mononoke, and the ironworks scene in the film. We will screen three minutes of that scene from Princess Mononoke so that we can all share those images for our discussion.

[Princess Mononoke ironworks scene: Ashitaka puts the ox driver Kōroku on a boat and takes him to the ironworks. Kōroku’s wife, Toki, upbraids her husband and the guard Gonza, and thanks Ashitaka. Then, Lady Eboshi, the head of the ironworks, appears.]

Director Akira Kurosawa, who passed away the day before yesterday, made a wonderful film, Seven Samurai, which featured samurai and peasants. But Miyazaki-san has put his focus on ironworkers and ironworks. I hear that Kōsaka-san, who is the head priest at Kōtokuji temple in Toyama Prefecture, thought “This is the history of my temple” when he saw this film.

KŌSAKA: My ancestor was what we might call a “prospector,” the boss of a group who searched for areas that could be mined. The eminent monk Rennyo stopped by before he went to Yoshizaki to proselytize not only to the villagers but also to the mountain folk in the area as his main focus. I was never ashamed of my ancestry for being ironworkers, mountain folk, and prospectors. But seeing this film, I felt Rennyo’s underlying presence, though it wasn’t evident on the surface. I was so moved, I watched it many times.

MAKINO: You used the term “villagers” in your comment just now. I had thought it meant farmers, but from the dialogue held between Amino-san and Miyazaki-san in Ushio magazine, I learned that it actually includes people who made their living in diverse ways. In the clip that we just watched, we saw several types of workers. Can we assume that ironworkers like the ones in the film existed in fact?

AMINO: Yes, they did. I have only watched the film once at a preview screening. But I was impressed at the setting of the ironworks. I may be stating this just from my own historical interpretation, but the term “villagers” doesn’t refer only to farmers. When the Ikkō uprising controlled the Kaga domain, it was said to have been a “country held by villagers.” This has been taken to mean a “peasants’ kingdom.” But that is entirely wrong.

KŌSAKA: That wasn’t the case, I agree.

AMINO: It was completely different in reality. The mountain folk and the maritime folk were urbanized people, and the Ikkō uprising was supported by the urbanized. What was particularly interesting to me in the film was that the ironworks was depicted as something like a “town,” or urban place. If I were to be picky, I’d have to say that an ox driver wouldn’t have looked like that in those days. To be accurate, he would have had a ponytail, not a normal hairstyle.

MIYAZAKI: Oh, they wore ponytails?

AMINO: Also, the people who appear were not peasants. These villagers were not farmers but were engaged in trades.

KŌSAKA: During the Ikkō uprisings, the Shinshū sect were all mountain folk. And their enemy was the farmer. The ones protected by the Tendai sect and the Shingon sect were powerful clans other than mountain folk. In the uprisings, they fought against the mountain folk who followed Rennyo’s teaching.

MAKINO: The film is so interesting because it consists of both the historically accurate and the imaginary. Umehara-san, can you give us your thoughts on the parts based on historical fact and the parts where flights of fancy have provided delightful images?

MIYAZAKI: None of it is based on actual history. [laughs]

UMEHARA: It doesn’t have to be based on historical fact. After all, literature is not the same as history. A historian saw my play Yamato Takeru and said, “This isn’t factual. You must correct it so there won’t be misunderstandings.” [laughs] I know it’s not factual, but that isn’t my concern in presenting the reality of the story. In fact, I have had some back and forth about this story with Miyazaki-san. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: What was that about?

UMEHARA: I wrote a play called Gilgamesh that dramatized the Gilgamesh legend. I consider it to be my best work. The best works don’t always sell well, but I really think it is my best work. It’s also difficult to present it as a play. Osamu Tezuka-san noticed this work and sent me an impassioned letter, saying, “I really want to turn this into an animated film.” I was surprised that he was interested in this play, and I replied, “Please go ahead.” Just as Tezuka-san started working on the project, he fell ill and then died. I still thought it would be good if someone worked on it. An acquaintance advised me, “Miyazakai-san is the only one who can become Tezuka-san’s successor.” So I asked Miyazaki-san if he would do it. I received a very courteous reply indicating, “Having read it, I was not roused.” The theme of that work was “the killing of the forest spirit.” On the completion of Princess Mononoke, I was requested to write an endorsement for the film. When I asked what it was about, I heard that the theme was “the killing of the forest spirit.” I thought, in that case a word could have been said to me about it, but now I realize Miyazaki-san is a bashful person, so probably …

MIYAZAKI: I did write you a letter after that.

UMEHARA: Yes, you did. Yesterday I saw Princess Mononoke for the first time. It was entirely different. Even if the theme “the killing of the forest spirit” were taken from my work, the result is a wholly different product. My play is about world civilization and how “the killing of the forest spirit” relates to the creation of the urban civilization of Mesopotamia. In Princess Mononoke the setup of “the killing of the forest spirit” may be the same, but it deals with ironworks and other subjects. It’s set in the Muromachi period, isn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it is.

UMEHARA: So it’s entirely different. If Tezuka-san had animated my Gilgamesh, I think it would have been a masterpiece. But I also thought Miyazaki-san’s film was brilliant. Yesterday, I happened to watch director Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I saw Miyazaki-san’s Princess Mononoke after that. They seemed to have something in common. The parts that they shared were the fluidity and ferocity of the battle scenes and also the beauty on the screen. Kurosawa-san was incredibly sensitive about the framing of beauty, and Miyazaki-san’s scenery is also very beautiful. The films also share a deep disillusionment with the world. And within that, a strong belief in love between people. This is also something shared with Kurosawa-san’s film.

MIYAZAKI: I love director Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. But I find it has cast a spell on those who make period dramas. The societal structure of peasants, bandits, and samurai had such an intense reality for people in the postwar period. This is what props up the vitality in that film. The image of farmers and samurai in that film is so different from actual Japanese history, and it seems to have misled historians. Reading Amino-san’s books, I came across many explanations of history that seemed convincing to me. Our ancestors’ history is far richer than what can be explained from a simple class history perspective or an approach that treats samurai as villainous and farmers as virtuous. The parts that we fail to see included in this conventional construct hold the real attraction and are aspects we should know about.

I have also long been interested in iron-making. I know that ironworks did not really have such huge furnaces. A newspaper photo I saw in my youth, of primitive furnaces built during China’s Great Leap Forward, made such a strong impression on me that I was unable to forget it. I had always wanted to use that image at some point. Also, related to what Sasuke Nakao-san said about the broadleaf evergreen forest culture, I wondered how the forest that once covered the western half of Japan had disappeared. When we talk about nature conservation, we tend to depict nature only as something needing protection. But nature also has a brutal and fearsome aspect. I ended up expressing these thoughts that collided in my mind through this film.

This may sound like an excuse on my part, but I was unaware that Umehara-san had been asked to write something for the film pamphlet. In the process of making the film, I realized that I had included some of my impressions of your Gilgamesh. So I talked with my producer about wanting to pay my respects to you, and it turned into that request.

UMEHARA: You should have told me earlier. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I should have. But I’ve always taken ideas from all sorts of places. [laughs]

UMEHARA: It’s only natural that you pick up ideas.

MAKINO: Most people write either academic papers based on facts, or creative works. As one who works in both areas, how do you, Umehara-san, treat them? I understand you are now writing fiction as well.

UMEHARA: I originally wanted to be a writer. When I was in middle school, we had a small student magazine. One of my classmates was Tsuyoshi Kotani, who received the Akutagawa Prize for literary newcomers when he was only twenty-three. He was such a good writer. I wasn’t any good. So I thought I could never be a writer. In my mind, if I couldn’t be a writer I would be a lifelong failure. But as a scholar, I could always make a living as long as I continued to study. [laughs]

AMINO: I wonder about that. [laughs]

UMEHARA: As long as you make an effort, you can teach at a university. I was unbeatable at making an effort. That is how I came to the philosophy department at Kyoto University. But I still yearned to be a writer. From my association with Ennosuke Ichikawa17 I was approached to write a play. And it happened to become a hit. Amino-san, you could write one too. [laughs]

AMINO: No, no, I couldn’t possibly …

UMEHARA: That made me think that I may have some talent, so I started to write fiction when I was approaching seventy. I’ve written three plays, and including Gilgamesh, that makes four works. A play is not solely the product of the playwright, as it takes on different forms depending on the director and actors. Ennosuke turned my play into a wonderful performance, but I still felt a bit dispirited.

MAKINO: That’s why you started to write fiction?

UMEHARA: Yes, I’ve written two short stories. Now I’m working on a novel.

MAKINO: Kōsaka-san, you’re head priest of a temple and a fabric dyer. You also teach school. How do you deal with those different roles?

KŌSAKA: I don’t consider myself to be doing different things at all. I’m doing things that are very ordinary. I don’t even want to do anything special. This is because I think unless the things I do are what anyone can do, they are not based in reality. Though it seems that I am doing many different things, they are all the same to me. I’m not doing anything other than being a priest. This is why, though I love folk art, I collect objects not to boast about my collection—I buy pieces that I can learn from, to improve myself.

MAKINO: Your entire temple is a folk craft museum. You have an especially large number of art pieces by Shikō Munakata18-san. One of our ideas was to have this discussion while looking at the remains of the ironworks at your temple. But as all of you are so busy, we decided to hold it at our university.

AMINO: Is there an ironworks at Kōtokuji Temple?

KŌSAKA: Yes, there was. There is a stone marker where the ironworks was located. The principal object of worship at my temple was made by Rennyo from gold he smelted, they say.

MIYAZAKI: He cast it at the ironworks?

KŌSAKA: Yes. It’s said to have been made by Rennyo himself.

UMEHARA: When was that?

KŌSAKA: It must have been in the Muromachi period. There is a historical document of the principal statue at Kōtokuji Temple that mentions the ironworks. There is also a song that Rennyo is said to have sung while he stepped on the foot-bellows to operate them. It’s called the song of the foot-bellows operators.

MIYAZAKI: I didn’t know anything about that, so I made up a lot about the ironworks. [laughs]

KŌSAKA: There’s also a dance that goes with it. In our area, folk songs called chongare are very common. The villages in the area all do their bon19 festival dances to chongare. We start with the dance based on Rennyo’s foot-bellows song. As the ring of dancers grows larger, the Buddhist prayer dances start up with the songs of the story of Buddha’s life, his pilgrimage through hell, and the story of the venerable Nichiren. That’s the kind of place it is.

MAKINO: It’s hard to picture it just from the word “ironworks.” But when we see it animated, it becomes a powerful image.

AMINO: I agree.

UMEHARA: Miyazaki-san, did you assume a specific place in Japan as the setting for Princess Mononoke?

MIYAZAKI: No, I didn’t. If I had, all sorts of inaccuracies would have become obvious.

UMEHARA: I thought it might have been Kyūshū.

MIYAZAKI: It’s meant to be somewhere in western Japan’s Chūgoku region. But it’s not a real place. If it were Kyūshū, it would be across the sea. I made the setting a place that people could get to without crossing the sea. I don’t know whether that kind of forest was still in existence in those days, but my assumption was that it was still there.

UMEHARA: I think it still existed.

MIYAZAKI: I’m a Tokyoite, so my reference point is the village scenery near Tokyo. The villages and mountain areas of western Japan aren’t the landscapes in my mind. There are things I found out for the first time after I traveled there. I realized that the song “Autumn in the Countryside” (“Sato no Aki”) was from the west. It’s not a song that came from the region around Tokyo.

UMEHARA: What is the difference between the two regions?

MIYAZAKI: The place where I live was settled in the mid-Edo period, so the history of the festivals is recent, and issues of class and discrimination tend to be insubstantial. But in the west, the villages were formed in a different way, and the place names seem so ancient. In my area the place names are quite descriptive of the geography: Nagakubo (long hollow), Ogikubo (silver grass hollow), or Numabukuro (marsh sack). [laughs] In Izumo, there are many place names that seem to have come from mythology.

Is Totoro a forest sprite?

MAKINO: Another key word for today’s discussion is “forest.” The topic of the vanishing broadleaf evergreen forest came up in the dialogue between Miyazaki-san and Amino-san. A year has gone by since then. I wonder if you have been able to confirm how the disappearance of the forest occurred as historical fact?

AMINO: Well, I haven’t looked into it much …

MIYAZAKI: I haven’t made any progress since then either. Where was the broadleaf evergreen forest, and were people able to live there? For example, the hamlets of the Jōmon period were not usually located in the broadleaf evergreen forest, but rather in woods of Japanese beech or Japanese oak. So there are many archaeological sites in northeastern Japan. But some large sites have been discovered in the southern main island of Kyūshū as well. What are we to conclude from this?

MAKINO: Umehara-san, what do you think?

UMEHARA: I prefer not to use the term “broadleaf evergreen forest culture.” I think it is best not to limit our understanding of Jōmon culture by placing it in that context. It is better to conceive of it as a hunter-gatherer culture that included areas of woods of deciduous trees. The broadleaf evergreen forest culture theory of Sasuke Nakao-san and others fails to address the Jōmon culture in the eastern half of Japan.

MIYAZAKI: There are theories that Jōmon culture was on the periphery of the broadleaf evergreen forests or that it originated in the north. We’ll have to wait for future research to provide a conclusive interpretation.

UMEHARA: That is why I think it best not to overlap Jōmon culture with broadleaf evergreen forest culture.

MAKINO: What image do you have when you hear the word “forest”?

KŌSAKA: This may be somewhat tangential, but there was a woodworker and lacquerware artist named Tatsuaki Kuroda20. He wanted to make a tea caddy (a small container for matcha powdered tea for the tea ceremony) in the Kinrinji style, which is made from a vine. So he had to find a thick vine. I wondered if there were really such thick vines. But in fact in times past there were indeed large vines in the Japanese beech woods at my place. That is what I consider a forest—a forest where the trees shouldn’t be felled. When I saw Princess Mononoke, it fit perfectly my image of our ironworks, and I thought, “This is exactly the way I imagined our place.” I thought it had been well researched. We even had a river that ran below the ironworks. We call that the Kanakuso River, using the characters for “corroded metal.”

UMEHARA: So that was where the ironworks was located.

KŌSAKA: Surrounding the ironworks are low hills covered with thickets. The trees there can be cut down and replanted for charcoal-making. Deeper in the hills are woods of large Japanese beech trees, too large to be cut down for charcoal. This area is where foodstuffs could be gathered. In the past, I used to go into the mountains to forage for mushrooms with a friend of mine who was a hunter. He knew where which types of mushrooms would be growing, depending on how many years it had been after the trees had been cut. So he could head straight to those areas. To my mind a “forest” is that kind of place.

UMEHARA: Amino-san, you have studied Japanese history centered on people who were not involved in agriculture, on the Jōmon people who were hunter-gatherers. This perspective has clarified what we couldn’t understand in previous studies. Your interpretation of history is somewhat different from the broadleaf evergreen forest theory.

AMINO: It’s just as you say. The word “forest” came up just now. But that word is hardly mentioned in old documents. The word for “sacred copse” was the originally used term.

UMEHARA: That means where the gods dwell?

AMINO: Yes, it does. What image did people have when they used that word? I don’t know, though I’ve studied those times. Written records mention “woods” more often. But, curiously, most of the woods are of chestnut trees. Stimulated by the discovery of chestnut woods at Sannai Maruyama, the Jōmon archaeological site in Aomori Prefecture, I looked into documents from the Heian and Kamakura periods and found that chestnut woods were measured by area. This means they were planted. Trees may have been planted even in the Jōmon period. We know that during medieval times people definitely planted trees. They most likely used the lumber for building material. This culture of trees has been important for the Japanese archipelago all along.

MIYAZAKI: The grove of trees around a shrine is said to be a broadleaf evergreen forest. Why is that? Is it so that the place where the gods dwell can be covered by evergreen trees?

UMEHARA: I think Jōmon culture formed the basis for Japanese culture, and then Yayoi culture came in. I share this view with Amino-san. Even though Yayoi culture became dominant, they had to use the Jōmon gods. Kunio Yanagita theorized that the forest gods became gods of the fields and then returned to being forest gods. Those gods are Jōmon gods, so they dwell in the “forest.” Since they believed that the gods must dwell in the “forest,” people had to keep a forest, a grove of trees, for the gods, even in plains used for rice fields.

KŌSAKA: I think it was like a lighthouse was for maritime folk, a beacon. On moonlit nights the leaves would shine, making it a landmark. That is what made people think gods inhabited that area, so the trees shouldn’t be felled.

MIYAZAKI: When we enter a forest like that, we sense that something might be lurking. Compared to that, beech woods are lovely, but they don’t give the impression that something fearsome dwells there. [laughs]

MAKINO: Here, we’d like you to look at a scene from My Neighbor Totoro.

[My Neighbor Totoro clip: Satsuki carries the sleeping Mei on her back and waits at the bus stop with Totoro in the rain. Satsuki lends an umbrella to Totoro and receives a small packet in thanks. The Catbus arrives. Totoro boards it, and the Catbus departs.]

Miyazaki-san, you mentioned the feeling that there might be something in the forest. This scene masterfully expresses that sensation, not in words but by using an animated character. Is Totoro a forest spirit or the forest itself?

MIYAZAKI: I’m often asked that question. And I can only reply, “It’s Totoro.” [laughs] If I give an answer, it could lead to disagreements.

UMEHARA: Is the forest a broadleaf evergreen forest or a beech woods?

MIYAZAKI: Basically that location is a satoyama, a seminatural area close to where people live. And I wanted to make the center of it a camphor tree. My approach was quite haphazard. I didn’t think too deeply about Totoro. I wanted Totoro to just be there as I expressed my gratitude that, as we humans have lived in Japan, “We’ve done some horrid things, but we are beholden to you.”

MAKINO: The Catbus is hard to describe in words. Animation is the only way it can be shown.

MIYAZAKI: We pushed the limits a bit. [laughs] In the old days it might have been a palanquin carried on a pole on the shoulders of two men. But since it is a Japanese spirit, it might love modern things, so I figured it could be like a bus.

UMEHARA: I consider there to be two poets of the forest. One was Kenji Miyazawa.21 He was definitely a beech woods type—he was like a fantasy of an airy beech woods. The other was Kumagusu Minakata.22 He was a scholar and also a poetic person. His forests were different. It was through both of these men that the forest became a subject in scholarship and in the literary arts. And it seems to me that Miyazaki-san’s animation is creating a new fantasy about the forest.

MAKINO: Animation is a way to convey the wonder and fascination of the forest to children and to those who don’t have theoretical or historical knowledge.

UMEHARA: Art becomes no good when theory is obviously displayed on its surface.

MAKINO: In a similar vein, there is a kappa (water imp) in Tōno. The kappa statue at the Tōno train station has a red face. One explanation is that the redness is a reflection of the fire from an ironworks forge. Does this practice of turning ironworkers into kappa or oni (demons) come from a historical treatment?

UMEHARA: This is Amino-san’s area of expertise. [laughs]

AMINO: I think there is no question that the iron-making world was seen as a very unusual world. I thought this was expressed well in Princess Mononoke.

MIYAZAKI: The people who carved out mountains and produced iron became legends of one-legged or one-armed giants, or a princess with a birthmark. They remain in stories that don’t have happy endings or any resolution. I was drawn to the idea of a princess with a birthmark and had long wanted to make a film with a princess whose birthmark keeps spreading. But, perhaps due to my own limitations, I thought that if I made such a film it might turn into something incomprehensible. So, ultimately, the mark ended up on the boy’s forearm. That mark made me think of a burn mark.

I also wondered how a young man in a small village in the old days would procure the iron tools needed in his life, when he became independent and established his own household. It wasn’t as if there were any hardware stores where he could purchase them with money. No one has written about this.

Another thing: if a person dressed in rags suddenly descended from the mountain and pulled out a shiny piece of iron and offered to trade it for some grain, he would have been considered some sort of wizard. I had long wanted to depict ironworkers in this way. And this film is what it turned out to be.

AMINO: Did you have a particular reason for including a group that we would consider to be outcastes?

MIYAZAKI: As I thought about how to depict human beings, I realized they would have ended up being like groups of construction workers and real estate brokers if I just showed them as destroyers of nature. I didn’t want to make a film criticizing civilization by depicting human beings in that way and placing the guilt on them. As much as possible, I wanted to show the good side of humans. I didn’t want to show them in a negative way since it is the efforts of human beings to try to live a decent life that has brought about our current energy crisis and other problems … Part of me does dislike human beings, but it wouldn’t turn out well if I showed that feeling. Also, I didn’t want to restrict the “villagers” to being just “farmers.” Some of these villagers don armor and attack the ironworks, and in that regard they are “rural samurai.” I wanted to touch on them as well, but I had to leave a lot out to keep the narrative flow of the film. If I were to show everything, the film would only have been able to cover just one day at the ironworks. [laughs]

Building a new view of the world

MAKINO: Shikō Munakata-san drew kappa when he stayed at Kōtokuji Temple. Are those kappa entirely unrelated to the ironworks?

KŌSAKA: I wonder. I don’t really know, but Munakata-san did say, “Kappa exist.”

UMEHARA: Kappa are not exactly vengeful ghosts.

MIYAZAKI: It’s the boar I feel sorry for. I think boars must have been larger in the olden days. I understand there’s a stuffed specimen of a Japanese wolf in Britain. It looks very small in the photo I saw. But the “mountain dogs” that emerged in the Edo period were larger beasts, weren’t they?

UMEHARA: They were wolves, weren’t they?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, they were wolves. It’s hard to believe old documents claiming that a man-eating wolf some nine feet long from head to tail was hunted. It appears that as environmental conditions worsen for wild animals, they become smaller and smaller. By the time the last remaining one of the species dies, it is really in a pitiable state. My ideas were influenced by my indignation about this state.

UMEHARA: Do the “curses” and “demon spirits” represent certain criticisms and disillusionment with our times?

MIYAZAKI: In the future we will likely confront many “curses.” When I see a cute little girl suddenly afflicted with a case of atopic dermatitis, the first thing that occurs to me, rather than imagining what caused it, is the unfairness of why it happened to her. In these times when such “curses” will afflict them, our films need to feature boys and girls who must face those hardships. Our films won’t be relevant if they only emphasize that all will turn out well as long as they have a positive attitude, full of cheer and vitality.

UMEHARA: I see your point.

MIYAZAKI: Unless I made at least one serious effort, everything I had made up to now would seem like a lie.

UMEHARA: When comparing Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Ran, Ran seems more merciless. It is also filled with disillusionment. Comparing Miyazaki-san’s Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, there is a much stronger presence of demon spirits and curses in Princess Mononoke. Is this a reflection of our times?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I think so. I also created a manga of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The film became something entirely different from the manga. I was too concerned with trying to neatly wrap everything up when I made the film. With Princess Mononoke, my idea was to put into the film the very things that couldn’t be wrapped up neatly … And, since I wasn’t able to wrap it up neatly, I feel uncomfortable about it. That is why I feel nervous even mentioning it. [laughs]

MAKINO: The hyakki yagyōzu, picture scrolls of the night parade of one hundred ghosts, show all sorts of things being possessed by spirits. If animation had existed in those days, the spirits would probably have been animated rather than drawn as picture scrolls. I wonder when that kind of personified treatment of objects began.

AMINO: I don’t think it was much before that time that people thought that furniture or household items could become possessed by spirits. These picture scrolls are certainly fascinating. All sorts of spirits appear that look like characters in animation. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Giving a form to the spirit of things is evidence that they are no longer so scary, isn’t it?

AMINO: That’s true. “Spirits” were unfathomable and definitely very sinister. For example, during childbirth, a shrine woman, a medium who attracts spirits, would be in attendance. Interestingly, this medium would be betting on a board game. This would give a spirit the opportunity to be drawn to her.

MIYAZAKI: So the evil spirit would be transferred to her?

AMINO: Yes, that was it. Demon spirits come out in abnormal times. If the spirit attached itself to the pregnant woman, her childbirth would not go well. So the medium who attracts the spirit would use various means to prevent the spirit from attaching itself to the woman giving birth. She would make loud noises by breaking earthenware pots or throwing grains of rice around the room.

UMEHARA: Was it a revolutionary development in Japan’s manga history when mangaka Shigeru Mizuki featured ghosts in Gegege no Kitarō?

MAKINO: Mizuki was quite taken with yokai. He didn’t just draw them in his manga; he also researched them.

UMEHARA: Princess Mononoke is a different sort of representation. Mizuki-san’s ghosts have a charming quality, whereas Princess Mononoke’s are demon spirits.

AMINO: I think Miyazaki-san is expressing the terrifying quality of spirits. I can tell that he has developed his thoughts further since the time he made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. What is more, my impression is that there are still many issues left unresolved.

MAKINO: This makes me think of the story of the violent spirit and the peaceful spirit. If I recall correctly, the violent spirit possesses something and causes havoc. Then it is deified and becomes a peaceful spirit. The demon spirit that puts frightful curses on others is just one that has yet to be pacified. In Japan, Buddhist and Shinto beliefs have merged. But how are these spirits and states of possession dealt with in original Buddhism?

KŌSAKA: Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) Buddhism, chose to exclude them. He refuted them absolutely and treated them purely as psychological problems. He must have seen them as having no substance.

UMEHARA and AMINO: That seems right.

MIYAZAKI: In treating the subject of forests, whether broadleaf evergreen forests or beech woods, we are discussing the vegetation of Japan at a certain historical time, with a certain climate, aren’t we? An NHK program the other day presented a theory that global warming is not due to man-made causes, but to the fact that Earth itself undergoes drastic temperature changes, and that it has only stabilized during the last ten thousand years, a nearly miraculous ten thousand years. It is this ten-thousand-year span that produced agrarian civilization. In the future, agrarian civilization may be wiped out. Further beneath what we consider the foundation of the forest is the existence of an even more fearsome Mother Earth. At times she becomes a goddess of destruction and at times a goddess of creation. If we follow this concept through, it becomes a question of what kind of worldview, or life view, or historical view we should hold. I feel that we are in an age when, as more time passes, everything is softening. Making a film thinking that “the forest” is a firm foundation, I realize that I am unable to scoop up the issues lying beneath. How deep should I scoop? That’s the dilemma we face.

I talked with the artist Shūsaku Arakawa-san a while ago. He told me, “I want to build a town that lasts for a thousand years.” However, if a town lasting a thousand years were to be built in Tokyo’s waterfront area, it would sink if the sea level rose. [laughs] If we take rising sea levels into consideration, building on such a site itself is a mistake. Young people are forced to look at the world this way. While it is quite exciting that we are heading into such a period, I have no idea what we should be doing now. [laughs]

AMINO: I think there is no mistake that the human race has already gone beyond youth; we have now completely matured and entered into the prime of life. I honestly think that humanity must deal with the natural world lying underneath the “forest” as you have just said, a world that defies our imagination.

MIYAZAKI: I think so too.

AMINO: Despite the fact that it is clear that this is way beyond the power of human beings, we must make this an issue in the coming age.

MIYAZAKI: That is an enormous void, isn’t it?

UMEHARA: Amino-san’s way of thinking is that we can’t comprehend Japanese history unless we expand our field of view to take into account people other than farmers, who have been the focus in our farmer-centered and rice agriculture–centered view of history. We’ve come to the point where we now need to include nonhuman elements as well. We’ll then end up with a worldview that we aren’t yet able to fathom.

MIYAZAKI: I agree with that.

UMEHARA: We can’t give up just because it is chaos. We must build an inclusive worldview in some form. That is the job of literature and philosophy. We are in an extremely difficult period. That is why it is easier by far to present this as manga rather than as literature.

MIYAZAKI: That is what I tell young people. I tell them that this is their job.

UMEHARA: So we can tie this discussion up with “literature has lost out to manga.” [laughs]

Dōji: the pride of the mountain people

AMINO: Recently I have begun to take another look at history, departing from the “conventional wisdom” we have followed so far. I am realizing that there are many factors that have been overlooked. They include, for example, the areas not only of cultivated fields but also the trees that grow in the mountains and plains, the products from the ironworks like the one in this film, and the charcoal and lumber from the mountains. These add up to many things we have not taken into account. Historians have hardly done any research on these aspects. One thing that surprised me recently is that women have been the ones involved in silkworm cultivation, from the Yayoi period (200 BCE–250 CE) until recent times. Yet I don’t see any studies that include sericulture when people discuss the social status of women. There is so much that we need to research in the future. For young people there is a mountain of interesting topics. But we are also entering a very difficult age. There is no question that manga are much more influential than academic papers. [laughs]

UMEHARA: Young people lack a fighting spirit. Old guys like Amino-san and I have more vitality. [laughs] This is definitely a problem. Those in their thirties are energetic, but the ones in between are worn out. The wartime and immediate postwar generations are the ones who are still going strong. [laughs]

AMINO: If I’m still doing this in my seventies …

UMEHARA: I’m becoming a novelist after turning seventy. [laughs] By the way, I’m starting a column called “Kyoto Pleasure Trips” for Kyoto Shimbun newspaper. I consider it a follow-up to my column “Discovering Kyoto” that was serialized in Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. I will first be discussing Yasedōji23 (Yase boys). The Yasedōji had loose, disheveled hair. During the Edo period when all the men wore topknots, the people in Yase had disheveled hair, so they were called “boys.” Why was their hair loose and disheveled? Folklore has it that in olden times the people of Yase lived around Mt. Hiei. When the priest Saichō24 entered the mountain, the Yase folk were chased out of Mt. Hiei. Sakenomidōji (sake-drinking boys), who lived in caves in the mountains in Yase, fled to Ōeyama, farther north, and were killed off. This is the folklore that has been handed down, which is so interesting. I think they actually must have been descendants of the Jōmon people who originally lived on Mt. Hiei. In olden days, it was not possible to farm in Yase, so they were permitted to enter Mt. Hiei to make their livelihood gathering firewood and selling it in the capital. The pride of these Jōmon descendants was displayed by the dōji. If their story could be turned into a manga, it would be quite interesting. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: In my mind, the Jōmon people had plenty of time, so they must have used makeup and had elaborate hairstyles …

UMEHARA: No, no, their hair was disheveled. The Ainu people’s hair was also disheveled. They did use makeup, though. They thought that hair shouldn’t be cut, so they didn’t wear topknots.

MIYAZAKI: They didn’t tie up their hair in topknots?

AMINO: Ox drivers had boys’ hairstyles. Even when they grew up, they were called “ox-driving boys.” In medieval times, those who had the appearance of boys were of a particular status.

UMEHARA: Yes, at the very least they were not farmers.

AMINO: If I may speak boorishly, as charcoal makers and firewood collectors the Yasedōji were mountain folk. There were many such groups in the northern part of Kyoto. Be that as it may, there was bartering from the Jōmon times, making a fallacy out of the theory that they were self-sufficient. It is a modern conception that only when people have enough to feed themselves do they sell the surplus. I don’t think that was the case at all.

UMEHARA: So you are saying the Jōmon folk engaged in commerce?

AMINO: Obsidian for tools was collected under the premise that it would be bartered, and salt was also traded.

MIYAZAKI: The shells found in shell mounds are the remains of shellfish that were dried and then grouped into uniform sizes.

AMINO: There must have been markets from the Jōmon period on.

KŌSAKA: Those must have been near rivers or the sea. My place is about thirty kilometers from the sea, but salt was harvested from the bottom of the river.

AMINO: Was salt made there?

KŌSAKA: Yes. We have clay salt vessels.

AMINO: Oh, you mean salt-making vessels. They can be found in places quite a ways inland. I understand they transported salt that had been fired.

KŌSAKA: Is that so?

MIYAZAKI: They were passed on further and further inland with salt inside the vessels.

AMINO: They did transport them far inland. That is why salt-making vessels have been excavated from inland sites. But in Toyama, the sea extended much farther inland in the old days.

KŌSAKA: Yes, it did. And that was where the Ikkō uprising occurred.

MAKINO: We heard that the folk who were forced out of Mt. Hiei became sakenomidōji. Can we say that sakenomidōji equal oni?

UMEHARA: Perhaps you could say that. But the Yase folk don’t like to be called children of oni, so they don’t put the stroke at the top of the character for oni.

MAKINO: In other words, they don’t have horns.

UMEHARA: Yes, there are oni that don’t have horns.

MAKINO: In Ōechō (a town located in Kasa-gun, Kyoto Prefecture; became part of Fukuchiyama City in 2006) there is an oni museum (Japanese Oni Exchange Museum). I haven’t visited it yet. They’ve turned oni into cute characters, so that they are not only hair-raising, frightening creatures but are also presented with some charm.

MIYAZAKI: Whenever I hear such stories, I am reminded that Tokorozawa, where I live, is really an Edo-era pioneer village. [laughs] There are no traces of such history there. But it was a man-made settlement of the mid-Edo period. Miscellaneous trees were planted to be a small forest for firewood. We know that rows of zelkova trees were planted at the time as windbreaks. We don’t have any tales of sakenomidōji. [laughs] It was a plain of reeds all along.

MAKINO: Weren’t there any ogres? I wonder.

MIYAZAKI: I don’t think so, not in the middle of the massive Kantō plain …

AMINO: They probably weren’t living in the middle of the plain, but the Kantō plain was a place full of reeds and wild rice that made it impossible for people to see far ahead.

MIYAZAKI: And when the wind blew, they say it could topple a person.

AMINO: Taira no Masakado25 moved around in a boat while hiding among the reeds. In that sort of world, there might have been some kinds of “spirits” that were different from the mountain oni.

MIYAZAKI: I am really curious about the landscape of ancient Edo Bay at that time.

AMINO: In those days, it was a waterside district where the bay’s waters extended deep inland. In the Warring States time, there was a ship battle in the Sanwa-machi (presently in Koga City) town limits, an area nowhere near the water now.

MAKINO: There are some who theorize that the folk who were pushed farther into the mountains became oni and long-nosed tengu, and those who were pushed out to the rivers and seas became kappa (water imps).

UMEHARA: The idea that those who were pushed farther into the mountains became oni was Kunio Yanagita’s first theory. His idea was that “there are indigenous people who lived in the mountains. The ones who were removed became oni and tengu.”

AMINO: That was Yanagita-san’s theory in the early days.

UMEHARA: Yes, it was. But he later changed his mind.

Taboos that cannot be ignored

AMINO: The ironworkers associated with oni were not villagers. In addition, they were despised. Even if they did not comprise a settlement of outcastes, they were a group that was definitely affected by discrimination. I think, however, that young people who saw Iron Town in the film have no idea about this sort of thing. When I asked my students at Kanagawa University about the meaning of the masked and bandaged people who appeared in the film, they had no idea what it meant. Knowledge of Hansen’s disease differs completely between our generation and the younger generation of today. Young people don’t know about the disease at all. So, when they see bandaged people, they are not even aware that they are diseased. Knowledgeable people who can read the intent of the film can appreciate the underlying meanings. It is a clever technique to show women workers, a courtesan-like person at the top, ox drivers, outcastes, and those with Hansen’s disease. And putting them in an ironworks makes the intent clear to those in the know. But when those who don’t know this subtext see the film, what is their impression? What was your thought in creating this setup, Miyazaki-san? What did you notice from reactions to it?

MIYAZAKI: I set it up that way because we cannot ignore the issue. Though most people may not understand it, I assume some might react in an extremely sensitive way. There is always the possibility that people might react too sensitively, and I might become sucked into the vortex of the problem. There is also the possibility of a reaction to the scene when the written order from the imperial court is presented. And there’s the possibility that a car with a loudspeaker blaring ultra-rightist slogans might park itself outside my front door. But if I whittled those scenes away and made everything symbolic, it would be uninteresting. This film will be shown in America, and we’re wondering how to translate this part.

UMEHARA: In America, you could just say “emperor.”

MIYAZAKI: Saying “outcastes,” “ox drivers,” and “courtesans” doesn’t get through to them.

AMINO: I don’t know about that. I think the young people of Japan today are as uncomprehending as Americans. That’s over half of those who watch the film …

UMEHARA: It is quite different between the Kansai and Kantō regions.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it is very different.

UMEHARA: In the Kansai area, even children understand to a certain extent.

AMINO: The students at Kanagawa University, where I taught, didn’t fully understand the Dōwa Issue—related to discriminated-against communities. Some of them thought it was “dōwa issues,” as in “children’s books,” since the two terms are homonyms.

UMEHARA: We cannot ignore this type of issue when depicting Japanese society.

AMINO: Miyazaki-san, you rendered their existence in a bold way. How did young people react to this?

MIYAZAKI: As a matter of fact, I thought I had shown the main character as being from a marginalized group. But I did it in such a low-key way, young viewers didn’t even understand that Ashitaka had been forced out of his village. Many of them thought he had left to embark on an adventure.

AMINO: The “curse” on him isn’t resolved in the end, is it?

MIYAZAKI: His mark did grow fainter. Young people nowadays aren’t convinced by a happy ending. They would feel it is more realistic not to have the mark disappear completely, and to have Ashitaka continue to live, bearing the burden of something that might flare up again at any time.

UMEHARA: It is a mark of discrimination.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it is.

UMEHARA: We can’t discuss modern Japanese literature without taking into account issues related to the social discrimination of entire communities of people, such as the buraku people. Many writers have idealized reality and avoided the issues involved. This is the same as discussing European history without referring to the topic of the Jewish people. These issues of social discrimination exist in Japan and are carried as heavy burdens. We cannot ignore the fact that modern Japanese literature has been established by writers who have neglected these issues.

MIYAZAKI: At the same time, we cannot discuss human beings if we omit the issue of how human beings overall have related to nature. When so much information assaults us about the earth’s ocean currents or the 28-million-year cycle of the movement of the earth’s crust, where can we focus to see the world? It’s too difficult for us to try to understand the ocean currents. Actually, I think this is work that should be done by young people. Human beings have tried to become happy by changing nature, by destroying it, and by exploiting it. Now that we have gone too far, we are full of self-criticism. The very essence of human existence enfolds this problem of having gone too far. We need to take a serious look at this issue of having gone too far. We can’t concern ourselves only with problems between human beings.

UMEHARA: That is a significant point. You’re thinking of all sorts of issues, much more than writers do. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: I’m telling young people that this is their work to do … [laughs]

Has literature lost out to manga?

MAKINO: At this point, we will show clips of the head of the Deer God in Princess Mononoke and the ohmu from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

[From Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind a scene of the battle between ohmu and the Giant God Soldier. From Princess Mononoke the scene of Ashitaka and San returning the Deer God’s head to the Deer God in its Great Forest Spirit form.]

These are symbolic scenes from the films.

MIYAZAKI: It was tough for the ohmu. [laughs]

MAKINO: It was a very moving scene.

UMEHARA: What is the Deer God?

MIYAZAKI: Well, it was something I thought of after a lot of struggle. At night it walks around tending to the forest. During the day, it disappears and lives in the forest as one of the creatures. It has antlers like a deer’s, the face of a human, the feet of a bird, and the body of a ram. I just made it up.

MAKINO: How should we interpret the ohmu?

MIYAZAKI: It was so long ago, I’ve practically forgotten about them. [laughs] I was afraid of giving form to the gods. Actually, for the Deer God, I drew it as a low-ranking god. I couldn’t draw any others, so I ultimately made it the “Forest Spirit.” I did this even though I thought that there must be some higher-ranking gods.

MAKINO: I would like to return to the theme previously mentioned: manga and literature. This may be a rough description. But I think of manga as being able to express and convey in concrete form difficult things like “spirits,” things that the author is trying to convey regardless of whether the audience is very knowledgeable, a child, or someone who doesn’t understand the author’s language.

MIYAZAKI: That’s very rough. [laughs]

MAKINO: As moderator, I will intentionally use this rough interpretation to get the discussion going and ask for your opinions.

UMEHARA: I used to read manga a lot in elementary school but not much after entering middle school. Since then, I haven’t read much as an adult either. The cartoonists I often read were Taizō Yokoyama26 and Shigeru Mizuki. I haven’t read many others. What made me change my opinion about manga was Osamu Tezuka-san’s request to make an animated film of Gilgamesh. At that point, I only knew about Tezuka-san’s Astro Boy, which I saw as conveying ideas of a healthy humanism along with a glorification of scientific civilization. So I couldn’t quite understand why he was interested in my Gilgamesh.

When Tezuka-san died, I was asked to write a memorial article on him. In preparation, I read his collected works. It was then that I found out that he was a person who had deep philosophical thoughts as an artist and as a Japanese. He expresses an idea close to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in his Phoenix (Hi no Tori). And the dialogues he engaged in were also very philosophical. I had been deceived by his appearance and by Astro Boy and regretted very much that I hadn’t engaged him in more conversation.

The Japanese arts that have swept the world are, after all, the films of Akira Kurosawa and the manga of Osamu Tezuka. There is no denying this. Have there been other arts that have had such strong impact? Not in the fields of literature and painting. It has only been in film and manga that Japanese culture has been able to sweep the world. I felt strongly that I had to rethink my perceptions about manga. And then, recently I read a book by Fusanosuke Natsume-san.

MAKINO: Was it about “the grammar of manga”?

UMEHARA: Yes. He is Sōseki’s grandson, and I was surprised at how much his work resembles what Sōseki presented in his essay “On Literature.” It was just that the genre had changed from literature to manga. Natsume points out that there is a grammar to manga, which had been thought to lack a grammar. And he explains manga in a very logical manner. It was a great pleasure for me to see that Sōseki’s talent has been transmitted in this fashion to his grandson.

As a matter of fact, there are two manga artists who draw best-selling girls’ (shojo) manga who have read my books. They are Ryōko Yamagishi27-san, who drew a manga story about Prince Shōtoku, and Riyoko Ikeda28-san. Both of them say that my books gave them ideas for their manga. Once, when Shunsuke Tsurumi29-san introduced me at an event, he mentioned that I had influenced manga and said it made me a major philosopher. I was amazed that anyone could be evaluated that way. I didn’t know much about shojo manga, but reading Natsume-san’s book, I found out that shojo manga express the inner psychology of human beings. And that they show this with a unique way of drawing panels. I was surprised to learn that shojo manga artists use similar techniques to Japanese autobiographical “I-novels” and effectively depict the inner psychology of human beings. I think we must reevaluate our opinions of animation and manga.

My generation hasn’t read manga since childhood, but those under fifty continue to read manga even after their youth. And Japanese manga are the most advanced. Natsume-san asserts that manga are an expression of a worldview and are educational. Listening to Miyazaki-san today, I found that he has read many books and has thought about all sorts of things. Manga are capable of expressing so many concepts that I think we should reevaluate them.

One more thing. Miyazaki-san has said manga include the perspective of how nonhuman creatures look at human beings. This is precisely what is important. The appearance of this type of manga artist means manga have matured or perhaps even gone beyond fiction.

MAKINO: For you, Amino-san, what is the nexus between the visual and your research? You have written some illustrated books for children.

AMINO: Watching Princess Mononoke, I was stimulated in many ways. A long time ago I also thought Sanpei Shirato was interesting, and I was stimulated by his type of manga. My work, however, is to deal with things that can be corroborated.

UMEHARA: I don’t think we can deal with history that way. It seems to me that it is not always something that can be proven. [laughs]

AMINO: When I was involved in writing the illustrated book Kawara ni dekita chūsei no machi (A Medieval Town Built on a Dry Riverbed) (Iwanami Shoten, 1988), I worked with the painter Osamu Tsukasa. Though we were in entirely different fields, as we discussed the project and questioned ourselves, we found at some point that our ideas resonated. It was then that a true cooperative relationship developed between us. The picture book took five or six years, maybe longer, to complete. We did a lot of talking with each other as we drank sake. I would say “It can’t possibly work.” But the editor urged us to “work it out somehow.” And we were able to turn out a book. I think it would be wonderful to be able to have such a relationship with persons in other genres, such as manga.

What the manga artist must be wary of; what is demanded of the novelist?

MAKINO: We don’t have a scientist or businessman here today, but it seems to me that scientists are running far ahead of the imagination of manga artists. Scientists are making strides in turning their hypotheses into reality in ways beyond what Tezuka-san ever imagined in fields like cloning, cryogenics, and recombinant DNA. Stories that science fiction writers think they have created have become reality by the time they hit the market. In this age manga artists must look ever further into the future.

To change the topic, I understand that the words animism and animation have the same derivation.

UMEHARA: Is that so? That’s interesting.

MAKINO: Umehara-san, you have said that the aspiration for the twenty-first century is to ensure the coexistence of the diverse living beings in the forest. I think animation has made moving images of this type of profound idea and allowed even young children to understand it. Miyazaki-san, have you thought about this?

MIYAZAKI: I’m not the type to think about things in a theoretical manner. It is difficult to create animation that can be called animism. It’s a problem at the technical level. I have been immersed in manga since I was a child. What I have come to realize recently is that when we try to look at the world through manga, it loses its universality. Because time and space can be infinitely skewed, manga don’t show the real world. The tendency has become to depict one aspect of emotion or psychology in an exaggerated way. Our eyes have become accustomed to looking at this type of manga. We have now come to the point when we need to go back to looking at time and space in a restricted form.

UMEHARA: But that is the strong point of manga. The power of imagination that is not limited by time and space …

MIYAZAKI: I think it is a delicate balancing act.

UMEHARA: In contrast, literature, and particularly I-novels, are restricted in time and space. Japanese literature has lost its vitality. We are in an age when we cannot depict the world unless we widen our scope. So what manga artists need to be wary about is the opposite of what is demanded of novelists, isn’t it?

MAKINO: I think so.

MIYAZAKI: There are filmmakers now who shoot live-action films using the methods of animation and manga. If one can show the real world by slicing it up as montage and using it to express oneself by stretching the very basis of space to change reality, anyone can express himself or herself.

UMEHARA: I agree that if the artist doesn’t have a clear purpose, the outcome would just scatter into the imaginary world. But if the purpose is clear and the time and space coordinates can be shifted freely, it would be a terrific manga. This can’t be done in literature. You can transform anything in manga. That is the strength of manga and the reason I think it is a good mode of art to express our current age.

MAKINO: I assume that as a creator, Miyazaki-san, no matter how many times you draw your scenes, you find it hard to be satisfied. Take the scene in Princess Mononoke where the semitransparent Great Forest Spirit (the Deer God) slowly moves about the forest with the morning glow shining through it. Children who see this may look at it as reality and assume that the Great Forest Spirit is an actual creature. It is that true to life. It seems to me that Miyazaki-san probably worries a great deal about the danger of giving such an impression.

UMEHARA: I can readily understand that.

MAKINO: It’s part of virtual reality.

KŌSAKA: For my generation, reading manga was considered sinful, and I don’t watch much television. But I watched Miyazaki-san’s Princess Mononoke and thought it powerful and was very moved by it. When I wondered what had moved me so much, I realized it was because it was intuitive, and I could easily accept it in a sensory way. I felt I was drawn deeply into the ideas that were at the base of the story. As I had never seen animation like this, I was truly impressed. My child has decided to become a manga artist and is going to a vocational school to study manga. I thought this was a ridiculous choice, but now that I have seen Miyazaki-san’s animated film, I feel as though my way of thinking may have been wrong. I see that there may be something deeper in it.

MIYAZAKI: No, no, that’s not the case. We are basically craftsmen, going back and forth between our workplace and our homes, tied to our desks and drawing when in the office. The work done by Umehara-san and Amino-san has influenced us in a deep part of our consciousness … As we pick up many things from a variety of sources, we have felt compelled to look more closely at our history and our past.

MAKINO: With techniques becoming so advanced and being able to express scenes so beautifully, I would think you would feel a certain sense of crisis.

MIYAZAKI: No, that’s not the case. I feel I haven’t yet been able to capture the world.

UMEHARA: People who are thinking of those things are the true artists.

MAKINO: When your ideals are realized, how far do you think animation can go?

MIYAZAKI: There will probably be an increase in people who fall into the gap between the virtual and reality, leading to a pathological phenomenon. I hardly think that this will result in people’s worldviews expanding or deepening. As our information intake increases, we lose the power to concentrate on one thing. That is why I think that computer graphics will be economical only up to a certain point. But it will mature quickly, there will be a surfeit of it, and CG and such will become just another part of the established mosaic. This is happening to computer games, and it happened to animation and manga quite a while ago.

MAKINO: You think so?

MIYAZAKI: Yes. In the future I think our job will become how to grasp the world within each of these pieces of the mosaic. I think that is what will be important. So I’m not interested in advocating for the genre, or for raising the status of animation, or improving the way manga are viewed. I don’t want to do that anymore. Neither do I want people to say to me, “Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing?” about my work.

UMEHARA: Expressing what one wants to express. Even if one wants to express something, it is hard to find the best method to do so. I think we need that struggle. I have so many things I want to write about. If I don’t write about them, they’ll come out as vengeful spirits. It’s important to present these things as soon as possible, while one is still alive.

AMINO: That is how I feel too. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: You’ve given us a conclusion.

MAKINO: We’ve been able to have an enjoyable discussion today, one that could only be had with these participants. Thank you very much for your participation.

Takeshi Umehara Born 1925, Miyagi Prefecture. Philosopher. Graduate of Kyoto University, Faculty of Letters, Philosophy Department. After serving as Professor at Ritsumeikan University, President of Kyoto City University of Arts, became first Director-General of International Research Center for Japanese Studies in 1987. Currently Advisor at the Center. Recipient of Mainichi Publishing Culture Award for Kakusareta Jūjika: Hōryūji Ron (Hidden Cross: On Hōryūji Temple). Recipient of Jirō Osaragi Award for Suitei no Uta: Kakinomoto Hitomaro Ron (Poetry Beneath the Water: On Hitomaro Kakinomoto). Recipient of Order of Culture, 1999. Play Yamato Takeru performed by Ennosuke Ichikawa as a super kabuki play in 1989. Publications include: Gilgamesh (Shinchōsha), Shōtoku Taishi (Prince Shōtoku; Shōgakukan), Ama to Tennō (Maritime Tribe and Emperor; Asahi Shuppansha), Umehara Takeshi Chosaku Shū (Collected Works of Takeshi Umehara; twelve volumes; Shōgakukan), Kanki Suru Enkū (Joyful Enkū; Shinchōsha), Kami to Onryō: Omou Mama Ni (Gods and Vengeful Spirits: Wandering Thoughts; Bungei Shunjū).

Seiryū Kōsaka Born 1940, Toyama Prefecture. Nineteenth Head Priest of Kōtokuji Temple, Toyama Prefecture. Natural indigo dye artist. Influenced by Shikō Munakata, who had evacuated to the temple in 1945. Became active in the folk craft movement in 1965. Served as board member of Japan Folk Craft Association, Chairman of Tonami Folk Craft Association, board member of Japan Natural Indigo Dye Culture Association, lecturer at Kanazawa College of Art. Deceased: 2005.

Keiichi Makino Born 1937, Aichi Prefecture. Manga artist. Director of Kyoto International Manga Museum, International Manga Research Center. Professor Emeritus of Kyoto Seika University. Graduate of Jishūkan High School, Aichi Prefecture. Worked at Nihon Television, Hakuhōdō advertising agency; founded Makino Production. In 1975, became part-time political cartoonist for Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. After serving as Manga Department Head at Kyoto Seika University, took current position. Publications include “Kankakuteki” Manga Ron (“Intuitive” Manga Theory) (Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai), Manga o Motto Yominasai (Read More Manga) (coauthored with Takeshi Yōrō; Kōyō Shobō), Shikaku to Manga Hyōgen (Vision and Manga Expression) (coauthored with Yutaka Ueshima; Rinsen Shoten).

Recalling the Days of My Youth

Shimbun Akahata Nichiyōban (The Akahata Sunday edition), April 5, 12, 19, 26, 1998

To children who are unable to start living

When I was a young child, I thought it might have been a mistake that I was born.

As a child, I nearly died of illness. When my parents would say, “We went through a hard time with you,” I thought, “I’ve caused so much hardship for them,” and felt I couldn’t endure my uneasiness. So I didn’t have a happy childhood that I look back on with nostalgia.

I passed as a “good kid,” the one among my siblings who was most obedient and gentle. When, at some point, I realized that I had just been matching myself to my parents’ expectations, I became so distressed that I wanted to scream in humiliation. This is why I do remember seeing for the first time beauty in the simple eyes of the cicada or feeling amazed that the tips of the legs of crayfish were scissors, but I erased from my memory how I related to other people.

I put on a cheerful front when I was among my friends. But inside was a timid self full of anxiety and fear.

Osamu Tezuka-san’s manga were a source of encouragement to the anxious, self-conscious boy that I was. To me he seemed so knowledgeable about the secrets of the world.

My generation, who, as six or seven-year-olds, came across Tezuka-san’s manga Takarajima (New Treasure Island, 1947) in real time received a strong impact. This is the only way to explain why so many of those involved in animation production were born in 1941 and 1942. [laughs]

⭑

In the old days what was most important for us kids was knowing how to snatch away each other’s menko30 cards. [laughs]

I’m not saying this out of nostalgia. The kid who was good at catching big dragonflies was much more highly respected by other children than the one who earned straight As. In between, there was a place even for someone like me, who was timid, overly self-conscious, and only good at drawing manga pictures.

Being full of energy, children left alone got into a lot of mischief. We lived in our own “kids’ ” world independent of adult society.

Now we have destroyed all of that.

Children began to think the world inside television was overwhelmingly more appealing than reality the moment Ultraman was first broadcast. For this Ultraman generation, the greatest thing in the world was Ultraman. [laughs]

This has continued down to today’s children.

At the same time, the number of things that make up children’s sense of values has decreased. This is due to the Ministry of Education as well as society overall having narrowed down its sense of values to the one value of “calculating profit and loss.”

Present-day children have not done anything wrong, so why have they been handed such a dreary world?

What fills my mind these days is: What should we do as adults?

⭑

The reason children pick up knives and stab people is because they can’t start living their own lives. They are at an age when they should start living, but they have no clue as to how. Because they have no way of becoming their own person, they turn to self-destructive acts or attacks on others. This pathological phenomenon has become extremely acute.

Before labeling their condition as good or bad, we must nurture the ability of children to become living beings that are full of life.

I have a fantasy that I would like to be given a district of about three elementary schools in which to conduct an experiment. I wouldn’t teach how to read or write at the kindergarten level. The adults would use all their wisdom to create a place that everyone loves, so much so that they wouldn’t want to go home. We wouldn’t show videos like My Neighbor Totoro. [laughs]

We would also create elementary schools that are full of fun. We wouldn’t teach the multiplication tables in second grade. If children don’t study during elementary school, they can readily recover once they feel like studying when they reach middle school age.

I would have the children also understand their dark sides. They need to be allowed to get into fights. They need to experience humiliation.

Let me conduct this experiment for ten years. If it goes well, it can be instituted throughout Japan.

What is clear is that we must fundamentally change our approach toward raising children. The role I might play toward that end might be to create a story about a child who is unable to start the journey, to begin living. A story about a child who can’t start, but who must start, and faces all sorts of adversities. I want to create entertainment that will make children who don’t know how to start to think it is their story.

The film I went to see three times

My high school days were really trying for me. Every morning, when I turned the corner and saw the school building in front of me, I would feel dejected. I would think that “I’m not burning with passion.” [laughs] At that time my escape route was my wish to become a manga artist.

Although I doodled a lot of manga, I couldn’t draw well. I loved Osamu Tezuka-san’s manga, but I never copied his work. That was because my mother had told me, “The lowest thing you can do is to mimic someone else’s work.” So I can’t even draw Astro Boy. [laughs]

Those were the days I often went to see movies. When I went to see Hakujaden (Tale of the White Serpent; directed by Taiji Yabushita, 1958), the first Japanese animated film, I didn’t sneak out to see it full of anticipation; I went just to kill time. And I was hooked. [laughs]

I wasn’t bowled over with the feeling of how wonderful it was. Rather, I thought, “How pathetic I’ve become.” While the characters in the film were living to the fullest, why was I just fumbling around as I studied for university entrance exams? I was rebelling against my parents in all sorts of ways and upset about all the squabbling, which led to my outburst.

It’s no use to analyze it, but by the time we’re eighteen years old, we tend to want to look at the world in a foul mood. I thought that was how things were, but then I came across a completely different take on the world.

When I saw the characters confidently engaged in a melodrama with no sense of embarrassment, I was forced to admit that I preferred facing things head-on rather than being contrary. This was the kind of story that I wanted to depict.

Facing the hardship of entrance exam time, I went to see this film again the next day and the next, three days in a row. That was the only time in my life that I went to see a film three straight days. When I went to see it once more after I had decided which university to attend, the weaknesses of the film were what caught my eye. Still, that first impression stayed in my mind, making me determined to make decent films like this one.

The value of a film as a creative work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its meaning depends on what kind of person, in what stage of life, comes across the film. The film casts its sign, and it is the fate of the person receiving that sign as to what instant he or she meets up with it.

Feet up on the desk at work

The lid I had kept on my feelings as I sought to meet the expectations of my parents and teachers in high school was blown off after I entered university.

I was in the economics department during my four years at university, but I didn’t study anything about economics. [laughs] I did spend constructive time studying drawing, though.

I would go to the zoo when I wanted to draw animals and spent long hours sketching there. But I didn’t have confidence that I was getting any better.

I also drew manga. I was told, “Your pictures are just like Osamu Tezuka-san’s.” That was torture for me. I tried so hard not to copy his style, but the drawings I attempted so earnestly ended up looking like his. I conducted “rituals,” like burning all the drawings I had put away in the bureau drawer. But these were meaningless, as I would end up drawing the same things again. [laughs]

Finally, realizing that I wasn’t suited to drawing manga, and because I had some interest in animation, I joined Toei Animation. Not wanting to become a mere cog in the wheel as an animator, I forced myself to leave the company at five o’clock every evening. I pushed myself to read books I felt would be good for me and flailed around in my boardinghouse room.

I was a smart aleck. While I worked on animation, I didn’t want to give up the chance to search for ways to become a manga artist. I refused to be chewed up alive by the company.

I would put my feet up on my desk while I worked, only to be scolded. I wasn’t doing what came naturally; I was forcing myself.

⭑

After a while, I became the secretary-general of the small company union. I was really at a loss then. I had to take on responsibility. And I had to fight against the old guys who had interviewed me when I was a newly graduated greenhorn. [laughs] This was a terrific training ground for me because I had to face my own weaknesses on a daily basis.

It was in that union that I met Isao Takahata-san. He was very smart and looked cooler than he does now. Even his laziness seemed like a virtue. [laughs] My encounter with him was the first important event since I had become an animator.

Beyond Princess Mononoke

About a year after I joined Toei Animation, I chanced to see a Russian animated film, Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen; directed by Lev Atamanov, 1957). It knocked me over. That was when I realized being an animator could be a fantastic occupation.

I played a sound recording of the film constantly as I worked. Listening to it so many times I was able to recall all the images. Though I had only seen the film once and couldn’t understand Russian, the meaning of the dialogue came across to me as musical sounds.

This was the second major impact on me. However, there was too much of a gap between what we were doing and that film. I had no clue as to how I could make my way to the level of that film.

On my next job, I worked with a lot of passion. But upon finishing the last shot and realizing that I couldn’t redo anything, I felt so inadequate I wept.

I had thought that my passion could bridge the gap between what I wanted to express and my ability to express it. But I saw that I couldn’t get by without acquiring the necessary skills. I learned through bitter experience that without those skills I wouldn’t be able to express my ideas.

This was when I changed. No matter what I was working on, I would give it my all; no matter how boring the job, I would discover something new and move forward, even if just a little. Unless one does this, one cannot make use of one’s abilities when a really important job comes along.

⭑

We are running a relay. I am handed a baton. The baton may be from Osamu Tezuka-san, Tale of the White Serpent, or The Snow Queen. Rather than giving the baton as is to the next runner, I will have these influences pass through my body before handing the baton to the next guy. This is the nature of popular culture.

Princess Mononoke will be the last film I direct as an animator. I can’t draw in the workplace anymore. I don’t have the physical strength left in me. This means I am compelled to work in a different way. Yet I don’t want to have to accept the possibility that the quality will decline because I can’t draw as I did before. I want the quality to improve because I can’t draw anymore.

For me, the question is what I will create next. When I decide on what that will be, I think I can go a ways beyond Princess Mononoke.

Animation Directing Class, Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II School Opening: Urging at Least One Seedling to Sprout! “Theories on Directing” for Aspiring Young Directors

Roman Album, Animage Special: Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno, Tokuma Shoten, June 10, 1998

Aspiring directors should have a “healthy ambition”

ANIMAGE (hereafter AM): First of all, please tell us your motivation for holding this class.

MIYAZAKI: It is very difficult to teach directing. I think, simply, that if we come across a seed of talent, it is crucial that we at least water it. As I wrote in the recruiting flyer, I hope that we might see a seedling of a director grow from that seed.

AM: What do you plan to offer as course content and format for this animation directing class?

MIYAZAKI: I have absolutely no intention of offering an impartial theory of directing. Consequently, it will probably turn out to be unlike a typical class. I can only do it my way, where our ideas collide. I intend to force my own ideas, to show “Here are my thoughts on directing.” I do intend to make it centered on practice. I don’t want to be a teacher who just lectures. Although I hope to discover some new talent, I have no intention of searching for talent that uses methods similar to mine. I realized long ago that this would be a foolhardy effort. So, if I find new talent, I may be able to support it; we may also not uncover new talent.

AM: Is the phrase written in the recruiting flyer—“Urging at least one seedling to sprout”—your true wish?

MIYAZAKI: We don’t actually know what kind of person is suited to become an animation director. The greatest problem in directing is that it is very difficult to figure out if one has the affinity, or talent, to be a director. If we look at personalities, we find all sorts: Mamoru Oshii, Hideaki Anno, and Isao Takahata. What’s common among them is their strong egos. [laughs] Just having a strong ego, though, doesn’t make a good director. It is certainly one of the necessary conditions, but we can’t say what the required criteria are. For the twenty-first century, I would want those who aspire to become directors to bring with them a “healthy ambition,” a desire to express themselves or entertain others, and make money while doing so.

AM: You call it a healthy ambition?

MIYAZAKI: You can’t get anywhere without ambition. You have to want to expand your influence and your powers of expression. There are increasingly too many people who think it is enough to do a good job with what they have been assigned. Having ambition means wanting to become, for example, an editor-in-chief so as to create a magazine in a certain way. Showing off one’s authority as editor-in-chief for its own sake is problematic, but it is not at all bad to want to have authority in order to create the kind of magazine one wants. At times it is necessary to be forceful. Directing is an occupation that may result in others saying, “What an idiot!” when the film is completed. That can actually happen. It may sound extreme, but you have to be so obsessed with the work that you think you can change the world if you make this film. Life can be easy if no one really appreciates or criticizes your work. Rather than easy, I should say there are jobs like that. There are many of them, even in the world of animation. But the work we do here isn’t like that.

AM: Is there some reason that you came up with this idea at this time?

MIYAZAKI: Those of us who are teaching the course are in our fifties. That’s the same age Takahata-san was when he taught at the first session. This means there is a huge age gap between students and instructors. Ideally, those closer in age would teach younger staff members and have them learn so that they can be your foot soldiers when you are working on a project. Or, when you want to work on a project, it is better not to go it alone, but to have the project be supported by those you have worked with. This ulterior motive of increasing the number of one’s colleagues is a type of healthy ambition. I want to circulate my own thinking as much as possible to the production staff through these methods.

But people nowadays tend not to make the effort to teach others. From what I know of those around me, each generation has different kinds of personal relationships. This makes the workplace wearisome. I expect this is happening all over Japan, not just around me. We do have to think about how to do our work in a way that is more in line with the mentality of the younger generation.

Bring a world you want to express, however incomplete it may be

AM: Do you wish those who attend this school to bring with them ideas for a world they want to express?

MIYAZAKI: It would be meaningless if they didn’t bring with them what they want to express. At this stage, as long as they have something they want to express, it doesn’t have to have a definite form. I don’t expect anything like a fully developed story. That is why I wrote in the recruiting flyer “a fragment of an image you want to turn into a film.” This fragment may be something that can’t be turned into a film even if one spends decades on it, but something can be gleaned from it. It can be very rough and incomplete. Even if it includes fragments here and there that might seem like “this is foolishness” or “this is such a naïve failure,” it can turn into something interesting for those who are likely to make something out of it. People who have a neatly tied-up, boring idea are ultimately uninteresting. Directing is the type of work that requires definite opinions.

AM: If you find a talent among the students that makes you feel “this is it,” what will you do?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t know. It would be good if that became clear during the course. It may be that I can’t tell, and the class will have to go a while longer. I may recommend the person for a job. But I do want to stress that students shouldn’t assume that being recognized in this course is a direct route to getting a job. This is the start of their efforts at working in the lower ranks of directing. To bring home this point, I won’t be the only one instructing, but plan to invite as lecturers people from Ghibli and other studios.

Attending this course won’t increase students’ knowledge about animation. If applicants think they will hear interesting stories about animation or will be able to watch a lot of animation, they’re mistaken. That kind of information is everywhere. This isn’t a training ground for critics. The important thing is to study what one can’t study in one’s workplace.

The kind of director needed in this world that is increasingly one of gekiga comics

AM: Is your search for finding new talent because you think there is something lacking in the present animation field?

MIYAZAKI: To begin with, unless three or four meanings are behind the decision on a certain shot, a film will not have a sense of urgency. It’s amazing, but just by watching a video screen you can tell if it’s an A-class or B-class film. You can tell it’s B-class right away when you see a shot of the face of a hack actor or a ham hero, no matter how good-looking or how much he tries to impress.

AM: You’re right about that. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: That is because you can’t dodge the truth on the screen. Japanese films are boring because they are not infused with multiple meanings on the screen. I think this is because Japanese culture overall has become like gekiga, or graphic novels. The methodology of gekiga is similar to the most worthless type of montage. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who made Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the early twentieth century, promoted what he had done as montage theory, in which the way shots are connected creates a greater meaning than a mere sequential lining up of shots. I think montage theory is a totally worthless theory, and films that are made in that fashion are the worst kind. [laughs]

AM: Is it because they are two-dimensional?

MIYAZAKI: No, that’s not it. It is because it assumes that each portion of the film is a component that explains or conveys something. If we make films to give form to the confusion and depth of ideas that can’t be expressed in words, each part of the film must be an important part in that effort. Each shot should express the film’s world in its entirety. I myself still hope to make a film like that. [laughs]

AM: I see …

MIYAZAKI: I’m sure just listening to me talk won’t make clear what directing is. [laughs] I myself wonder why I’ve gotten involved in such a difficult task.

What is strange about the condition of Japanese culture today is that manga have become the originator of culture. Manga is no longer a subculture. Everything has become like a gekiga graphic novel. People who would prefer to draw manga, if they had the talent to draw, write novels just because they can’t draw pictures. Or people who like manga create music in the image of manga. That isn’t the way it should be. Films must hold on to their space, to their tenacious expression as films. In current Japanese culture, everything has become insubstantial and mangalike, with all the cuts, angles, and actors as shallow as graphic novels.

AM: You feel that they lack the power needed to create a solid setting?

MIYAZAKI: It’s more that there are too many things that they don’t know about. They have to study all sorts of things and bring them alive through their expression. Of course the most important thing is imagination, but you have to have a constant interest in customs, history, architecture, and all sorts of things. Without that you can’t direct.

You don’t have to be overwhelmed by having to do so many things. First of all, just look carefully at what is right in front of you. Otherwise, what is most important to you becomes mere imitation. No matter what you make, it turns out to be a film we’ve seen somewhere, or something we’ve seen in a manga.

AM: There are a lot of those recently.

Seeking a place to stimulate and to be stimulated

MIYAZAKI: I’m still figuring out what I plan to teach. I need to prepare a curriculum. [laughs] I’m in the middle of thinking about it. I may give out assignments. What do the students seek who come thinking they might be able to be a director or want to be a director? Where should I start? I wonder what kind of atmosphere will develop as we are stimulated by those who come; how they will stimulate each other; how that will stimulate us and them. We’re embarking on a thrilling experience by holding this risk-filled course for half a year. It’s one day a week, so we’ll manage somehow.

AM: It sounds exciting.

MIYAZAKI: Thinking about something can be done while doing other things. This is true even if you have only five minutes during the day to consciously think about something. Just think for five minutes. Then act on that thought. Actually your brain has a part that works by will and a part that works on its own. Even when you aren’t consciously thinking about it, the part that works automatically will think everything through for you about what interests you. I think that’s the way it works. Human beings don’t think about what is crucial to them in words. We don’t think, “Why do I love her?” [laughs] It’s meaningless to analyze such things. That is why “a fragment of an image you want to turn into a film” on the recruitment flyer can be anything. It is important to have many things that you want to express or feel it would be wonderful if you could express. Don’t make them imitations. My wish is to meet many people who value and exchange all sorts of ideas during the course.

Animation Directing Class--Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II

Head Instructor: Hayao Miyazaki

{Opening September ’98

Welcome, aspiring young directors of animation films!!}

Announcement for recruitment of the second directing class

Following on the first class of the “Higashi Koganei Sonjuku I” (Head Instructor: Isao Takahata) held April–December 1995, the “Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II” (Head Instructor: Hayao Miyazaki) will take place beginning September 1998. Please read the application requirements carefully to apply for the course.

Number of students: 10

Qualifications for entrance: from age 18 to around age 26
No restrictions on gender, nationality, educational background, professional, amateur standing.
Must be able to speak conversational Japanese.

Term: September ’98–February ’99.
Saturdays from 3:00 p.m. for five hours. One hour for supper (food and beverages provided)

Location: Atelier Nibariki (completion expected in July) and Studio Ghibli

Tuition: No entrance fee; 90,000 yen (tax included)Installment plan: 30,000 yen/two months

Application Method: 1) Resumé (attach photo)

2) Essay: within two pages of 400-character text paper
Topic: “A fragment of an image that I want to film”

3) One drawing of the above image (up to size B4).
Supplemental explanation in words allowed.

* Drawings will not be returned. Those who wish return, send in self-addressed stamped envelope.

Application deadline: May 31, 1998 (postmarked)

Selection method: After selection of application documents, individual interviews with Head Instructor Hayao Miyazaki. Time and location to be supplied to those whose applications are selected.

Supervision: Nibariki, Studio Ghibli

To Energize People, Towns, and the Land

A Dialogue with Yoshio Nakamura

Asu e no JCCA (JCCA Toward Tomorrow), Shadan Hōjin Kensetsu Consultants Kyōkai, October issue, 1998

The many ways nature and humans interact

MIYAZAKI: I read the article on the restoration of Goshonuma in Koga (Ibaraki Prefecture), the project you worked on. I hear that in the Netherlands they are restoring wetlands in some areas that have been reclaimed, and I think there must also be many places in Japan that should be restored.

NAKAMURA: Goshonuma was reclaimed and filled in 1950 from a reed-filled back marsh area of the Watarase River. Regrettably, the younger generation doesn’t even know the name of the marsh. Goshonuma is part of a park, so the landscaping features are prominent. We moved so much earth you could call it a civil engineering job. We dug up over eighty thousand cubic meters.

MIYAZAKI: The place in N. Prefecture where my mountain cabin is located is at twelve hundred meters above sea level, at the elevation limit for rice paddies. In postwar times, they cultivated some rice fields, but the rice grown there wasn’t tasty. It was rumored that even the farmers who grew the rice sold it and bought better-tasting rice at the agricultural cooperative. That area has lain fallow for years. It would be so great if we could restore it to meadows and forests.

NAKAMURA: There are many places like that.

MIYAZAKI: It is an area where larch trees and red pines were grown to harvest after twenty years or so to make charcoal. These trees haven’t been tended to, so they are in danger of falling over from snow damage. If we, with our self-satisfied air, approach the local old men to “take better care of the woods,” they would just get angry with us. Even the larch trees that are understood to be an invasive species serve to calm the rushing brooks. I think it would be best to restore the area, but it’s impossible to do so without taking into account the village’s history.

NAKAMURA: Being used that way for so long, the trees have become part of the natural features of the area. Rather than a primeval area, those areas have inherited the forms of interactions between nature and human beings.

MIYAZAKI: That is what we tend to lose track of. All the opponents can urge is not to cut down those trees. We may reach a consensus for our country, but we don’t have a clear vision of what we want to create in local areas. In your writings, you suggest that we need to have some foundation, ideals, and philosophy as to what we want to pursue.

NAKAMURA: Yes. In order to think about it, it is helpful to have examples of various ways humans have interacted with nature in the past. Among those, the satoyama, a source of fuel and food near a populated area, is quite a masterpiece. Unfortunately, current conditions make it difficult to declare a moratorium on development for all satoyama areas in order to keep them as they are.

MIYAZAKI: It might be possible to maintain certain areas as cultural heritage districts.

NAKAMURA: That would require ignoring economic risks. It could be done for a portion of those areas, but not for the majority. It’s the same for rice fields.

MIYAZAKI: There are many people now who want to keep groves of miscellaneous trees as they are. But it is not as if the trees can regenerate if none of them are cut for a while. Whether to keep them as maintained woods or to turn them into forests is in dispute. Right now, those who want to have well-tended woods and those who want to turn them into a forest are cleaning up the woods together in a cheerful manner. But they disagree on the future of the woods, though at present it is still a friendly disagreement … Unless the goal of what type of landscape environment to create becomes clearer, even the local residents can’t reach a consensus.

NAKAMURA: Not only is there no agreement among the residents, even the specialists disagree. For example, in Provence, the barren areas created by goats grazing on the land have been turned into a cultural heritage.

Inseparable from aesthetics and beliefs

MIYAZAKI: This is a joke, but I think it would work well if we created shrines where we want to preserve nature. If we built a shrine so that the surrounding woods can’t be touched because it belongs to a place of worship, we might be able to get away with it …

NAKAMURA: That is one of the points at issue. Behind the reason nature was preserved in the past was a certain sense of aesthetics, which was supported in major or minor ways by a sense of religion. Today, we live in an irreligious manner, so we have separated aesthetics from religion. This has weakened the status of beauty in our time.

MIYAZAKI: We should have in our thinking a way of demarcating an area to be left alone, as part of another world. But we tend to think that unless we can explain everything in words, we cannot rationalize things. In my neighborhood, a truly awful ditch has finally started to show signs of improvement. There are several rivers that are just ten kilometers or so long in our city, and a few cleanup organizations have been formed. When the rivers get cleaner, fish and crayfish return to the waters. But strict ecologists can’t abide the fact that a nonnative species of crayfish have returned. They consider them to be invaders. To me it seems good that crayfish have returned. But people who want a utopia say native river crabs should be released. They want the crayfish that eat river crabs to be caught and killed. That’s where we argue, while joking, with each other.

We were able to turn the small plot of land that was a parking lot back into a wood. We received seedlings donated by the prefecture and city, but they weren’t enough. Some people in Kyūshū offered to send us oak seedlings grown from acorns, so we asked for them. This also became a source of disagreement. The purists were against bringing in plants with Kyūshū genetics. I pointed out that people are also a mixture. We come up against deeply philosophical issues like these on an everyday basis.

NAKAMURA: The concept of ecology is that of science. There is a certain danger in bringing scientific concepts directly into decisions about human behavior. Just think of Nazi Germany and its ideology of racial purity, which touted the purity of both race and land. That was very much related to ecology. The German scientist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel came up with ecological theory in the late nineteenth century. While it played a significant role in preserving forests, specialists came to think that outside species shouldn’t be introduced. I think this kind of purism is a dangerous ideology.

MIYAZAKI: That is a very interesting point. What do we value the most when we consider ecology? When a local government solicited images on the theme of water, all of the images sent in were of clear, clean water. People took videos of the least spoiled rivers such as Shimanto River in Shikoku or Kakita River in Shizuoka Prefecture. There were no images of “the four seasons of the ditch” next door. When I look into the ditch near my house, I see changes on a daily basis. There was a time when we had a huge swarm of midges, though that has abated now. They emerged all at once from the water’s surface. The ditch was dirtier before, so not even midges could live there. It was when the water became somewhat cleaner that they swarmed. Watching them I noticed how hard it was for them to survive. The water level changed daily due to urbanization. If it rained, the level rose and the midges were all washed away. When the water level receded, the larvae could finally settle in. I was hoping that at least one person would make a film showing that midges were living healthily in a ditch. The fate of the midges represents our own fate. If we can’t allow them to live, we won’t be able to allow ourselves to live, either …

NAKAMURA: I thought the same thing when we were restoring a small river running through Goshonuma. That water was so filthy we couldn’t let it in as it was, so we had to make a bypass for it. Then, it was restored by rainwater. And right away the bitterlings, crayfish, and loaches that had lived there before reappeared. I wondered where they had come from. One theory was that even in the filthy water, there were some springs of clean water and some clean areas. When the water level rose with the rain, the water became cleaner, and they moved in during that time. Quite a lot of creatures lived there, and they spread as soon as the conditions improved. Living beings survive even under trying conditions. I felt empathy toward them. It’s amazing: human beings are undoubtedly destroying nature, but nature lives together with human beings. It’s an unbreakable bond.

We need a Don Quixote

NAKAMURA: I was able to watch Princess Mononoke and several other films of yours, and I was moved by your ideals. We’re pondering what needs to be done in the future. You have commented on Yōrō Park’s “Site of Reversible Destiny” (designed by Shūsaku Arakawa). It made me realize that the key concept behind the resistance we feel when walking through it, or our experience of the space, must be our physicality.

MIYAZAKI: I think so.

NAKAMURA: One way for human beings to regain our sense of being alive is to start by discovering hope with our bodies. I thought the “Site of Reversible Destiny” was one example of that. I have doubts as to whether that is the only way, but the idea is very interesting.

Another concept I find interesting as a different way of thinking is the “worth of worthlessness,” a phrase by Zhuangzi31. When someone suggested that a tall tree standing in a field be cut down because it was worthless, the comment was, “Don’t cut it down, because there is something of worth in the worthless.” What is the worth of the worthless? I think it is the existence of a marvelous intuitive physicality. That is, if we use words to carve out things as having certain functions and certain uses to human beings, we overlook something very important. “The worth of the worthless” is a warning to us. In a way it signifies a mistrust of words.

MIYAZAKI: We always try to come to an understanding within the realm of words. But whether human beings can live in the “Site of Reversible Destiny” is an entirely different issue. That space was created as a work of landscape art and not as a habitat for living, nor as a garden. It did surprise me that children enjoyed it so much. Grown-ups were tripping over their feet as they walked along reading the brochure and wondering what meaning it had. But children were immediately running and clambering up the slope. It’s rare to have children become so liberated so quickly, so I thought it was amazing. Why not make nursery schools, kindergartens, and elementary schools like this?

NAKAMURA: It was the same when we made Koga Park. We created hillocks, modeled after those of Fujimizuka, to give some definition to the landscape. They were being used by children as slides, and the kids were having a great time. The designer’s clever ideas are only half of the total; the rest can be filled in by the imagination of the people using the space. The power that the space itself has is great, it seems.

MIYAZAKI: Children learn best about mud and ground by going up and down these small hills. We have taken away their chance to do that, and to flail around and fall down, by making things efficient and convenient. We pave roads and make parks, which distance children farther and farther from mud and dirt. I think the O157 E. coli bacterial infections are the result of killing so many things off with antibiotics. The other bacteria were killed off and a gap occurred, allowing that strain of bacteria to grow. I’m not sure about this, but if children did things like wallow around in the mud and get sprayed by the urine of the kid playing next to them, they might not be so affected by bacteria like O157 E. coli.

NAKAMURA: We made the park so that children could get close to the water. But at the same time, elementary school teachers lecture the children not to go near the water. Our society as a whole is very inconsistent.

MIYAZAKI: In order to preserve the woods along the river near my house, we decided not to put in a fence or to put in mercury arc lamps. If things were left to the local city authorities, they would put in mercury arc lamps and put up many signs detailing regulations so as not to be liable. It’s an area that spans two districts, and the land is city land, but its management has been delegated to the residents. If we put in lamps, they might attract loiterers, so we thought it better not to put them in. We wanted to make it a place for living beings other than humans. So we put up a sign that says, “You are responsible for any incidents.” We really don’t know what might occur. Many opinions were raised. When a couple of people offered, “We’re willing to go to prison, then. We can’t take responsibility, but we’ll take it on,” the discussion ended. There were actually many who agreed entirely with them.

NAKAMURA: I agree completely. The local administration tends to overmanage, while the citizens blame everything on the local authorities. If that continues, the cost of local government will swell. As it is, citizens are overly catered to so that children can’t become full-fledged adults. We need to reconsider this as an educational issue for children on a community-wide basis. If we have more widespread responsibility, this could lead to the regionalization of political administration. Unless we do that, we won’t have livable towns.

MIYAZAKI: We claim that Japanese are a people good at making things (monozukuri), but I think that claim is becoming dubious. We’ve become clumsy. I’m part of a subculture that makes animated films. What we have done is to narrow down the world of children and fill in that narrow sliver with this subculture. The television stays on all day long even in rural homes. People’s lives have become filled with this subculture, and they have become sloppy in the way they do things. This is the source of the downfall of a people.

NAKAMURA: Words create a type of virtual reality. And this medium has become overly wordy.

Four years ago, we invited Ryōtarō Shiba-san to speak at the eightieth anniversary of the Japan Society of Civil Engineering. Being a magnanimous person, he spoke positively about civil engineering as a foundation that supports civilization. But he was also critical of the over-use of civil engineering projects. In other words, with so much work available, we have become lacking in ideals. We have lost our ideological backbone, and the public works projects that were intended as a means have become their own ends. In a similar vein, various social systems are reaching their limits. Will a great collapse occur?

MIYAZAKI: No, I think Japanese people will be clever enough to quit doing things en masse just before the great collapse occurs.

NAKAMURA: If we look at the will to live of the Japanese in the latter 1940s to the early 1950s, we can hold out some hope. We had people developing the high-speed rail system when the country was so poor. But does the next generation have that kind of drive …

MIYAZAKI: We hurry to teach young children how to write. This means we are teaching abstract thinking at an age when they learn things with their bodies. This is not good at all. We should wait. When we consider what they should start with, we need to overhaul our kindergartens and elementary schools, which are the entry points to their future world. Children don’t move enough now, so they need to be encouraged to move. Make the entrances to the kindergarten from above, on the roof, and from below. They can clamber up a slope from the playground and enter from above. When the teacher calls them to come inside, some kids may enter from below, but even the three and four-year-olds will rush to climb the slope. Their sense of accomplishment, confidence, and pride will grow. Having this kind of experience for several years would make a big difference. I think children become clumsy because they haven’t engaged in this kind of playtime, something that is a slight amount of time, that adds up to a hundred hours or so. We need to raise the kind of children who can feel enjoyment with their bodies. If I were given a space to use, I would love to try this out.

NAKAMURA: There are quite a few leaders at the local level who encourage free play, so I think it can be done.

MIYAZAKI: Working on local issues has made me realize that much can happen if there is one person who is a Don Quixote. Someone who doesn’t just whine about things. It’s important to have a Don Quixote.

NAKAMURA: Yes, the most important thing is to have someone with a vision.

The point of view of amateurs is more important than that of specialists.

MIYAZAKI: When I had a discussion with Shūsaku Arakawa-san, he said, “Human beings have killed God. So we ourselves must become God. When we lose confidence, we can’t hand things back for God to take care of.” In his “Site of Reversible Destiny” there is no thought that, if the land is given over to God for care, it may become a better place as trees die off or grow in a natural fashion. His opinion is that the moment of completion of his work is when it is in its best condition, and that it should be maintained in that state. This is a European way of thinking—gardening is an act of maintenance; grass that grows on the pathway must be mercilessly pulled up or the garden will become overgrown. I like a more overgrown look. A wide gap exists between those who want to manage the garden thoroughly and my view.

NAKAMURA: The problem is the nexus between human beings and nature. The Western concept of nature is a certain ideal of nature. An actual tree that grows in front of us is an inferior copy of the ideal tree. It is a Platonic way of thinking. The ideal landscape is an entirely managed scene of a manicured lawn with a tree in the center, like a golf course. We can say they are looking at conceptualized nature.

Japan’s case is also an ideal, but it is one that fixates on the beauty of form created from coincidences and the details of naturally growing plants. Japanese gardens are lovely. What does it mean to have details that are beautiful? It may be an idealized nature, but it is not managed. The gardener, tobacco pipe in hand, carefully casts his eyes over the garden and, when he sees that this branch here is out of place, prunes that a bit. He doesn’t chop away at the plant. When a branch seems likely to sag and break, he puts in a support. The garden as a whole is tended according to the sensibility of the gardener as he considers its overall balance. This method is not one of managing, but of tending.

MIYAZAKI: At some point we leave it to God, as in the phrase, “Leave it to heaven.” Since I have that mentality, on one hand my opinions are at odds with those of others. On the other hand, I am impressed by the ideas and actions of Arakawa-san, who has thought of creating something greater by thoroughly making over nature with human power. He is not halfhearted about the enormous task of creating a civilization and not disheartened by the many failures of our age.

NAKAMURA: In leaving it up to heaven, we leave some things up to nature, allowing us the excitement of discovering beauty according to our own interpretation, within the complexity of nature that has been left to itself. I think there must be a gentle way of managing nature. Japanese landscape design seems to recognize that there is a wisdom that we humans cannot fully comprehend.

By the way, when a director makes a film, does he have in his mind a clear image of the completed work?

MIYAZAKI: No, that’s not the case for me. It’s only after it is completed that I see what I have made. I don’t see the entirety at the initial planning stage. The part that can be explained in words and sentences is only the surface layer of what I am thinking. Unless what is in my subconscious, what I am pondering, is expressed, it can’t be turned into a film. As I am making the film, I often stagger to my knees, wondering where I am going with the project. Somehow I have to get through those obstacles and forge on.

NAKAMURA: That is what is so interesting. When we try to create a space that encourages an ecological way of living, the kind we have been discussing, we must move ahead in our thinking by repeated trial and error for it to work out well.

MIYAZAKI: Trial and error are absolutely necessary. As you work at it, you realize the tree that would be better located here needs three more near it, or the road needs to be widened a bit, or this area needs to be dug out.

NAKAMURA: That is the way a gardener works. Construction and civil engineering are done according to initially drawn plans. Therein lies their strength and their weakness. Something very interesting might result if we could build with the flexibility of the gardener’s method. In our current managed society, however, this is extremely difficult to do. The sponsors of parks and structures these days are the city or the nation, so we use tax money for funding. We need to explain to them in words, by detailing the reasons something is necessary. But we can’t explain the worth of the worthless.

MIYAZAKI: In our industry, as well, we are asked what the concept or theme of the film is. They all think it can be conveyed in words. That just isn’t so. If we can say this is the message, all we would have to do is hand that over. That would only take two or three sentences. Then there would be no need to watch the film. We’re not making films as messages or themes.

NAKAMURA: It is difficult to implement a large public works project by trial and error. It wouldn’t work if we left things up to the local residents. Neither would it work to leave everything up to the specialists. The specialists have their own methods, which involve their egotism. I understand this because I was an engineer. Engineers want to try out their technology. It’s not a good trait.

MIYAZAKI: As my studio has become computerized and I’ve begun to deal with engineers, I’m getting to understand this. They are all intent on testing their technological abilities. [laughs] They’re always wanting to try new things. [laughs]

NAKAMURA: My mentor said something quite alarming: “Military men who are specialists in defending the nation will destroy the nation. Economists destroy the economy, and agriculturalists destroy agriculture.” There is a dangerous aspect to specialists. We have to be careful so that civil engineers don’t destroy our nation’s land …

MIYAZAKI: That is why we need producers in addition to specialists and designers. Producers must be given rather flexible authority and have quick minds and ready words. They need all sorts of abilities. The status of producers is very high. It’s no use if they are the sort who tremble at the possibility of having to take responsibility for a project. It has to be a person who can say, almost casually, “I’ll take responsibility.”

Then there are certain types who are suited to be directors. A director can be irritable and convinced that this is solely his project. But he needs a producer who can place the film within the societal context, figure out what kind of publicity will work best to attract viewers, and deal with the sponsors.

NAKAMURA: In prewar times there were fewer civil engineering projects, and they were undertaken directly by the government. To build a bridge, an engineer from the Ministry of Construction would stay in charge until it was completed. So the engineer, in effect the producer, oversaw the entire project. As we have become more and more a managed society, the project manager now keeps changing.

MIYAZAKI: We could even decide by competition who becomes the producer. It’s the same as political parties. It’s sufficient to give them discretionary powers and critique their work after it is done. The finished film can be severely criticized, but it’s not something that can be made by a majority vote.

NAKAMURA: I suspect we need to have civilian control of technology. Those overseeing a project can be engineers or from any other occupation. In Britain, with overcrowding at Heathrow Airport, there was discussion as to whether to construct a third London airport at a place called Maplin Sands. The chair of that committee was a historian, not an engineer. The answer was “No.”

MIYAZAKI: They say that during the war, there were far fewer deaths among soldiers serving under officers who had lived regular civilian lives and were in the reserves, compared to soldiers serving under officers straight out of the army military academy. It is common folk who are able to decide that it doesn’t make sense to hold this position or that the squad must stay at a certain location. There must be something similar involved in planning cities as well.

We need to consider what kind of towns we want to create after the many problems like ground water and dioxin pollution are fixed. I don’t have a clue. But I do think that it is better, when a park is planned, if the producer role is not filled by a specialist on parks. It should be the type of amateur who considers what would make the town more livable, or how to promote the town. That kind of ability comes from someone’s avocation. Terunobu Fujimori32-san! He’s such a playful man. I don’t know what he says about it, but his first effort, Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum near Lake Suwa, is nothing if not a plaything. That is why it is so wonderful. Only when we put our all into it can our work result in something good. We all want to fulfill our ideas in our work.

In order for real work to be accomplished in a five-day work week, I think it is better if we have Thursday off. You get tired around Thursday. I suspect that the kind of labor system that involves demanding money instead of taking days off doesn’t fit our mental state. There must be another solution.

The problems we need to address are raised in a way that saps our energy. This way of dealing with issues serves only to prove how ineffective people are. It would be much better to solve our environmental problems and then go on to the next step. That would energize us. What is most persuasive for our children is to show them one place in Japan about which we can say, “This is what we did and we succeeded.” Then their trust in adults would deepen. We blame the look of our towns on things like concrete block walls or utility poles. But there should be a way to build an attractive city by taking advantage of construction methods, color schemes, styles, and topography.

NAKAMURA: In Japan’s case, particularly, it is more topography than nature. The power of topography is very strong. In Tokyo, streets on slopes often have stone walls. They are so appealing.

MIYAZAKI: Although we can choose any place around Tokyo for a film’s setting, we end up selecting hilly areas. When we choose a slope, it turns into an extremely significant space, an enjoyable street worth a stroll. What is disillusioning is that the population has increased so much that no matter what the topography there are houses built everywhere. I once rode in a dirigible and looked out over Tokyo from three hundred meters up in the air for a couple of hours. The upshot was that I became quite dismayed at what I saw. All I saw were houses crammed all the way to the horizon.

Creating a lively city

NAKAMURA: Changing the topic a bit, I really enjoyed PomPoko (directed by Isao Takahata, 1994). Did you direct that film?

MIYAZAKI: No. All I said was, “Make them tanuki,” in the planning stage. [laughs]

NAKAMURA: It’s about Tama New Town, isn’t it? You can’t do shape-shifting unless you use animation. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Director Takahata is involved in the environmental issues related to Tama New Town, and the pollution of groundwater and other matters.

NAKAMURA: I see. Even in Britain, considered an advanced nation in terms of city planning, environmental issues were raised first by citizens’ movements. That’s true for the National Trust. And they say a complete amateur, a secretary who transcribed the verbatim proceedings of Parliament, came up with the design of the garden city. This became the model for Tokyo’s Den’en Chōfu area. Thinking along those lines, with PomPoko and Princess Mononoke, I feel that we have come far in citizen participation in raising issues for Japan. This can have a major impact.

MIYAZAKI: We can see that Tama New Town has many ideas built into it, but when I went there, I didn’t see anyone walking along the pedestrian walkways. I wonder why the residents don’t walk there.

NAKAMURA: Hmm. Something must be missing. We can have encounters when we come across unexpected things. As you wander along, you come across someone, or you find something enticing at a tool shop, or you see a white flower gourd blooming on the fence of a backstreet you wandered into. These small daily occurrences give added meaning to our lives. The current intellectualist designs force all sorts of ideas onto pedestrian walkways, but they can’t capture uncontrollable occurrences. One of our future tasks to work on is to have a way to design the pleasures one encounters on a quiet walk.

MIYAZAKI: A friend of mine from Nagoya says, “Nagoya got rid of alleyways with its city planning. The result is that young people don’t stay there. I was surprised when I came to Tokyo to discover so many narrow alleys that are fun to stroll along.” As I’m used to them, I don’t notice them as much, but alleys seem to provide a psychological retreat, and we end up liking the place.

NAKAMURA: The alleyways that remain in Tokyo weren’t left intentionally.

MIYAZAKI: The result turned out well because they weren’t thorough about urban renewal. [laughs]

Moderator: Could it be that current urban planning theory doesn’t recognize the role of alleyways?

MIYAZAKI: They say alleys are dangerous in terms of disaster preparedness. But we seem to need mysterious spaces and useless corners.

NAKAMURA: I didn’t want to take the puritanical stance of having only water and woods in the Goshonuma project, so I included a restaurant and other things. It was difficult to include such things in past parks planning.

MIYAZAKI: You often find an old teahouse, without any upgrades, in a park. But there must be restrictions on investing new monies and turning it into an attractive shop. There are many places where a restaurant would fit nicely and would be a pleasure to come across while strolling in a park.

NAKAMURA: I think that is common sense. It’s quite a new management philosophy that thinks such establishments sully the purity of the place. In prewar times, Matsumotorō was built in Hibiya Park, and there are many restaurants on the grounds of Sensōji Temple in Asakusa. In prewar times, parks were self-supporting, so they allowed restaurants to operate and used the money from the lease for park maintenance. It was a clever system.

MIYAZAKI: Having a good restaurant or café makes the entire space so attractive.

NAKAMURA: That’s true.

MIYAZAKI: From what I hear, if the head of the local government approves, they could be included in parks. But in the case of the Tokyo governor, he has to put his stamp of approval onto papers every five minutes or so, so he has no time to think about things like this.

NAKAMURA: We need to resort to having the person in charge of the project break some rules. If it succeeds, people will pay attention. Then the voice of the bureaucratic mentality forbidding such things will gradually get softer. That might be the way to go about it.

MIYAZAKI: There could be an animation museum where people can drop in when they come to the park to play on the grass. It could have a restaurant where people enjoy having a cup of tea, where the tea and cake are delicious … I would love to do something like that.

NAKAMURA: That sounds wonderful! You can’t enclose the park with a fence. That would make meaningless the public funds spent on the park. We have the concept of the “waterfront.” The edge of the water has great value. I think we need to place similar value on the concept of the “parkfront.” Bring in what will go well with the park. The best would be a restaurant. A hospital might work as well. They are building libraries in many places. A library or a museum would fit in very well in a park.

MIYAZAKI: So many of the museums built during the bubble economy are deserted now. In order to have a solid plan and offer many programs, you have to gather together talented people who want to spend their careers working there.

NAKAMURA: If there are fun programs, more people would use those facilities. Using is participating. I think everyone takes too narrow a view of local resident participation. Decision-making together with urban planning experts is not the only way to participate.

MIYAZAKI: Older people can’t find jobs. I would like to see an expansion of workplaces for them rather than insisting they have a comfortable old age. A town where everyone, from children to the elderly, has self-awareness and a role as a member of the community is a town that is full of energy.

NAKAMURA: That is what a healthy town looks like!

Yoshio Nakamura Born 1938, Tokyo. Professor Emeritus, Tokyo Institute of Technology. After receiving his degree in civil engineering from the Engineering Faculty of University of Tokyo, worked on the Tokyo-Nagoya (Tōmei) Expressway at Japan Highway Public Corporation. Assistant Professor at University of Tokyo, Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Professor at Kyoto University. Promoted “landscape engineering” in research and teaching. His designs include Haneda Sky Arch, which received Japan Society of Civil Engineers Tanaka Award, and Koga Park, which received UNESCO’s Melina Mercouri International Prize. Publications include: Fūkei o Tsukuru (Creating Landscapes; NHK Library), Fūkeigaku Nyūmon (Introduction to Landscape Studies; Chūkō Shinsho), Shitchi Tensei no Ki: Fūkeigaku no Chōsen (Notes on Wetlands Restoration: Challenges of Landscape Studies; Iwanami Shoten).

What Grown-ups Can Tell Children So That They Can Live in a Happy Time

Interviewer: Norio Kōyama (Jojō Bungei; Jojō Bungei Kankōkai, Summer issue, 1998)

Children who aren’t able to start

—[The morning of this interview, in a television broadcast] President Yasuyoshi Tokuma of Tokuma Shoten stated, “Director Miyazaki rescinds his retirement; his next project will be …”

MIYAZAKI: Since I’ve never announced my retirement, I have no way of rescinding it. [laughs] I am always hoping that I can retire. It is clear that it’s too much for me to go on working in the same way I have. What I said was that it was the end of my directing as an animator.

I didn’t hear what President Tokuma said, but he enjoys sending up signal flares. We’re always changing our minds willy-nilly, so I just think, he’s at it again. [laughs]

For my next film, I want to fill in one of the blanks that we haven’t touched on in our past films.

—What will that be about?

MIYAZAKI: In our youth, at a certain time we had to “start” something, to start on something of our own volition. We felt we were expected to start something, no matter what form it took. We chose a path for our future and started on it. This is why, when creating a story, I begin it with a certain form and depict the process of the journey. That is what I have always thought films were about.

The most serious problem for children nowadays is that they are “unable to start.” They don’t know when to start. In fact, they come to think they don’t need to start on their own lives. It seems not only children, but also older youths, think this way. But the world out there tells them to “start” when they reach a certain age, just as in the past. These children end up stuck in this limbo. They have to pretend they have started. Our films tend to leave behind these children who can’t start. For children who are willing to start, our films become powerful encouragement, but children who aren’t able to start are left with their mistrust of change. They become more disillusioned and doubtful about the possibility that people can change.

—Can those children be helped?

MIYAZAKI: That question shows too much impatience. When we have a problem, we immediately look for a bandage to cover the wound, but we need to determine the problem’s cause. And it might be that in reality they don’t have to start. We ourselves may just assume we have started, but are we conscious of the world in a realistic way? Our belief in our power to help others may be unfounded.

We may have the bad habit of searching for a quick solution that ends up only treating the symptoms.

I often hear from children these days that, “It’s a film, after all,” no matter what kind of film I make. Their feeling of mistrust has encroached on many areas. Young people no longer read fiction. Sales of illustrated children’s books have fallen drastically. At the root of these phenomena is this sense of mistrust. This is what leads to “crimes,” or rather “pathological phenomena” by youth that are upsetting our society.

I don’t intend to delve further into this problem here. Yet we do need to see how our work fits into the present for children and figure out how to engage with the problem of them not being able to start. We must confront this head-on.

No doubt this problem occurs everywhere in the world, but I expect it is most striking in Japan, and it is also evident in the mosaic-like society of America. I don’t know enough about the situations in other countries.

—It seems that as adults we are so powerless concerning those children.

MIYAZAKI: No matter how much effort we put into making a film about “a story of having started,” to children unable to start, those who have already started are a different breed, who seem to be in a video-game world. A world in which the main characters carry swords and go on an adventure as they make friends is nothing other than a video game for children. Not only children, but adults as well, may see this as a game rather than a drama. After all, children are a true mirror of adults.

What have grown-ups done?

—The root of the problem seems to run deep.

MIYAZAKI: We could give various reasons for it. This was fated from the time when television, or manga, or video games, or even photo print clubs came to fill in for something children had lost and became more exciting than reality. This tendency is clear in the generation under thirty-five years old now, and I think it will become stronger in the future. Why? Because that generation will become parents.

They buy videos of our films to watch again and again. They think their children are fine because they are viewing good quality films over and over. That’s outrageous. Rather than watch a film fifty times, their children should be doing something else for forty-nine of those times. During the forty-nine repeat viewings of Princess Mononoke, they are losing out on something. And the adults don’t realize that it’s something that can’t be regained.

It’s pointless to have just one set of parents among the rest who don’t allow their children to watch television. That’s because children aren’t raised by grown-ups; they grow up by hanging around each other. If children lived in a remote area, they would make friends with the animals living there and grow up relating to and having curiosity about the complexity and depth of nature that surrounds them. But in our current society, they grow up relating only to their parents or to a small number of friends. What fills in the gaps in their lives is the mass of electronic subculture.

—You must mean television, videos, games, print club photos, those media that have become standard fare.

MIYAZAKI: Mobile phones also fall into this group. Even the economic newspapers shamelessly announce this year’s hit product. And the president of that company is happily quoted as he relates, “My company’s performance …” I think these types of people will surely face destruction.

Even so, we are attempting to create animated films. So I feel torn in two directions.

When I was growing up, we were poor, so the only way for us to live was by relating to other people, even if it meant suffering humiliation. One can’t live alone, and it was no fun if I couldn’t play with friends. I may have drawn pictures and read books alone, but most of the time I was playing with my friends. If, when we were children, there had been video games, no doubt we would have gone in that direction. After all, they offer a quick fix with a lot of stimulation.

Fortunately, in my day we placed value on the fact that this kid was most reliable in fights, that kid was the best at drawing manga, another kid knew a lot about fishing in the river, or yet another kid was good at bicycle-riding. We did go through a lot, including studying for upper school entrance exams. Though some were smarter than others, we knew that so-and-so was really good at fishing, or another at something else.

If I was in a fight, I would lose, and I couldn’t run fast, but I could draw manga. I liked art class, and I was able to find a place for myself and develop a sense of my own self-worth.

My discovery of Tezuka’s manga and my parting from him

—Could you tell us how you entered the field of animation?

MIYAZAKI: The formative experience in my life story was Osamu Tezuka-san. When I read Fusanosuke Natsume-san’s book, I saw that my experience was the same as his: Tezuka-san’s manga filled the gap between my self-consciousness and reality. And I was thrashing around trying to escape from this gap.

When I was twenty or so, I had a hard time as I felt compelled to struggle against Tezuka-san’s works. I didn’t want to fall under his influence. So I tried hard to find his weak points. My mother had told me that if I was going to draw manga, I shouldn’t copy other people’s work, and I agreed with her. Even when I came across manga that thrilled me, I never copied them. Still, though I wasn’t copying his style, people would say my drawings looked like Tezuka’s. I tortured myself trying to escape from the maze of humiliation I was lost in. I thought I should start by mastering the skills of drawing and sketching. But it’s not true that if you can draw and sketch you can create a picture. Unless you have an image in your mind that is different from those of other artists, you can’t draw a different picture. You must have a different worldview, a different view of humanity. As I filled the gaps rising from my self-consciousness with Tezuka-san’s manga and attempted to view the world through his eyes, I struggled against myself. This increased my dilemma. Though I was trying to move beyond his manga, I was still enthralled with his world.

—I see that you faced many dilemmas.

MIYAZAKI: I was finally able to rid myself of this dilemma when we entered the era of mass consumption of manga. Tezuka-san himself changed a lot, and due to that change I was able to distance myself from him. I had had enough.

That was during the first half of the 1960s. Occasionally I would glance at Tezuka-san’s works, but my reaction was that he was doing something new, and I was no longer an attentive reader of his works. Even when I encountered them, I no longer had that feeling of being enthralled. This was in part because he had begun to make animated films. And by that time, I had also become an animator.

Until about the time of Tezuka-san’s death, I felt that everyone who critiqued him held back. Was it because of sentimental fondness for their own youth, their mixed feelings, their regrets, or their unease at killing off their father figure? My feelings were complex. At the same time, I wondered why critics didn’t criticize Tezuka-san’s portrayal of girls in popular culture with a certain sexual immaturity, whereas all the women in his works were nurses or kind nursery school teachers—the kind of women drawn by Shōtarō Ishinomori-san. Why didn’t they criticize Tezuka-san’s lack of development? This is what has led to playing with pretty-girl character dolls (favored by animation fanboys). It seems to me that the critics have avoided touching on this facet of Tezuka-san.

How to live one’s childhood

MIYAZAKI: I don’t think I had a better life in contrast to children these days. So I don’t have happy episodes of my childhood that I want to depict. We animators are involved in this occupation because we have things that were left undone in our childhood. Those who enjoyed their childhood to the fullest don’t go into this line of work. Those who fully graduated from their childhood leave it behind.

—What do you mean when you say “those who fully graduated from their childhood”?

MIYAZAKI: The British author Roald Dahl, who passed away recently, wrote his autobiography in Boy and Going Solo. These are brilliant books. Dahl, who as a boy wrote daily to his mother, decided at age eighteen to travel to Africa, and went off. Having thoroughly enjoyed his boyhood, as a youth he decided against continuing on in school and went to work for an oil company in order to go to Africa. He was put in charge in Africa because no one else wanted that job, and he engaged fully in life there. Moreover, he continued to write letters to his mother.

It is those of us who aren’t like that who draw manga, Tezuka-san included. As Natsume-san has written, it may not have seemed so to others, but he was very self-conscious, which warped his personality. He had to always deal with the gap between his inner self and the world. I’m the same way. As a child I was sickly. Others must have seen me as an impulsive and goofy kid. But inside, insecurity and fear swirled around in me. I desperately hid this gap so it wouldn’t be discovered. One of the things that filled that gap for me was the manga of Tezuka-san.

When I look around me, I see many people like that. What is curious is that in my workplace those who draw background art aren’t like that. Animators are the ones who haven’t fully grown up. We must all be pursuing what we couldn’t do during our childhood.

When we actually start working, we face tiresome human relations and problems we must resolve in order to go on to the next phase. We have to start whether we want to or not. It is within this context that we have to work with others, and at times we hurt one another.

We often hear the phrase “Don’t become a bother to others.” This is a postwar illusion. It’s a phrase I dislike intensely. In reality, just by existing, people are a bother; we all think it’s best if no one else is around. Even within families, the mere existence of an older brother is a bother, and there are many relationships where we feel bothered just by having that kid around. There is no relationship that isn’t a bother. If you think you’re not being a bother, you’re bound to be causing other stresses.

For humanity in the modern age, the only way to establish one’s ego is by negation. We can only see our surroundings as the enemy. I don’t know if that is good or bad. After all, the modern ego only has a history of a few hundred years. It may be that, just as the modern nation-state is bound to disappear, the time will come when the modern ego will also disappear. We may recapture a society in which the village or family becomes central to the way we live. I don’t know if that will come about. But our present society is most certainly not that type. It is one in which we must battle using our egos.

I myself haven’t been able to find any enlightenment, as I live steeped in impatience and irritations. But unless I claw my way, nothing will start, and unless I engage with others, nothing will start. Kindhearted young people who loathe relating to others or being a bother to others are increasing in number. This preference by these youths is a weakness held in common with the somewhat sickly otaku types.

It would be fine if they were left in peace, but in reality they must be economically active. Unable to “start,” they end up destroying themselves or attacking others. Problems related to their condition are bound to increase.

We can now see the structure of ruination

—We face the issue of how to deal with this condition.

MIYAZAKI: Children are asking us adults, “Why are we living?” “Why was I born in such a time?” “Why was I born at all?” To these queries, adults respond, “You’ll lose out if you’re concerned about that,” or “If you do this, you’ll gain an advantage.” They don’t have any answers. If I were asked such questions, it would trouble me. That’s because I don’t have any clear answers. Unless we stop speaking in terms of advantages and disadvantages, we can’t be persuasive. The rationale of the grown-up world is no different from playing the money game. The falseness of this structure has been exposed for all of society, including the countryside.

What is more, our current situation will likely become more merciless as economic slowdowns exacerbate the disquiet people feel. As a result, the Japanese people may weaken and lose their aggressiveness and become the people that cause the least harm in the world. [laughs] In our stead, neighboring countries are trying to do similarly foolish things. In China, films, videos, and video games are all entering the society at the same time, so their effect may become even more pronounced.

We need to rid ourselves of the subculture surrounding television so that the human race can live in decency. Of course, it is all right to dispose of animation as well. But I doubt that it will go away. Humans collect junk and stash usable things and unusable things jumbled together. We, and I include myself, seem unable to endure our fear of blank time and freedom.

We have failed multiple times as we have tried to control these problems in the twentieth century. Socialism was one of those efforts. It came about in order to control the economy to overcome severe economic depression.

Having seen the slums of the Victorian era, Marx wanted to do something and thought of remaking the environment. His solution was to control the economy. However, the result of this experiment in the twentieth century was that control always brings with it a reaction. We can conclude that all our efforts at control, including solving environmental problems, have failed in the twentieth century.

Living in this age, when we can see these results, what are we to tell our children? First and foremost, we must make our children sturdy. And we must make sure they continue to have intellectual curiosity. Specifically, we must teach them how to fit into this society. That is what childhood is for. Taking an antiwar stance should be left to grown-ups. If grown-ups are antiwar, then children will be as well. We shouldn’t be showing children antiwar films to salve our own conscience. Even more basic than this is the issue of whether our children can experience the joys and sorrows that come with life. What should we do to deal with the issues that are preventing children from having a full life?

—There’s no simple answer, is there?

MIYAZAKI: It won’t be simple to come up with an answer, but I would like to conduct a great experiment. Since we’ve had so many failures, we could try an experiment. [laughs] I would like to make over nursery schools, kindergartens, and elementary schools by turning them into places where children love to be.

Kindergartners are the customers, so make a kindergarten that meets customer demand. It shouldn’t be a place for serious thinking or teaching how to write. It would be senseless to have the pupils who complete this kindergarten go to the kind of elementary schools we now have, so we must remake the elementary schools. Children are now told at around second grade that they are no good, that they can’t recoup what they have missed learning. This used to occur around fifth grade, but now it happens much earlier. I wonder who made it so. Whoever instituted this is the enemy of the people. If it was the Ministry of Education that decided to teach writing in kindergarten, we would be better off getting rid of the Ministry of Education.

What makes for the happiest childhood? It seems to me that this question is ignored, as childhood has become a time to invest in becoming an adult. What is important, for example, is not disallowing children the use of knives, but rather teaching them how to use knives well.

The extraordinary stresses created when an agrarian society turned into a modern industrial society have led to our current situation in this world. We see similar problems coming up now in China and Korea. When the money game starts, we all create similar problems. That means that Japan was not the only foolish country; all of East Asia is foolish. It’s actually a relief to me to see that it’s not just our country.

What Is Most Important for Children

Interviewer: Masao Ōta. Initial publication: Kikan: Ningen to Kyōiku (Quarterly: Human Beings and Education), Issue Number 10, Minshu Kyōiku Kenkyūsho (ed.), Junpōsha, June 1996; compiled in Kyōiku ni Tsuite (On Education), Masao Ōta (ed.), Junpōsha, September 25, 1998

I practically crawled to my sons’ fathers’ class observation day

—Today, I hope to hear from you about children and education, culture, and nature, among various subjects.

MIYAZAKI: Actually, my wife told me that I’m not qualified to talk about education for children, since I didn’t do anything for my own. But when my children were in elementary school, I made sure to attend the fathers’ class observation day held once a year, even if it meant I had to practically crawl there after working through the night. Not many other fathers were there, but at least I went. As I walked unsteadily from our house toward the school, I realized I didn’t remember which grade or which classroom I was headed for, and when I called home I was scolded roundly. That was the kind of father I was. The other day, when I was talking with my son, he told me he had no memory of seeing me during a certain period of his childhood.

—Do you mean at school?

MIYAZAKI: No, no, at home. I would get up in the morning after the children had gone to school and return at night after they had gone to bed. There was a while when I went to work even on Sundays. That meant we didn’t see each other until the film I was working on was done.

—And yet, you went to the fathers’ day at school?

MIYAZAKI: In the early days, my wife and I both worked, so I had a sense of obligation that I had to fulfill my responsibility as a parent. We both worked for five years or so, but after our second child was born and I changed companies, our work schedules became entirely out of sync. My studio was completely geared toward late-night hours. I would take my son to the nursery school in the morning and then go to nearby Shakujii Park to fish in the fishing pond, and then loll around for a couple of hours before I arrived at work, and I would still be on the early side. I did enjoy that time before going to the office, though. I was determined to take my son to nursery school in the morning, but I couldn’t pick him up in the evening, so my wife did that. When she told me that he would fall asleep, holding her hand, as she walked him home while she carried our younger son on her back, I thought this wasn’t right. It was then that I pleaded with her to stop working. She still recalls that time with anger.

—She gets angry with you?

MIYAZAKI: Yes. She hasn’t forgiven me for the fact that she had to quit working. Occasionally she recalls this and gets angry with me. I keep quiet until her mood passes.

I don’t think the husband must necessarily earn money by working and the wife must necessarily stay at home and maintain the household. I think each role should be filled by the most capable person. I have friends who are better at being househusbands, and I know women who wouldn’t be good housewives.

—Nowadays there are married people and couples who have a flexible relationship like that.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, there are. You have to have a talent for family life or for being in love.

—You think talent is needed for family life?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, we’ve entered that era. Falling in love requires talent as well. Don’t you think so? You need talent to stay in love for a long time or to live continuously in the frenzy of falling in love.

In education too, we have so many manuals, and we think there must be one best way out there. Parents are quick to ask the advice of specialists, to find out if their way is correct. I think we shouldn’t rely on manuals. There really aren’t any that have all the answers. That is why I feel helpless when I am asked for advice on education. [laughs]

Parents should think about their own way of living

—In education as well, I think it is necessary, particularly now, to deviate from the manuals, and that is what people seek.

MIYAZAKI: Sometimes I listen to education advice programs on the car radio in the morning. What I have noticed is that it is impossible to teach people how to treat children. I react by thinking, “It is you parents who need to think about how you are living.” Don’t you think so? Children aren’t persuaded by parents who boast about tiresome things like how they have an advantage because they graduated from a good school. They become troubled as a result of these parents’ attempts to shove onto their children their extremely foolish and shallow sense of values. Many of the mothers who are asking for advice should take a look at themselves. This has nothing to do with whether they are good or bad people. I’m sure the counselors who reply dozens of times to these sorts of questions suffer negative psychological effects. The only way they can respond is according to the manuals they have internalized.

—I see two issues: one is the way the parents themselves are living and the other is that they shouldn’t force their way, even if it is correct and with good intentions, onto their children. The way of life that was backed by values that have held true until now—getting good grades in school and joining a good company—no longer holds sway. The children know this.

MIYAZAKI: I think the architecture of schools should also deviate from the manuals. There is a park that Shūsaku Arakawa-san designed in Yōrō Town in Gifu Prefecture that is a wonderful space. It’s an astonishing park that has no flat surfaces. Some elderly people have fallen and even broken bones. I think school playgrounds could be like this. Why do school playgrounds have to be flat? They are flat because they were used for military training in the past. In Europe and America, there are many schools that don’t have playgrounds, and in Europe they don’t have track and field day.

—School playgrounds and sports fields used to be different spaces. Schools had gardens. At my elementary school there was a sports field and also a play area that included a pond and woods and a stone statue of Kinjirō Ninomiya.33

MIYAZAKI: That’s the way it should be.

It is pointless to have the morning lineup on the sports field. Speaking from my elementary school experience, not once was I moved by what the principal said. After all, elementary school pupils don’t have the ability to be moved on the spot by listening to a lecture.

At Arakawa-san’s fantastic park, where not only are there no flat surfaces but there are also no perpendicular lines, the neighborhood children have a great time. This is the kind of landscape of fields and woods where we used to play. It’s all slopes, and not just going up and down, but also slanted to the side. We used to play while we crawled around on a bank of red earth. Not only did we have to pay attention to the slope in front of and behind us, we also had to check what was to our left and right. It would be great if this kind of playground could be made. There are so many schools in Japan, you’d think at least one school could try it out. The sports field could be in a separate location. Rather than playing dodgeball, this kind of play would be much more fun. The children will come up with their own games to play.

—The Hanegi Playpark in Setagaya, Tokyo, is based on a similar concept. Children can have adventures and can use fire and water.

MIYAZAKI: I’d like to make a big pit in a place like that where you slide down and fall in. There would be mud and water at the bottom. Of course if it rains, the water will get deeper, and if there is no rain for a while, it will dry up. It would be a place where children could slip and fall in, and it would be hard to climb out of. That’s the kind of pit I’d like to make.

This may be too blunt a way to say it, but unless we change our way of thinking to such a degree, Japan’s education can’t be reformed.

—Recently, school buildings have become really interesting, unlike the old military barracks type of buildings. We see this especially at private schools.

MIYAZAKI: Even if the buildings are interesting, the problem is what’s inside. No matter how resourcefully one builds a prison, it is, after all, a prison. [laughs] There was a time when children didn’t think a dingy wooden school building was pitiful. Although it is important to create a good environment, it doesn’t seem to matter to children if it is what adults consider pretty or light. It’s all right for the building to be makeshift; even in a cardboard classroom, children will study when they enjoy learning.

Don’t let children watch television until they are three years old

—Architecture can reflect educational principles. There might be a hideaway, or small rooms, or curved lines. These kinds of ideas have been researched in line with various educational principles. It is a way to rearrange a school’s space and time frame.

MIYAZAKI: We saw newspaper reports about increasing recess time at the elementary school level when the Japan Teachers’ Union held its educational research workshop. Lunchtime was increased to forty minutes so that children could have recess after they ate; and during this time there would be no club activities or class preparation. When this was put in place, the children’s health improved.

—I think it was an elementary school in Shiga Prefecture that added twenty minutes to lunchtime. This greatly changed the way children behaved, apparently.

MIYAZAKI: Every summer my friends’ children come to visit my cabin in the mountains. I look forward to seeing how the kindergarteners turn out when they start elementary school. Two years later, they tell me they are already learning their times table. That infuriates me. Why do they teach the multiplication table to such young children and make them suffer? If they are taught it in fifth grade, they’ll learn it quickly. Why do they try to teach it when they are too young?

—I learned the multiplication table in third grade. Now they teach it earlier, and the amount children have to learn has increased. They teach things earlier and earlier in kindergarten, even subjects that aren’t covered in the teaching guidelines.

MIYAZAKI: They are trying to shorten childhood, which is the best time of one’s life. I’m afraid the world of children changes when they learn how to read and write. From what I saw of my own children, when they didn’t know how to read and write and didn’t yet have the ability to grasp abstract matters, they were so free in making wonderfully inventive clay figures. As they learned to read and write, they thought in more conceptual and abstract ways. And what they made became uninteresting.

What is more, it is just at that time that they are assaulted by manga, animation, and video games whose make-believe experiences, combined with commercial interests, surge over them. Children aren’t able to resist all of this. I wonder if our country is trying to gang up and destroy our children. Wait a minute, I’m one of those making animated films, aren’t I? [laughs] We even sell videos, so we’re also at fault. I wish that videos were shown to children only about once a year. That’s what I would like to write on the video packaging. Something like, “This video is to watch only on special occasions.” I hear parents say that their children have watched a video fifty times or more. The kids can’t fully concentrate on something when they watch it that many times, so I think it’s not good for them. Watching something on a special occasion is an entirely different experience than watching it over and over again. Movies or animation should be saved for special events. What children need these days is ways to enjoy their ordinary days.

—When you say children shouldn’t watch movies and animation so much, is it because children don’t engage directly with things and nature, and with media as intermediary, everything becomes abstract?

MIYAZAKI: A natural area doesn’t have to be impressive. Children might be captivated by the tufts on tatami mats. [laughs] That’s what it’s really about. If a kid puts a cigarette butt into his mouth out of sight of his parents, he’ll realize how awful it tastes and never try it again. That’s how children learn what is bad for them.

How do children learn about their world when they are one or two years old? They learn that a flame is hot by experiencing it, getting burned, and making a big fuss over it. That’s when they learn the simple workings of their world: if they lean too far over the edge, they will fall off; if they lean out about this much, they won’t fall off; or how much it hurts if they do fall off. If they watch television during that period, they see a virtual reality in front of their eyes. A three-year-old can’t tell the difference between reality and what is inside the television set. I realized that by watching my own children. When a monster appeared, they thought a real monster was right there and ran away. I heard that when they showed the video of My Neighbor Totoro at a kindergarten, when Totoro appeared all the children hid underneath their desks. I didn’t mean for it to be so threatening.

With these points in mind, we should not let children watch television until they are three years old. And definitely not during mealtimes. It should be the norm that decent families don’t turn on their television sets first thing in the morning. While we argue, not about specifics, but about the generalities of whether television as a whole is good or bad, reality has progressed to a state where we have gotten bogged down—just as with the issue regarding our Constitution, as we fight over how to interpret Article Nine34 of the peace constitution. Those who were critical of television were utterly defeated and have given up. And now we can’t conceive of an era without television.

I think it is best to regulate and restrict the constant flow of images to children whether in print, television, or video games. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or freedom of expression. It is a necessary step to make our children healthy.

Engaging with reality is what is important

—Was the first animation you made for television Heidi, Girl of the Alps?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it was the first where I was on the main staff.

—What year was it?

MIYAZAKI: It was 1974. I was already kind of dejected at that time. My colleagues wondered why I felt that way.

Children who watched Heidi apparently were convinced that pastures were like lawns of solid green, painted in poster colors. So they thought if they actually went to a mountain pasture they could run around barefoot. But in reality, the grass was sharp, and everywhere there was cow dung covered in blowflies. I heard they were astonished, and I was happy to hear that. [laughs]

To return to our main point, engaging with reality doesn’t mean going to some impressive natural area or scenic spot. What is important is for children to learn about the reality of the area where they live. Animation, movies, and video games, as well as education, shouldn’t take away that time from children.

However, in our household environment and around our towns, even in the countryside, children have fewer and fewer chances to actually see, hear, touch, pet, and smell, to engage with things surrounding them. In that case, why can’t schools cover this area? At the very least, by the time they graduate from elementary school, children could learn during playtime how to chop wood, cut vegetables with a knife, master several types of knots, and sew on a button with needle and thread—though this last task they do teach in home economics class. But if these become subjects for examinations, then some educators will train students to just focus on these skills.

Children these days have it tough. Yet they are told to live with hopes and dreams. When grown-ups themselves are doubtful whether a bright future exists, how can they insist that children have hope for the future?

—Do you know the book Niji no ue o tobu fune (The Boat That Flies Over the Rainbow) by Shōkurō Sakamoto (Ayumi Shuppan, 1982)?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I know it. I used it in a film, with Sakamoto-san’s permission. In fact, my wife’s father, Kōshi Ōta, who was the chairman of the Educational Woodblock Print Association, wrote a recommendation for this book.

—Really? Is that so?

MIYAZAKI: I myself sold quite a few of the collection of prints. Sakamoto-san is a very impressive person. Whichever school he went to, he left wonderful results. That is why he is proof of the incredible importance of teachers during childhood.

—In fact, when my friend heard that I was going to meet with you today, he sent the book to me from Nagano. He wondered if you had read it, as it is so much like the world of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. But you began Nausicaä before this book, didn’t you?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t recall which was first, but I thought the prints were very good.

—Also, as it says in the title, a boat flies in the sky. You must also like the sky because in your works Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, and Porco Rosso, there is a lot of flying.

MIYAZAKI: I wonder if I depicted too many flying machines.

—And those aircraft are called “ships,” aren’t they?

MIYAZAKI: I feel that ships are the most basic means of transport for humans. We can load all of life onto them.

—Like Noah’s ark?

MIYAZAK: They don’t have to be that large. There are stagecoaches as well, but ships can float on the water and they can go anywhere. I think the word “airship” encompasses that idea and has a unique ring to it.

I have a strong desire to be liberated from being tied down to reality. When forced to explain it I can say that’s my rationale. That is why I want to fly away. But rest assured that in my next film (Princess Mononoke) there is no flying.

Revel in the pleasure of the present

—This area (Higashi Koganei where Studio Ghibli is located) is very nice. I am surprised that it is so undeveloped despite being close to a train station in Tokyo.

MIYAZAKI: Even though there are universities here and students use this station, there isn’t a big bookstore around here. It’s up to the individual whether one reads books while a student, but the penalty for not reading will eventually come around to the individual. Increasing numbers of people think knowledge and cultivation are not strengths, but ignorance is, after all, ignorance. No matter how good-natured and diligent you are, if you don’t know about the world around you it means you don’t know where you are. Especially in our age, when each of us has to think about where we are going, there will be a heavy price to pay for ignorance about past history.

—A moment ago you said that reading can harm young children. Do you mean that it is also important to gain knowledge from reading?

MIYAZAKI: Of course it is. But cramming too much into young children is harmful. Just like an ace pitcher in Little League who ruins his shoulder or elbow at a young age, it robs children of curiosity itself. I don’t like to study, so I don’t want to say people should study. But I do suggest that you study things you like. It’s just hard to find the right entry point to find what you like. This is why it would be good if schools could offer this entry point.

Taking the example of baseball, rather than instilling grown-up strategies like swinging at a strike but not at a ball, it is more important, I think, to have the children hit any pitch with all their might and experience the joy of running around the bases. I think that’s much more important to children than walking to first base on a four ball count.

For those interested in academic learning, they can study after the years of compulsory education. And for children who like to study and want to study more, they should be given special treatment. I think it’s fine for a child who loves to study and is good with numbers to earn more than the average worker when he grows up. That’s a much better way than forcing the larger group who don’t have mathematical abilities to attain the same level.

We often talk about “the future of our children,” don’t we? Unfortunately, our children’s future is to become boring adults. For children only the present instant exists. For that child the present doesn’t exist for the sake of the future. What I want to say is don’t rob children of their precious childhood for the sake of tedious studies, their parents’ petty concerns for appearances and peace of mind, or their parents’ pedestrian thinking. I want to make children happy in a completely different way than offering them delicious food or buying them whatever they want.

This is where the parents’ values and way of life gets called into question. Concerning these issues, I can’t say that my own parenting was impressive. After we had finished raising our children, my wife and I agreed that we could do a better job if we were to do it over again. But we realized that we wouldn’t have the energy to chase our children around as we did when we were younger, without any idea of what we were doing. So we ended up harping on past regrets.

Our basic awareness must be that childhood doesn’t exist for the sake of the humdrum lives of adults; rather it exists for the present of the children. By “the present,” some people take it to mean living only for the moment, but that is not what I mean. There are things that should be seen now, things that should be felt now. For example, a joyous feeling one has as an adult might last just five minutes. But for a child that five minutes may fulfill an entirely different qualitative and decisive function.

From the opposite perspective, a psychological trauma that, from an adult’s viewpoint, may be minor can be a major wound for a child. The child will be hurt, for sure. It is impossible to grow up without being hurt. So we can’t be afraid of being wounded, nor afraid of wounding. I don’t know who said such nonsense as we shouldn’t be a bother to others. Just by existing, human beings cause trouble for each other. It’s better for us to accept the reality that we are living by being a bother to each other.

At times I have thought that the existence of my children was troublesome. This is something that is taboo to speak about. I’m sure my children thought it was a bother to have such a dad. That’s how we tend to feel about each other. The relationship between my wife and me is like that, and I’m sure there are even more troublesome relationships in the workplace. [laughs]

—The manga Nausicaä touches upon the lack of a mother’s love and being hurt, doesn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t consider myself to be creating films and manga about being hurt. Everyone has gone through that. It’s a matter of whether a person holds on to it as a valuable experience or sublimates it in a different form. That wound can be endured, but it cannot be healed. Enduring it is sufficient, as this is the very core of human existence. That’s what I think. What is irreparable is irreparable. Labeling a child as falling behind in the fifth grade causes irreparable damage, no matter what kind of humanistic intervention is attempted in middle school. An experience of one hour, for a three-year-old, has a much greater impact than an adult’s experience of one year.

When we realize that, we can become so afraid we can’t do anything. But in actuality, living beings are hardy, so we must rely on that. We shouldn’t fear mistakes either. It is a terribly erroneous assumption to think we can always grow up healthy and lead a wonderful life as bright as the blue sky. Every conceivable thing happens in life.

If we look at history, on the level of a small village, many things have occurred that made us think that the world will perish. If people yet continue to live, even if we have come to understand that those occurrences are happening on a global scale, we can ultimately only feel the same way as the villagers felt in the past. To me it seems the same whether we think in terms of the scale of the village or of the globe.

I have come to think, whether your child has atopic dermatitis or whatever it may be, it is better to live no matter what, to have children and suffer together with them. So I tell young people to go ahead and have children. It is better to live fully, getting married and having children and floundering, even if one is brought up short by what is lacking in oneself. That’s what proves you are alive.

Yesterday I attended a memorial gathering for Ryōtarō Shiba-san. Though he knew from his study of history the many ignoble aspects of humanity, rather than write about them he made an effort to find the best in people. I thought that year by year his disillusionment would have grown. But when I saw him toward the end of last year, he told me that this country has gotten better. He was such a decent person; I don’t think there’s another person who was so decent. I liked him so much, it warms my heart to recall him.

Relate to nature with courtesy

—The theme for our feature for this issue is “Nature.” Your comments so far have touched on this. I would like to ask, what is your view on our present natural environment and global environment?

MIYAZAKI: I can only say the same thing that everyone else has already said. With that in mind, I must decide the way I want to live. The film I am making now treats that theme, and my work on Nausicaä also dealt with it. I think this is the fundamental dilemma for humanity. It may look like we are engaging in a balanced form of agriculture, but in reality we are plundering nature. We could say that the course of our fate was set when we started tilling the land.

—People also say this started from the time humans obtained fire.

MIYAZAKI: If we stopped tilling the land, they say the earth can support only four million hunters.

Therefore, when we think through what we can do, I come back to treating nature with courtesy in our daily actions.

It is wrongheaded to think that the natural environment was wonderful in the past and is now in its worst state. I came to think this way as I took walks in Hachikokuyama (Eight Country Mountain). It is on the farthest reaches of the Sayama Hills, and in the old days, people could see from its peak a panorama of eight countries, or domains, including Sagami and Musashi. Now it is covered in a thicket, and you can’t see the surrounding countryside. So in the Kamakura Period it must have been a bald mountain. There is a place called Shōgunzuka (General’s Mound) where, as Yoshisada Nitta35 came pressing in from the Gunma region, he raised the Genji’s white flag. If the hill had been covered in a thicket, no one could have seen the flag. That means the hill has been in turn burned, made into fields, planted with trees, and had trees cut down for a long time. It is clear that people have ruthlessly cut down trees for their own purposes.

A while ago someone wrote in the newspaper that if you study picture scrolls of historic periods and look at their landscapes, you can see that our view of nature, that a primeval forest existed in proximity to and pushed against inhabited areas, is a lie. He wrote that it was a lie that Japanese held vegetation precious, and, in fact, they had cut down a lot. His theory was that the Kantō region around Tokyo, where there are woods, is a man-made landscape of second growth trees, and that the area became stable from the mid-Meiji to early Shōwa eras, during the first decades of the twentieth century. He hypothesized that, with commercial value put on firewood and charcoal from the woods, people continued planting. From my experience of Hachikokuyama, I think his theory may be correct.

Human beings were living face to face with death, so they couldn’t have been that kind toward nature. The problems we are facing now are actually those that humans have faced over and over again.

—The European countries all have the same background as well. Compared to Japan, a country like Spain has much less greenery. What Spain has are ranches and fields, and the rest is desert.

MIYAZAKI: That is why it is a question of how to get along with nature, how much risk we are willing to take. If we become deep ecologists and go into nature to find happiness, we won’t be able to be happy. The people of the Jōmon period were not all happy. In the periods when Buddha lived and Christ lived, their religions were born and ultimately grew to be worldwide because people were concerned about human suffering. You can see we have kept repeating things.

Japan was peaceful until just a short while ago. We were optimistic because we had an economy that was growing.

There are countries that were on the verge of crisis as they ruined their natural surroundings and felt the danger and somehow recovered; and then there are countries that continued on their ruinous path. We need to acknowledge that the human race has done such things. Now that these have reached global proportions, the solution can’t be arrived at easily. But if we understand that there has never been a fundamental solution, conversely we can deal with it. It is better to deal with nature with courtesy in specific ways, such as helping to clean up a nearby river, not clear-cut trees, and not pick all the persimmons but leave half for the birds. Worrying about the fate of the world doesn’t lead to solutions. After all, Buddha worried, Confucius worried, Shinran36 worried, everyone worried, and we will likely continue to worry in the future. So we should all worry according to our own abilities. [laughs]

—Should we call that nihilism or optimism?

MIYAZAKI: Yoshie Hotta37-san used the term “transparent nihilism.” If we can live like that and be moved and be kind, rather than giving up in desperation, wouldn’t that be the best? I’m one who insists that I’ll drive an automobile to the end even if I have to pay a carbon emission tax. Yet I intend to live out my life by leaving this tree uncut, or donating some money to the Totoro Fund38, or limiting parking spaces in order to increase the number of trees when I designed this studio.

The other day I rode three hundred meters above Tokyo in a dirigible. The sight below appalled me. Tokyo looked like mold spreading all over the place. Houses upon houses. I was dismayed to think that all of this land is owned by people, and they live everywhere, eating three meals a day and turning lights on and off.

Humans should live walking on the ground and enjoy strolling along this street or stopping at that shop. But we have entered an age when we need to have both perspectives. We need a global or worldwide viewpoint and, at the same time, the viewpoint of where we sit, the area in which we lead our lives. Within our surroundings, if we can live by discovering that this person is a good person or even trivial things like this house’s fence is delightful, we can become decent, pleasant people, I’m sure.

—Perspectives from the sky and from the ground, you say.

MIYAZAKI: As a result, I think we would come up against the fundamental issue of the way families ought to be. After all, what supports us is family.

There is a famous book by Victor Frankl called Night and Fog. It’s a very moving book. Strangely enough, though it is about the hell he lived through, reading it gives one hope.

—That is quite true. It describes the worst hell humans can think of while at the same time telling us of the hope for humanity.

MIYAZAKI: For example, he describes how the prisoners felt incredibly uplifted by the sight of a single sapling tree from the windows of the concentration camp.

Recently, I saw a documentary featuring a Japanese woman who had married a Bosnia-Herzegovinian young man. She returned to Japan with her child after her husband was killed in the Balkan War. Her situation was so tragic, but her facial expression turned brighter and brighter as time went on. If Japanese films could show a face like hers, rather than the faces of complacent talents, Japanese films wouldn’t have become so inferior. The irony is that misfortunes can improve people.

She had married this foreign young man, pretty much running away from home and eloping with him, and had been away for seven years. Now that she was returning with her child, her father went to Tokyo’s international airport to welcome home his daughter and grandchild. I think he was from Yamagata Prefecture, and he was also a remarkable person. The gesture of this old man bending down and holding his hand out to the grandchild he was meeting for the first time moved me to think that people are truly wonderful.

The more I hear about Yugoslavia the more I am upset by the fate and shortsightedness of human beings and the senselessness of ethnic nationalism. But watching this documentary energized me. It made me feel that human beings aren’t so worthless after all. This is the way that people have managed to live on. So many things may happen as the times get tough, the world goes to pieces, and the average temperature rises. There are, of course, things that go wrong due to such events. But if we take the perspective of the human race, we have survived and lived on through those times over and over again. That is the only way to look at history.

We in Japan have been very fortunate that for fifty years we haven’t had to experience danger to our own lives and haven’t had to worry that those close to us may suddenly be killed. For us this has been an easy period. Those who live on into the future may not live in such an easy time.

What grown-ups can do for children

MIYAZAKI: I’m the type who lays bare my feelings when confronting things, even to new hires at the studio. So, as I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, just as my wife says, I am not qualified to talk about education.

But what I can do is to give children pleasure. I don’t have any ability to give them guidance in the correct path or to teach them subjects, but I think I can teach them some strange ways to enjoy the moment. These are things a mother would never do. Like taking them for a speedy ride in a weird car or secretly letting them do something forbidden. When a bunch of fifth graders came to my mountain cabin, I let them use a chain saw. That was scary. One mistake and a finger might get sawed off. I decided to let them at it without an adult around. I was nervous, wondering when I might hear some screams. But when you actually use a chain saw, it’s not that much fun. It’s more fun to split firewood with an ax. It feels much better to wield the ax and split right through the wood. When I let them use the ax, they kept at it without getting bored. An ax is heavy, so it’s scary too, but if you’re careful to show them how to use it, they are less likely to injure themselves.

This is the good thing about an avuncular figure. I can give them a chance to do these things. If their mothers were around, they would never be able to do them. They would be yelling, “Be careful!” Actually, there are times when that could be more dangerous.

On that occasion, they were all boys. When I told them to make their own meals, they left the kitchen a mess. They took turns washing the dishes, but they splattered water everywhere and left things out. It completely tired me out. I found out there is a gap between the ideal and reality.

—There are kids who are really accomplished and good at cooking, aren’t there?

MIYAZAKI: It bears no relation to whether they are boys or girls. It’s a talent. I think it’s talent and training. Though it was exhausting to have the boys stay with me, I had fun, so I hope to do it again if I have the chance. When I finished a film and had some time off, I’ve taken all my relatives’ kids off to play. Once there were eleven children and I was the only adult. That was so much fun. The children were really great. Their behavior was entirely different from when their parents were with them. The older boys and girls looked after the little ones, and the little ones listened to the older ones. All I had to do as an adult was to say, “Let’s go to the beach!” or “It’s free time!” and pay for things. So I just lay around smoking, my mind blank.

It’s no use to cite complicated theories like the need to spend time with children or the need for children to spend time with their father as you deal with children. What grown-ups can do is give the kids a chance. So if you’re taking your own children somewhere, take along your relatives’ children, or neighborhood children, or school friends, and don’t interfere in their play. Creating that kind of chance is easier on grown-ups and more fun for children. That’s what I urge people to do.

No matter what kind of complex, insoluble problems I may be burdened with as an adult, when I see children smile, in that instant I feel glad. That moment is so precious. What pleases me in making films for little children is to witness the moment when they see the film and become truly liberated. When the children are really enjoying it and that feeling spreads like a contagion, I feel so happy in that moment. It is so wonderful.

Regarding the environment for children, it’s not good to be contemptuous of the place where we live. To keep telling our children that we could only afford to live in these lousy surroundings is so negative. If we stroll around our town when we are in a good mood, we do feel affection toward the landscape. In making Whisper of the Heart, I wanted to take another look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Children know intuitively that nature is finite, even if they do not know this as learned knowledge. They also know that they are not celebrated. They have not been warmly welcomed to the world they were born into; they are told that they were born in a difficult time. That’s why children, from the moment they are born, think the world is a harsh place to live. That is the main feeling that has been implanted in children these days. All the more, adults must show them that, even so, there are good things and there are wonderful ways of experiencing and looking at the world.

Sacrifices of the Sky

Commentary included in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand, and Stars), translated into Japanese by Daigaku Horiguchi, Ningen no Tochi, Shinchō Bunko, October 15, 1998

What we humans do is far too merciless. Pouring talent, ambition, labor, and resources into flying machines—newly born at the start of the twentieth century—unfazed by failure after failure, crashes, deaths, bankruptcies, at times extolled and at times derided, we granted them the starring role as weapons of mass slaughter in the space of a mere decade.

The dream of the human race to fly in the skies was not always a peaceful one, having been tied from the beginning to military purposes. Already in the nineteenth century, flying machines appear as invincible new weapons in works of science fiction. In fact, the Wright Brothers were intent on selling their flying machine to the army, and Count Zeppelin, inventor of the dirigible, dreamed of building an air fleet that could rain bombs down onto the very heart of enemy countries.

When World War I began in 1914, it did not take long for the first machine guns to be mounted on the bodies of airplanes made of a framework of spruce or ash across which cloth was stretched, strengthened with wires like kites. This was the start of midair battles. New models of airplanes were manufactured with inventions leading to complexities of operation and refinements in fighting strategies. Developments were made in wooden monocoque bodies, copper piping framework, duralumin plates, and powerful engines, and finally the manufacture of all-metal aircraft. As many as 177,000 military aircraft were produced by the countries at war before the war ended in 1918, when 13,000 aircraft were in service. That means that over 160,000 aircraft were ruined, burned, and abandoned during the war years. I wonder what happened to the young men who flew in those planes? Pilots, engineers, gunners, and radio operators all were used up and died shockingly young and alarmingly quickly.

To the generals, aircraft were reserves of military capacity, to the manufacturing industrialists they were pure profit, to engineers they were professional accomplishments, and to the young men who flew in them they were a chance for glorious fame and excitement. In order to raise the wartime morale of their citizens, the countries at war announced the results of air battles using individuals’ names and thus made heroes of them. Aviators who shot down five or more enemy aircraft were called aces, and the top aces became national heroes, written up in newspapers just as professional sports stars are today. The countries that fought on the European battlefronts each counted several hundred aces. I totaled up the number of aircraft shot down by these aces. According to the information I have at hand, it added up to several tens of thousands. Parachutes became practicable only toward the end of the war, crashing meant death, and there were many pilots who died from gunfire before crashing. What is more, two or three, at times four, crewmembers rode on planes other than solo aircraft. It is astounding to think how many men must have died.

It is difficult beyond imagination to aim at a target that is moving in three-dimensional space in an irregular manner from a moving aircraft and shoot to destroy it. It is impossible without having an immense talent for it.

The aces were downed, and the many other crew on the aircraft not only were downed but also were fated to be killed as fodder for the aces. At the time it was said that the average life expectancy of the crew of the fighter planes on the Western Front was two weeks. Even so, the nations kept sending their youth off into the meat grinder of war.

Although the airplanes advanced considerably, by today’s standards, they were fragile and unstable. They often broken down and caused accidents just from flying. It is appalling to think of the number of men who died during training in accidents or breakdowns, and those who were wounded and disabled.

Despite this, many young men were drawn to become airmen and so enlisted. These youths were filled with a feverish excitement that cannot be explained only in terms of their thinking that it would be better to be airmen than crawl around in the muck of trench warfare. The desire to fly freely in the sky turned into the freedom to fly at high speed at will, with speed and destructive power stirring up the aggressive impulses of the young men. This is readily understandable when we see young people today running through a red light as they speed on their motorcycles. Speed was the drug that stirred up the twentieth century. Speed was good, it was progress, it was superior, and so it became the yardstick to measure everything.

Those readers who have read this far must be wondering what this has to do with a commentary on Terre des Hommes. As I grew increasingly fond of Saint-Exupéry’s writings and of his fellow pilots, I wanted to reconsider in a dispassionate manner the history of aircraft itself. Having been a weakly boy who loved airplanes, I realized their motive contained in it an undifferentiated desire for power and speed. Because of this, I cannot help but see the anguish of human beings who were part of the history of flight, and I feel this should not be glossed over with words such as “the romance of the sky” or “conquering the sky.” My profession is an animation filmmaker, and if in making an action-adventure film I have to work hard to create evil characters and defeat them for there to be a catharsis, I am forced to say mine is a despicable profession. The dilemma for me is that I actually like action-adventure stories.

After World War I ended, the youths who yearned to become pilots regretted that they were born too late. With reduction in the military forces, their path to fly in the sky was barred. The world of aviation entered a period of adventure and record-making flights, but becoming this kind of aviator required incredible good fortune. Passenger flights were not yet possible as aircraft were not very comfortable. There were no customers.

Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Italy all started postal flight businesses supported by the state. Speed was the key feature; speed that could beat post sent by rail. There were any number of surplus aircraft available from the military. We mustn’t disguise this development with upbeat phrases like “peaceful use of aircraft” or “airplanes being used for their original purpose.” When we realize that over one hundred deaths occurred in the establishment and maintenance of France’s airmail routes, we are struck by the mercilessness of the scheme, and the French were party to this.

The aircraft were repurposed for carrying postal freight in the same manner as during wartime. The managers touted the prestige of the nation and the progress of humanity while the engineers gained work. I can’t imagine that the pilots found much meaning in increasing their speed for the delivery of postal items. It was likely more accurate to say that was the only way that they could fly. They just wanted to fly. But this time they were not allowed to fly freely in the sky at high speeds; they were required to fly a set route precisely and safely for the sake of the mail. The enemy this time was not an enemy plane that would appear suddenly out of the sun; it was the rain, fog, and storms. Air battles were not fought on rainy days, but the planes carrying the post had to fly. They had to compete with trains and automobiles that ran through the night and in bad weather. Unless their flights were faster, they would lose their raison d’être.

The first aircraft model used was the Breguet-14. It was a reconfigured single-engine two-seater light bomber made during the war. Its engine was three hundred horsepower, with a crude body and a maximum speed of about 180 kilometers per hour. Its instruments were simple, and blind flying in clouds was suicidal. There was no navigation system. Pilots had to fly by relying on targets on the ground, even in head winds of seventy kilometers per hour.

The aviators concentrated all their senses and attempted to read changes in the weather from the slight indications in the landscape. White clouds were a dangerous trap, like a solid rocky mountain. They well knew that a puff of air blown on a whim by the sky could destroy a mail plane. I wonder what kind of world they saw with their heightened senses amid such widespread danger.

Landscapes become worn down the more people look at them. In contrast to the sky today, the view from the sky that they saw wasn’t yet worn away. No matter how many planes we fly now, we cannot possibly feel the sky as they did. The expansive sky full of magnificence transformed the mail-carrying aviators into possessors of a unique spirit.

During the decadent interwar years, young aviators went off to the desert and to the snow-covered mountains, hiding their contempt for the miscellany on the ground and their yearning for it. Without Saint-Exupéry, the story of these young men would have long been forgotten. It would have been just a one-line episode on one page of the history of technology and its ferocious evolution. In reality, the era when the mail pilots were heroes was a short one, a story that ended in one generation.

The aircraft bodies were refined, navigation was improved, and flight became safer. Mail flights became the purview of practical businessmen. Then, another war. This time, far larger numbers of young people were sent even more systematically into the cauldron of the skies. Preparations were made for postwar mass transport. These young airmen had become a sacrifice to the era of mass air transport—tourists and their brand-name purchases would rule this era.

The era of the mail pilots that Saint-Exupéry wrote about had already passed even as he worked on Terre des Hommes. Some continued to rebel against this change, and some fell by the wayside. His colleagues Mermoz and Guillaumet died, and Saint-Exupéry himself disappeared in practically a suicidal way over the Mediterranean Sea, leaving the phrase, “The future anthill appalls me.”

The history of aircraft is mercilessness itself. Despite this, I love stories about aviators. I won’t discuss my reasons as they would seem like justifications. It is most likely because I have a streak of brutality in me. I feel I would suffocate if all I had was my daily life.

Today, there are so many lines stretched across the sky. With military flight zones, large aircraft fly areas, flight restrictions, safety constraints, the sky is full of lines. Our sky has become one that we fly in while being controlled by earthbound bureaucrats.

How would the world be different if the human race could not yet fly and children still longed for the peaks of clouds? I wonder which is greater: what we gained by making airplanes or what we lost due to them? Is our mercilessness an attribute of ours that we cannot control? At times I wonder if, as the next step after banning land mines, we should start thinking seriously about banning the use of manned and unmanned aircraft in war.

These are the musings of one termite in the age of the anthill who has begun to have misgivings about such advances as progress and speed.

The Sky That Saint-Exupéry Flew Through

Nami (Wave), Shinchōsha, November issue, 1998

Mr. Hayao Miyazaki, who read Saint-Exupéry’s (1900–1944) Terre des Hommes in the Shinchōsha paperback edition as a twenty-year-old, was influenced by that world. This spring he rode on the same model aircraft that Saint-Exupéry used during his mail pilot days and flew from Toulouse in the South of France to Cap Juby in the Western Sahara, some three thousand kilometers. We asked Mr. Miyazaki for his thoughts on Saint-Exupéry and flight after he had experienced flying the mail route.

I was so happy that I could actually feel what I had only imagined on this reportage trip. First of all, the clouds. Without instrumentation, when we flew into a cloud, instantaneously we couldn’t tell which way was up. Slamming into the cloud, I noticed there were bumps in the cloud; raindrops hit the window frame, then immediately we would be in bright blue sky. Above the Sahara, a thin layer of cloud hung over the desert like a field of snow, so I asked the pilot to fly as if he were clawing through the cloud cover. I opened the window and stuck out my arm. The air was cool and whipped my arm backward.

The aircraft fuselage was a wood and metal composite, and its maximum speed was about two hundred kilometers per hour, but with air resistance we couldn’t actually go that fast. Flying near the Atlas Mountains at seventy kilometers per hour, we had a head wind of twenty meters—seventy kilometers per hour—so we really stopped in midair. [laughs] Our altitude was at most fifteen hundred meters. I asked the pilot to fly close to the ground, lower than the power lines. I was so excited that I could see the landscape in such detail.

I wondered what Saint-Exupéry felt when he flew this course over fifty years ago. During the late 1920s to mid 1930s, when he was active as a mail pilot, France was in the interwar period of turmoil and decadence. The only way to fly was to become a mail pilot, a highly sought-after occupation at the time. On the ground, people drank absinthe and blathered nonsense. Saint-Exupéry and his buddies Mermoz and Guillaumet, famed pilots who appear in Terre des Hommes, distanced themselves from that scene and flew the skies as heroes. The gap between the ground and the sky then was much greater than what we imagine now. I expect that the only thing they could believe in was their friendship and solidarity.

I suspect that, rather than feeling that they were conquering the skies, they sensed the overwhelming power of nature and developed a deep reverence toward it the more they flew. After all, their planes were shoddy and crashes were a matter of course. They must have felt an emotional exaltation as they pushed the limits of their crafts to float in midair. In actuality, many died. When I looked at the names of those who died on duty listed on the wall of the Toulouse airport, I counted a hundred flyers in ten years. The history of mail flights is littered with corpses. Still, young people wanted to fly. Why was this? The only way to explain it is that they just wanted to fly.

They must have felt the world, the wind, the waves, and the air. Air can be sticky, or it may be sharp or soft on any given day. When the headwind was strong, they must have flown low avoiding the wind by using the topography of the land, as if they were crawling, and in contrast when there was a tailwind, they must have wanted to whistle.

They must also have had the joy of connecting the places where people lived, even if carrying only commonplace items like pieces of direct mail or money orders. They probably wanted to string together the entire air route. People lived everywhere they flew: in a slight dip at the top of a mountain, in the desert, and on the other side of the Andes range. They saw landscapes that no one had seen, something completely different from today’s view. Landscapes seen by many people diminish in impact; they become faded and worn away.

What kind of person was Saint-Exupéry? I suspect that if he were right next to you he would be a bothersome sort. Both he and Mermoz had the reputation of only being impressive when in airplanes. A man who spends so much time aloft, all tense, can’t be a normal, good father the minute he lands on the ground. [laughs] Over and beyond that, Saint-Exupéry had an aristocratic background, so he was not a person of the masses, even in the way he spent his money.

As a flyer he crash-landed many times, so he must have been a very inattentive man. Yet, though all his cohorts died in their thirties, he alone lived until he was forty-four. Thanks to that, the only records left of that era’s French flyers are his writings. He wrote that they had all died. He also wrote, “The future anthill appalls me,” shortly before he died. When I flew over the Spanish coastline now ruined by resort developments, I felt that was so true.

During World War II, Saint-Exupéry became a crewmember on reconnaissance flights. We still don’t know where he crashed after taking off from Corsica in 1944. They say it was near Marseilles. I wonder if he chose to die. His physical exhaustion must have been at its limit, and apparently he had flown to Agay (where his wedding had taken place). Rather than being shot down by the Nazis, it seems more realistic, and more like him, to have fallen into the sea while deep in thought.

Saint-Exupéry died because he was bound to die. I want to honor his way of living. It shouldn’t matter if one has setbacks, or dies from drink, or dies in an airplane. We all have the right to make that choice, and we should be entitled to it. There’s no need for all of us to live in a healthy way, always being positive. Poets in particular should have license to live in a most unhealthy way. Didn’t Takuboku Ishikawa39 and Santōka Taneda40 live that way? Saint-Exupéry was a poet. Even if he lived a life full of vices, that is irrelevant; that is what a poet is. Reading his work Terre des Hommes makes me excited. For an instant, I feel I could become a self different from my current self. It makes me feel that I need to become different. In the end, though, I don’t change. [laughs]

If you read Terre des Hommes as well as The Little Prince, the impact is heightened. This is because Terre des Hommes is such a fine book. It deserves to continue to be read into the future.

Traditional Japanese Aestheticism in Princess Mononoke: An Interview by Roger Ebert

Interview at Park Hyatt, Toronto, September 19, 1999
Roman Album Ghibli, Tokuma Shoten/Studio Ghibli Jigyō Honbu (Business Unit), issued on May 20, 2000

Adults don’t watch animation

EBERT: My grandchildren love My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service because they say you can believe the stories.

MIYAZAKI: How old are they?

EBERT: They are nine, and seven, and two. Why do you choose to make animation instead of live-action?

MIYAZAKI: Because I had my heart stolen by several animated features.

EBERT: When you were a little boy?

MIYAZAKI: No. When I was eighteen and when I was twenty-three. The animated film I saw when I was eighteen was Hakujaden (Tale of the White Serpent), the first animated feature film ever made in Japan, about a white snake. When I was twenty-three, I was already an animator when I saw Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen), which was made in the Soviet Union.

I had seen many American Disney films and Fleischer Brothers’ films—and I loved them—but they didn’t move me to want to make animation my life’s work.

Hakujaden was far below anything that Disney was creating in terms of technique. But the way the characters were depicted was what I could understand and empathize with; I think that is why these films stole my heart.

EBERT: There has been ever since then a tradition of animation in Japan as a full-bodied genre. In this country animation is more a family picture, but in Japan it is considered to be equal with live-action. Isn’t that true?

MIYAZAKI: It’s actually not true that animation is considered fitting for adults in Japan. Unfortunately of the many animated works created, there are very few that I could recommend.

EBERT: Are many of them just action films?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, they are. Not just action films, there are films that treat women in a very sexual way or show violence just for the sake of violence, and various other genres. This tendency is strongest in films that are made for straight-to-video releases.

EBERT: I was told that you personally drew around eighty thousand or more than half the drawings for Princess Mononoke.

MIYAZAKI: I never counted the number of drawings myself. But because my background is as an animator, I am deeply involved in checking and redrawing and touching up all the work that comes from the animators. Since that task takes up a large part of my work, that may be why people have said so.

EBERT: You have made the statement that animation or animation for television doesn’t have the budget for really evolved, really good animation. When you were first starting, you must have had a small budget, but you must have made up for it with your own time, by drawing all the detail and putting in all the love yourself without worrying about the budget. Is that true?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, of course, as a director it is my job to put all I can into my own work, but I couldn’t do it without my dedicated staff.

EBERT: On the very first film, how did you decide to go to work on the first day to make your film? What was in your heart at that time?

MIYAZAKI: Hmm. When I start a film, I think about the long journey ahead and, with a heavy heart, I start trudging along.

Is the cursed boar the director himself?

EBERT: In Princess Mononoke, at the beginning, there is a marvelous monster, a boar monster with a flesh of snakes. It is one of the most amazing sights I have seen in films. It occurred to me that it couldn’t be done with special effects. It would look like a mess. Only animation would make it clear.

MIYAZAKI: You’re right. Actually, I tried to use a computer to do it, but I realized it wouldn’t work. So we all got together and drew it.

EBERT: I didn’t even mean special effects animated by computer, but special effects in a live-action picture. If you try to make a live-action picture with that monster, it wouldn’t show up. You couldn’t see the snakes, the worms. It seems like animation in general can make things more clear than trying to make them look real, absolutely real.

MIYAZAKI: That’s what I was striving for. As a director, though, I can always think about what went wrong. [laughs] I’m a very emotional person, and when I get enraged, I have the sensation that black worms are crawling out of my body. It takes a lot of effort for me to control that rage. But my staff don’t seem to have that feeling. They are calmer people, so I think they struggled doing this work.

EBERT: So the boar monster is based on the artist himself?

MIYAZAKI: Perhaps so. [laughs] I believe that violence and aggression are essential parts of us as human beings. I think it is impossible to eliminate that impulse from ourselves. The issue that we confront as human beings is how to control that impulse. I know that small children may watch this film, but I intentionally chose not to shield them from the violence that resides in human beings.

EBERT: So, do you think it should have a G rating or a PG rating? In the US, it is a PG-13 rated film.

MIYAZAKI: In Japan we don’t have that kind of rating system. There is only an adult film category. When I began making this film I didn’t want small children to see it. But as the film neared completion, I started to think that young children would more intuitively understand the essence of the film.

But there are shocking parts, so my producer suggested we show the most brutal scenes in the television spots to advertise the film. In that way we publicized to all of Japan what kind of film it was. We did this not only to attract viewers but also with the intention to tell parents, “This is the kind of film it is, so if you think that it would be too shocking for small children, please don’t take them to see the film.”

Animation fans in America are isolated

EBERT: One thing that is frustrating for me as a film critic, or as a lover of film, is that people in America automatically go to the new Disney picture, but it’s very hard to get them to go to an animated film that doesn’t say “Disney.” I don’t know why this is. There have been some good animated films in America not by Disney. For example, The Iron Giant (directed by Brad Bird, 1999), recently didn’t do too well. What are they trying to do to get the word across that Princess Mononoke is the film they have to see, even if it doesn’t have a little Walt Disney name across the top of it?

MIYAZAKI: I really don’t know. [laughs] That is what I have come to America for. I don’t know if I can be very effective, though. [laughs]

EBERT: I did a television show recently about animation. In the show we took our camera to a video store. And we pointed out that every video store in North America has an anime section with hundreds of tapes—hundreds, maybe thousands. Yet these films rarely play in theaters. Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Ōtomo, 1988) played in a few theaters, and Totoro played in theaters. But usually they don’t play in theaters. Who is watching them? There must be millions of anime fans hidden away somewhere, because even the small stores in small towns have Japanese anime. So it must be an audience that has found it for themselves, without any media push.

MIYAZAKI: I think that’s the same situation in Japan. When we show a film in theaters, not that many come to see it, even if the video sells well. So I think some people distinguish between what they watch in movie theaters and what they watch on video.

EBERT: But Princess Mononoke was the biggest hit in Japan, wasn’t it? Until Titanic came along.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, frankly this phenomenon left me baffled. [laughs] I have no idea why that happened.

Of the films we made at Ghibli, the first films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, and Totoro weren’t able to recoup their production costs from the theatrical releases. We were finally able to make a profit from secondary rights. That switched with Kiki’s Delivery Service. So it wasn’t as if we had a warm, receptive audience for animated films in Japan from the start.

EBERT: So you had to develop your audience in Japan as well?

MIYAZAKI: That’s right. One direction that my producer, Mr. Suzuki, who is here as well, and I have discussed and taken is that every time the audience develops an expectation about Ghibli films, we work to betray that expectation with our next project.

EBERT: How do you feel about the Walt Disney Company and Miramax having the rights to your babies?

MIYAZAKI: The truth is we don’t have time to promote our films abroad. We would rather expend that energy making the next film. We were happy to partner with Disney and Miramax to promote our films because it would be too troublesome for us to do it on our own.

EBERT: I know that Harvey Weinstein told me a year ago that he was devoting himself full-time to this because he loved the film so much.

It seems to me that in your films, you often exaggerate the mouth and eyes to convey extreme emotion, and that in the new Tarzan picture (directed by Kevin Lima and Chris Buck, 1999) from Disney, baby Tarzan seemed to look exactly like a character in a Miyazaki film, as if the Americans had been studying your work.

MIYAZAKI: Our work depends on how much we can appropriate from other people’s work. We take from everything: paintings, films, plays, music. [laughs]

EBERT: So what goes around comes around?

MIYAZAKI: I think of our work more as a relay rather than as creative work. We were handed the relay baton as a child from someone. Instead of just handing off the baton to the next runner, we pass it through ourselves and then hand it to the next child. That is the kind of work we do.

EBERT: That’s very nice. In this tradition that you just spoke of, I think that Princess Mononoke is a very, very beautiful film in its drawing, and some of the images reminded me of Japanese art from two hundred years ago, the line drawing tradition. You know the famous drawing of the wave; you know what I’m talking about. It seemed as if these were painterly drawings that had been rendered in animation but still had the art of centuries past embodied in them.

MIYAZAKI: It wasn’t conscious, but I think a lot of tradition remains in our aesthetic sensibility.

I feel that I have met my third national treasure

EBERT: Could you talk about the story of the film? Is it based on traditional Japanese myths? How much of it is original and how much is inspired by such emotions as forest gods and Japanese interest in shape-shifting?

MIYAZAKI: I have absorbed aspects of history and legends within myself, so I can’t be sure what is original and what is taken from them.

Many of the elements in the film were commonly known about Japan among those in my generation. It was during the past twenty years or so that we have found out with historical accuracy that there were groups of people who went into the woods to cut down trees and make iron. Many Japanese hadn’t known the concrete details of what kind of forge they built or what kind of labor was involved in iron-making.

Fortunately, it rains a lot on the Japanese islands, so even when large numbers of trees were harvested, the forests were not decimated. But on the Korean Peninsula and in China, where this technology came from, the forests disappeared. This was a major inspiration for this film.

EBERT: Someone told me that you are not going to make another film. Surely that is not true?

MIYAZAKI: [laughs] I always make each film believing it will be my last. But the truth is that at my age it is realistically impossible to work in the same way as I have in the past. If my staff will allow me to direct films in a different way, then I have several films I would like to make.

EBERT: But they are your staff. So you tell them to.

MIYAZAKI: It’s not that easy. [laughs]

EBERT: But they must love you and want to work with you.

MIYAZAKI: I’m a tyrant and reign over my staff, so I don’t know about that. [laughs]

EBERT: I will ask one last question. My wife and I were in Japan, and we were able to meet two living national treasures, a man who makes pots and a man who makes kimono. Are you a national treasure? You must be a national treasure because I think of you as a national treasure, although I’m not on the committee.

MIYAZAKI: I don’t want to become a national treasure. [laughs] Because I want to keep the possibility of making outrageous films.

Roger Ebert Born 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. Film critic, television host. Wrote as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967. Received the first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism as a film critic in 1975 for his writing at the newspaper. From 1976 teamed up with Gene Siskel, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, as co-hosts reviewing films on television. Siskel and Ebert’s At the Movies became a popular program. After Siskel’s death, he continued co-hosting the review program with Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper until 2008. Since 1999, he selected and screened overlooked films at the annual film festival known as Eberfest, organized by the University of Illinois, in Champaign, Illinois. Deceased in 2013.

Words of Farewell

Eulogy for Mr. Yasuyoshi Tokuma, founding President of Tokuma Shoten Publishing Company, October 16, 2000

President Tokuma was our president.

We loved President Tokuma.

He was more like a supporter who listened attentively to us rather than a company head.

He trusted those of us in the workplace and left the planning and operation of the studio to us.

He often said, “We’re climbing up the hill with a heavy load on our backs,” and made rapid decisions about plans that seemed reckless and risky.

When our films did well, he was overjoyed. When they didn’t do well, he was unfazed and showed his appreciation for our labors.

The reason we have come this far is due to our having encountered President Tokuma.

You have endured bravely the long battle against your illness.

Please rest in comfort and sleep in peace amid the sky and water and earth and trees.

We shall continue to speak of you in the years ahead.

ENDNOTES

1 Ryōkan Taigu (1758–1831), a hermetic Zen monk and mendicant known for his nature poetry and calligraphy.

2 Ryōtarō Shiba, born Teiichi Fukuda (1923–1996), was a historical novelist and essayist. His historical and travel essays about Japan were extremely popular and influential. Books available in English include Clouds Above the Hill, a multivolume historical novel of the Russo-Japanese War, and the short story collection Drunk as a Lord.

3 Sanpei Shirato is the pseudonym of Noboru Okamoto (1932– ), a manga artist and essayist associated with the “dramatic pictures” movement in Japanese comics known as gekiga. An English translation of his radical ninja drama The Legend of Kamui was published in 1987.

4 Kunio Yanagita (1875–1962) was a Japanese folklorist and scholar whose work emphasized the everyday lives of the lower classes.

5 Ken’ichi Tanigawa (1921–2013) was an ethnologist and author.

6 Shigesato Itoi (1948– ) is a copywriter, game designer, voice actor, and media personality. Itoi wrote the copy for most Ghibli films, and the slogans and phrases he coined have become part of the rhetorical idiom of everyday Japan. He provided the voice of the father in My Neighbor Totoro.

7 Doppo Kunikida (1871–1908) was a Meiji-era author of novels, short stories, and poems. Though initially considered a romantic poet, his later works helped introduce naturalism to Japanese literature.

8 Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) was a Chinese politician. As Chairman to the Central Advisory Commission to the Communist Party of China, he led the nation away from a planned economy and toward open markets, called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” These reforms led to the immense growth of the Chinese economy in the post-Mao era. Though a reformist, many observers believe him to be personally responsible for the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

9 Zhuge Liang (181–234) was a scholar and military strategist during China’s Three Kingdoms era. His military genius allowed the warlord Liu Bei to found the Shu Han state. Liu Bei is also said to have invented the repeating crossbow.

10 English translations: Satō, Tadao. Currents In Japanese Cinema. Translated by Gregory Barrett. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1982.

Satō, Tadao. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema. Translated by Brij Tankha. New York: Berg, 2008.

11 Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/7–1598) was a powerful warlord who unified Japan and launched the Momoyama period of Japanese history. His reforms—barring peasants from owning weapons and compelling members of the samurai class to live in castle towns—reinforced the class system for centuries to come.

12 Hisashi Fujiki: (1933– ) is a historian of the medieval and Warring States periods.

13 The Chichibu Incident (November 1884) was a peasant revolt against Meiji-era tax reforms designed to encourage industrialization, which had the side effect of bankrupting many farmers. Peasants in Chichibu seized the local district government offices and declared a new government of “freedom and self-government.” The uprising was quashed by the firepower of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

14 Rennyo (1415–1499) is the monk credited with restoring Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) Buddhism, one of the most popular sects in Japan. He converted many to the sect in his travels and rewrote Buddhist texts with phonetic kana characters, to allow the common faithful greater access to the ideas of the faith.

15 Shūgorō Yamamoto was the pen name of Satomu Shimizu (1903–1967), a novelist and short story writer. The Akira Kurosawa film Red Beard is based on one of his works, and his material is frequently adapted by Japanese cinema and television.

16 Indeed, a nine-minute short, “Treasure Hunting,” was produced and shown at the Ghibli museum in 2011.

17 Ennosuke Ichikawa III (1939– ) is a kabuki actor famed for his love of advanced stagecraft techniques, including wire-work and quick costume changes.

18 Shikō Munakata (1903–1975) was a woodblock printmaker whose themes included the natural world and the kami (spirits) who inhabit it. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1970.

19 Bon, or Obon, is a three-day Buddhist-Confucian holiday centered around the veneration of the ancestors. It takes place annually, in summer, to welcome the return of the souls of the ancestors for three days.

20 Tatsuaki Kuroda (1904–1982) was one of the most influential craftspeople in Japan. In 1970, he was declared a Living National Treasure.

21 Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) was a poet and author of children’s literature, most famously Night on the Galactic Railroad.

22 Kumagusu Minakata (1867–1941) was an author and conservationist who spent time in the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom, where he collected plants, studied agriculture, and even worked for a traveling circus. Upon his return to Japan, he became an advocate for local shrines, a folklorist, and a naturalist.

23 Mountain folk in the Yase district northeast of the old capital of Kyoto, who at times carried palanquins for official events.

24 Saichō (767–822) is the founder of the Tendai sect of Buddhism, which is a syncretism of the Chinese Tiantai sect of Buddhism with Zen and other Japanese beliefs. Saichō is also credited with bringing tea to Japan.

25 Taira no Masakado (?–940) was a Heinan-era samurai who led a rebellion against Kyoto in 939–940. It is said that many natural disasters and miraculous phenomena accompanied his march to Kyoto. The Taira Masakado Insurrection was a harbinger of a later shift of power away from the imperial center and toward the samurai class.

26 Taizō Yokoyama (1917–2007) was a mangaka known for working in the four-panel and single-panel idioms. His Shakai Gihyō (Sarcastic Social Criticism) was published in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun for nearly forty years.

27 Ryōko Yamagishi (1947– ) is a mangaka known for her occult and historical themes and unusual visual sense.

28 Riyoko Ikeda (1947– ) is a mangaka and singer, best known for her manga of the French revolution, The Rose of Versailles, also known as Lady Oscar.

29 Shunsuke Tsurumi (1922– ) is a historian. Educated at Harvard, he was one of the first students of philosopher Willard Quine. His books in English include An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931-1945 and A Cultural History of Postwar Japan.

30 A card game popular since the Edo period. Played with artfully decorated cards, the goal is to slap down one’s own card hard enough to flip over an opponent’s card. The winner keeps both cards.

31 Zhuangzi was a fourth century BCE Chinese philosopher. His ideas emphasized relativism and skepticism toward apprehending the universe. He is famed for his aphorism about the man who dreamt of being a butterfly, who may well have been a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.

32 Terunobu Fujimori (1946– ) is an architectural historian turned architect. His projects include the Nemunoki Museum of Art, the shape of which has been compared to both a woolly mammoth and a giant acorn.

33 Kinjirō Ninomiya (1787–1856), also known as Sontoku Ninomiya, was an economist and public intellectual who focused on agricultural development and economic modernization (including popularizing the concept of compound interest) in Japan. Many Japanese schools display a statue of Ninomiya as a young man, reading as he carries firewood on his back.

34 A clause of the 1947 Japanese constitution designed to keep Japan from declaring war and maintaining a military capable of waging war. The official English translation reads as follows: ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

35 Yoshisada Nitta (1301–1338) was a military leader and head of the Nitta family. His naval campaign in support of Emperor Go-Daigo (1288–1339) destroyed the power of the Kamakura shogunate.

36 Shinran (1173–1263) was a Japanese Buddhist monk and the founder of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism. He taught that human beings were too depraved and beset by greed and hatred to achieve enlightenment on their own and must rely on the saving grace of Amida Buddha.

37 Yoshie Hotta (1918–1998) was a Japanese novelist and international traveler known for his attempts to articulate Japanese culture for a worldwide audience. He won the 1951 Akutagawa Prize for Hiroba no Kodoku (Solitude in the Plaza).

38 The Totoro Fund is a foundation dedicated to preserving the natural habitat of the Sayama Hills, a location that inspired the creation of My Neighbor Totoro.

39 Takuboku Ishikawa (1886–1912) was a Japanese poet who explored naturalism, classical tanka, and later both modern forms and socialist antinaturalism in his work. He died of tuberculosis after years of poverty, living on borrowed funds, and interpersonal conflicts with family and friends.

40 Santōka Taneda (1882–1940) was a Japanese poet specializing in free-verse haiku. He drank heavily, was arrested as a suspected Communist, and after attempting suicide by throwing himself in front of a moving train embraced Zen Buddhism.

▶ SPIRITED AWAY

Chihiro, from a Mysterious Town—The Goal of This Film

From the proposal for Spirited Away (November 8, 1999)
Quoted in the July 20, 2000 film pamphlet issued by Toho Co., Ltd.

In Spirited Away, no one waves weapons about or has showdowns using superpowers, but it’s still an adventure story. And while an adventure story, a confrontation between good and evil is not the main theme either. This is supposed to be the story of a young girl who is thrown into another world, where good people and bad are all mixed up and coexisting. In this world, she undergoes rigorous training, learns about friendship and self-sacrifice, and using her own basic smarts, somehow not only survives but manages to return to our world. She struggles free from tight spots, evades dangers, and ultimately returns to her normal, ordinary life. Yet just as our ordinary world has not completely disappeared, she has returned, not by vanquishing evil in the other world, but as a result of having learned a new way to live.

Our world appears ever more fuzzy and confusing, yet in spite of that it threatens to corrode and devour us. The job of this film is, therefore, to depict this world with clarity within a fantasy framework.

Today’s children feel shielded, protected, and distanced from reality, to the point where they only have a vague sense of what it means to be alive, where their only solution is to inflate their otherwise weak sense of self. Chihiro’s skinny limbs and her deliberately miffed and apathetic expressions are a symbol of this. But as reality sets in, and as she directly confronts danger from which she cannot easily extricate herself, she demonstrates an adaptability and toughness that even she had not been aware of; she realizes that she has a life force in her that makes her capable of bold decisions and action.

Of course, if most ordinary young people were actually placed in Chihiro’s position, they would probably freak, say, “Oh my God! You’ve gotta be kidding!” and crouch down, head between knees, into a quivering ball. But in the world in which Chihiro finds herself most such people would of course be immediately annihilated or eaten. Chihiro is not the heroine of this story because she’s particularly beautiful or because she has a perfect personality. One could even say that she’s the protagonist simply because she’s strong enough to avoid being eaten. This, in fact, is one of the hallmarks of the story and also one of the reasons it can be a film for ten-year-old girls.

Words are power. And in the world into which Chihiro stumbles, the words one utters have irrevocable significance. In the bathhouse controlled by the witch Yubaba, if Chihiro so much as utters a “No!” or “I wanna go home!” she immediately faces being tossed out, left to wander aimlessly forever until she dies, or risks being turned into a chicken (to continue laying eggs until she’s eventually eaten). Conversely, when Chihiro says out loud, “I’ll work here,” her words are so powerful that even a witch like Yubaba can’t ignore them. Nowadays, words are used ever so lightly, and they’re taken lightly, almost like froth, but this is just a reflection of the fact that reality itself has grown so hollow. The truth is that even today words can still have power. Our lives are filled with far too many meaningless, powerless, and hollow words.

Appropriating another’s name does not equate to just changing your name; it is a way of completely controlling the other person. And in that sense, Sen is horrified when she realizes that she is forgetting that her own real name is Chihiro. Every time she visits her parents in the pigsty, she finds herself more and more used to the idea that they have been turned into pigs. In Yubaba’s world, one must always live with the constant threat of being completely devoured.

Yet in this extraordinarily difficult world, Chihiro truly comes alive. By the end of the film, Chihiro—a once lazy and pouty character—can assume a shockingly attractive expression, despite the fact that the real world has not essentially changed at all. If there is one thing that I want this film to convey, it is that words represent our will, words are us, and words are power.

And this is another reason that I decided to create a fantasy film set in Japan. Spirited Away may be a fairy tale, but I don’t want to make it a Western-style one, with lots of easy outs. I know that some may interpret Spirited Away as a just another variant of ordinary other-world films, but I, instead, like to think of it as the direct descendant of Japanese folktales like Suzume no oyado (Home of the Sparrow) or Nezumi no goten (Mouse Palace). We don’t have to call it anything like a “parallel world,” but our ancestors goofed up at the home of the sparrows and enjoyed gorging themselves at a mouse palace.

I depicted Yubaba’s world as only quasi-Western so that it would seem vaguely familiar yet not clearly identifiable as either a dream or reality. And at the same time I did this because traditional Japanese design is a cornucopia of different images and because many people have simply forgotten about the richness and uniqueness of Japan’s ethnic space—the stories, local lore, festivals, designs, and everything from deities to magic and sorcery. It’s certainly true that old fables like “Mount Kachikachi” and “Momotaro the Peach Boy” have lost some of their original persuasive powers. But rather than simply stuffing traditional elements into a more modern pseudo-fable world, we need to be more creative. Today’s children are surrounded by a high-tech world and increasingly lose sight of their roots in the midst of so many shallow industrial products. We need to show what incredibly rich traditions we have. By inserting traditional designs into a story to which modern people can relate, and by embedding them as a piece of a colorful mosaic, the world in the film gains a new persuasiveness. And it results in us realizing anew that we are inhabitants of an ancient island nation.

In a truly borderless age, people are liable to think lightly of those who have no firm sense of place. Our place is the past and in history. People who have no sense of history, or ethnic groups that have forgotten their past, are destined to disappear like the short-lived mayfly or to become chickens that have to keep on laying eggs until they are eaten.

I want to make Spirited Away a film in which an audience of ten-year-old girls can find what they are really looking for.

Notes for the Spirited Away Image Album

July 10, 2000

The film itself unfolds through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, and the notes for the music reflect this. It is, I believe, a new and unique feature.

1. The River, That Day

(Main theme here is the meeting of Chihiro and Haku, the young boy. Music should be familiar, warm, sweet, and melodious.)

From a sunny backyard, and out through a forgotten wooden gate

I follow a path in the shade of hedges

The young child, who comes running from the distance, is me

Drenched wet from rain and in tears, we pass each other by

Tracing footsteps in the sand, going forward further

All the way to the river now buried

Amidst the trash, water plants sway

It was at that little river that I met you

My shoe slowly floated away

Caught in a little eddy, it disappeared in the swirl

The mist covering my heart lifted

The shadows on my eyes disappeared

My hands felt the air

My feet absorbed the spring in the ground

I, who live for someone

And someone, who lived for me

I went to the river that day

I went to your river

2. The White Dragon

(A love song)

Flying low over a moonlit sea

My precious white dragon

Come fast … ever faster … come to me

The black ones are closing in

In hot pursuit, their merciless claws,

With poison dripping, tear at your silver scales

Fly fast! Ever faster!

O my precious white dragon

Come back to me

3. Nightfall

(Main theme of a world of the bathhouse)

The sun, directly above so recently

Starts to set as I watch

Black clouds cover the sky

A violent evening wind might tear the flags

Night is coming, night is coming soon

Redder than blood, in the evening sun’s last embers

Your shadow becomes darker and darker

Night is coming

And I can no longer see your face

I must hurry

I must speed up

But where shall I go?

Night is falling, and I don’t know

4. The Bathhouse

(A work song, performed as though fatigued and at times with energy. Sometimes sung by the workers, sometimes by the six-armed Kamaji and susuwatari soot sprites.)

Just when you think it’s time to sleep, it’s time for work

Just when you think it’s over, it’s time to begin

The body feels heavy

The spirit more so

Consider yourself lucky, as long as you have work

The old lady said it

The old lady, once a young girl

Said you’re only pretty while you’re young

The old man said it

The old man, once a young man

Said the only thing left is your life

Only a heavy, sluggish life

5. Procession of the Gods

(Endlessly repeated, far away but near)

Ah, nameless spirits

Tired beyond belief again today

Coming for their long-awaited, two-night and three-day rest

Coming to Aburaya, the bathhouse in the world next door

A mugwort bath, a sulfur bath, a mud bath and a saltwater bath

A scalding hot bath, a lukewarm bath, and a cold bath with floating ice

Hoping to regain their strength, clenching their meager, saved money

They don’t get hot

Ah, nameless spirits

Spirits of the furnace, the well, the shutters, the roofs, the pillars, the bathrooms

Spirits of the rice paddies, the fields, the mountains, and of trees lining paved roads

Spirits of the horribly polluted rivers, listless spirits of the springs, and spirits of the air

They will no longer come. Electric things do not need spirits.

6. The Ocean

After a night of torrential rain

The sea stretches all the way to the horizon

The wetlands, the forests, and the plains

All appear to sway beneath the transparent waves

And right on schedule, a train goes by, kicking up the surf

Fish, including a giant whale,

Drift through this place

Languidly flapping their tail fins

A town, a phantom town, appears on the sea’s horizon

There, that’s the golden minaret of a mosque

And above it, creatures flitting about, like specks of sand

A gentle wind, and the peaceful sound of the waves

The moist air relaxes the spirit

Today is a sea day

7. Lonely, Lonely, Ever So Lonely

(Theme for No-Face, or for Yubaba)

Lonely, lonely, ever so lonely

I’m all alone

Turn around, look over here

I want to eat things up, I want to swallow things, I want to get bigger

If I get heavier, perhaps I won’t be lonely …

I want, want, I so want

I want more

Include me. Do you need this? Do you want this?

See, you really want it, right?

I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you everything.

I’ll give you more. I’ll keep giving you more and more.

So come here. Touch me. Can I touch you?

Give me. Let me eat you up.

I’m so lonely. That’s why I want to eat.

I want to eat. I want to eat …

Room to Be Free: Speaking About Spirited Away at the Press Conference Held Upon Completion of the Film

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, July 10, 2001

From Eureka’s August special edition on Hayao Miyazaki:
“Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi” no sekai; fantajii no chikara (The World of Spirited Away, and the Power of Fantasy). Published by Seidosha, August 25, 2001.

MIYAZAKI: Well, here I am again, someone who only four years ago announced that he would be retiring. This film was made to trace the reality in which ten-year-old girls live, as well as to trace the reality of their minds. I made it realizing that this filmic structure—one of following a young girl throughout most of the story—is very difficult, but I didn’t want to take the approach that everything would work out in the end simply because it is a film. I wanted to make a film that would show young viewers that they too can do what the heroine did. So in that sense, I intended to tell the truth and not to lie. As a result, as we worked on completing the production, we hoped that there might be something in the film that would appeal to adults. We fell way, way behind on our production schedule, and at one point things were so chaotic and we were so overstretched that we weren’t even sure we could make our deadline, yet we did, and despite looking around at the exhausted staff I found myself secretly thinking over and over, “We made it.”

—You made the protagonist a very ordinary young girl this time and not a superhero. In terms of creating the drama, was anything different required? How did you change the way you created the story, compared to other films?

MIYAZAKI: The girl’s a brat, frankly. And most of the real young girls I know at that stage might be described much the same way. If you tried to make a film like this in real time, you’d make no progress at all, no matter how much time you had. We had her act like a brat a bit along the way, and since it’s a film about following this brat, it was frankly really irritating. The people making the film get irritated. When she ever-so-slowly comes down the stairs, if we had shown her descending the entire way like that it would have taken the entire film. So in some places, we just decided to eliminate the side panels. If she had fallen, of course, it would have been the end of the movie, but because she ran we were lucky, and it all worked out fine.

—Where did you get the idea for a character as unique as No-Face?

MIYAZAKI: No-Face is easy to remember. I think it was around the end of April of last year, but I was having a really hard time creating the storyboards for the film. We started doing the key animation in February, and maybe it was around May, but when I went to the studio on what was normally our day off, I found that the producer, the animation director, and the art director had also come in to work. Thinking it was a good opportunity, I had the four of us get together, and I started explaining the story to see how far we could go with it. After hearing me out, the producer said, “Miya-san, this’ll be a three-hour film …” Frankly, I also thought it would run for three hours at that point, perhaps even three and a half hours. But my producer then said, in complete seriousness, “Shall we postpone the release for a year?” Of course, this is the same trick he always uses with me. And of course I told him I didn’t want to delay the release. So then we started talking about how we’d have to totally change the story somehow. But we’d already drawn some of it, so we couldn’t change that, and we’d already finished the key animation, and as it happened, in the scene where they cross the bridge leading to the bathhouse, there was a weird-looking masked man who sort of floats across. So when I saw this, I said, “Let’s use him.” And that was the way No-Face came to be.

So the answer is that I didn’t start out planning to use a character like No-Face. He’s just one of the characters who started out because he happened to be hanging around the bridge. It’s the truth. He was drafted into being a stalker. I know that the producer has been going around saying “Oh, that’s really Miya-san’s alter ego,” but I’m really not that dangerous a person. [laughs]

—So I guess it’s like the Japanese expression “hyōtan kara koma,” or a “horse from a gourd,” where something good comes unexpectedly, and a character can emerge from some unanticipated place and grow. Is that what you mean?

MIYAZAKI: Well, of course, I don’t know if he really grew or not. He was a character that actually took quite a bit of time. He doesn’t have any facial expression. We still tried to make him as expressive as possible, but he’s partly transparent, so despite the fact that he took a long time to create, the fact that he doesn’t have a strong sense of presence was a really big problem for us.

—Two questions for you, as director. First, in the commentary, you wrote something to the effect that “children can get along fine without manga or TV or animation,” but here you yourself are making animation like this. What do you think about this contradiction? Second, you’ve also written that “when little children run into really big problems, they’ll obviously lose if they try to tackle them head-on, but fantasy can be a source of strength for them.” Can you tell us more explicitly what you mean by fantasy being a “source of strength”?

MIYAZAKI: Frankly, I’m just a bundle of contradictions and dilemmas in my work. To my mind, it would be great if kids could see just a couple of good animated films while they’re still little. I think children would be healthier if they had enough space in their lives to be more fulfilled, as they could see something mysterious and pretty and wonder what it was. Our job is to take aim at this gap in their lives and to fill it with everything we can think of, and take the money not so much from the children, but from their parents. Well, I really don’t know how in the world to resolve this. When I once talked with a young American, a fellow who was working with the most advanced computer graphics, he said that when he used to try to watch television his mother would immediately shut it off. That he wasn’t allowed to watch it. And when he occasionally did get the chance, he would get so excited his heart would pound in anticipation. Since he would truly get excited over images, he wound up going into computer graphics, and he said he still believes that images have a huge power. I’ve put a little bit of translation into what he said, but I personally think his attitude is correct.

These days kids are surrounded by all sorts of things, including TV, movies, manga, and animation, that all clamor for their attention and beg to be seen, but I think that kids who are raised amidst the clamor of this climate probably can’t become the flag-bearers for new images. They’ll probably say, “Oh, I saw that on TV,” or “Oh, I already saw that in the movies,” or that they’ve experienced everything—including the scenery—when playing video games. They’ll feel like they’ve already done things. But I think the reality created by a civilization like this will eventually call for a settlement of accounts or require some sort of a payback. Now, I know that there’s no sense in my making this sort of prophecy as we’re working on this sort of film, so we’re caught in a huge dilemma as creators.

As for the “power of fantasy,” that was my own personal experience. When I was younger I was filled with anxiety and lacked self-confidence, and I was no good at expressing myself. The few times I truly felt free were times when, for example, I read [Osamu] Tezuka’s manga, or read books that I had borrowed from someone. Nowadays people say you should face reality and not flinch from it, but I think the power of fantasy is that it provides a space for people to become heroes, even if they lack confidence when trying to face reality. It doesn’t have to be just manga or animation, it could even be myths and stories from much longer ago; I just think that humans have always brought with them stories that make them feel they can cope somehow, that things will turn out all right.

So as I mentioned earlier, even though we are full of dilemmas and contradictions, I still think fantasy is necessary. But of course there are people who claim they don’t believe in the power of magic. I’m sure there are even people who would say there’s no way the world depicted in this film could ever exist. You have to be pretty tough to tell a bunch of bald-faced lies. In my own mind, I’m not sure how to put this, but I tell people that if you lose a certain freedom, well, I call it a weakening of the spirit, but when that happens and you start creating a story, the tendency is to start adding all kinds of explanations. In the science fiction world, people talk about fourth dimension pulses and whatnot, and energy doing this or that, when the word “magic” would easily suffice. When I made Castle in the Sky some people said they didn’t get what a “levistone” really was, but it was just magic. Why did the famous manga ninja Sarutobi Sasuke disappear? Why, when using ninja techniques, did someone turn into a toad? Well, it’s because he needed to turn into a toad, and I believe that if people can’t accept that, it represents an example of a weakening of the imaginative spirit. I personally believe fantasy is necessary. But I don’t believe fantasy necessarily has to be in the form of animation or manga. If there’s a better way or form to convey fantasy to children, then it would be great to use it.

—It seems like the voice actors fit their roles perfectly in this film. Do you write the script with the voice talent in mind?

MIYAZAKI: Well, I really have to apologize here, because I’m the type of person who doesn’t watch either movies or television. I watch TV late at night, but that’s the only time, really. I watch shōgi, or Japanese chess, programs on NHK and fall asleep; at least that’s my pattern on Sundays. So I really don’t know anything about what you’re asking. I know who Gary Cooper is, but that’s about it. When it comes to finding good voices for the characters, I do have an image of what I want in mind, but from that point the producer arranges for all sorts of voices to be brought to me, asking me if I like this one or that one. The instant I heard the voice of Rumi Hiiragi (who played the heroine, Chihiro), I thought, “This’ll work,” and decided on her. As for Bunta Sugawara, the voice of Kamaji, I just went along with the producer’s opinion, that he was the only one who could properly say, “It’s love. Love.” [laughs]

—Earlier, you mentioned that you hadn’t wanted to postpone the release of the film, but what’s the real reason you wanted to bring out Spirited Away this year, four years after Princess Mononoke?

MIYAZAKI: It’s because we have a budget. This is not the happy-go-lucky kind of business where we can spend as much money as we want, and besides, film production gets exhausting if it takes too long. We need to insert a period—bring things to a stop. Of course, we keep saying things like “If only we had about two more months, we’d end it at such and such point,” but toward the end we start saying things like, “Only one more month.” Of course, because it was so hot this summer, I did suggest the crazy idea to our producer that we should delay the opening until fall … [laughs] This is just the way it turned out.

I often say it, but if you spend three years making a two-hour film, those three years are represented by only two hours. And it’s true. So then what happens is that some people say, “What? You’re thirty years old?” Of course, it doesn’t make sense for me to be the only one who’s aging, but I don’t like to think of the young staff members around me all suddenly aging. Of course, telling them not to age doesn’t work either.

So I tell our staff that it’s not an issue of just spending time on the project. It’s more important, whenever possible, to do other things while doing your work, to just disappear secretly so you can have your own time, to not go around saying how you’ve still got paid vacation left. But here we are, and they’re still sitting at their desks. It’s a big problem.

—So that’s the sort of four years it’s been?

MIYAZAKI: I’m not saying it took four years, because we actually went into production in the fall, two years ago.

—You mentioned that there were actually some girls to whom you wanted to show the film. With the film now completed, do you think it met your goals vis-à-vis them? And if they’ve seen it and voiced an opinion, can you tell us about it?

MIYAZAKI: No, I don’t think they’ve seen it yet. But I would like to show it to them. I have somewhat conflicted feelings because while I think it’d make me happy if they saw it, there’s also a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t show it to them. It’s because they’re already over ten years old now, unfortunately. So I’m really more interested in knowing how kids turning ten this summer will react.

With ten-year-olds, parental influence starts to weaken. Chihiro really cares for her mother and father. Eventually, her feelings get all tangled up and confused, but I don’t want to view her basic feelings as some halfway, transitory step in the middle of a larger process. I think the children who view this film want Chihiro’s father to be a fine man, and they want her mother to be a fine, gentle person. And those are the sort of children I want to watch this film. I never, ever intend to create a film that encourages children to see through their parents, to see who they really are. On the contrary, I also don’t want fathers in the audience to view the film through the eyes of a father either. After all, the fathers were themselves once ten-year-olds, and so were the mothers, so what I really want is for them to view the film from Chihiro’s perspective.

—We hear that you composed lyrics for the film’s image album and that you gave some to Joe Hisaishi, telling him to compose tunes for them. Can you tell us what really happened?

MIYAZAKI: When I told him to just work off the imagery and his imagination, Hisaishi-san threatened me, saying, “Write some poetry … Write some poetry.” I told him over and over again that “I don’t have any talent for poetry,” but he kept bugging me to write some. I wrote some, feeling really exasperated, though I know I shouldn’t say that I was so exasperated. It turned out that we weren’t able to use the piece that I wrote for No-Face in the film. It’s a song about being “lonely, lonely, ever so lonely,” but I was told it was a bit too problematic to use. It had lyrics like “I want to eat things up.” Hiiragi-san said that No-Face was actually a “gentle” being, but he’s the sort of gentle being that would eat you up the moment you start thinking he’s gentle.

—In the last part of the film, we finally see a flying scene again, with Chihiro and Haku flying through the air together, and it felt like you were really in your element, depicting a true Miyazaki fantasy. Was this scene there in the beginning, when you started developing the story? Also, could you tell us how you honestly feel, now that the film’s finished and finally coming out, because we heard stories that you wanted one or two more months, and even that your staff wanted to be spirited away themselves.

MIYAZAKI: To give you my frank opinion, I feel that, well, everything comes to an end at some point, even my own life! [laughs]. But during the period you’re referring to we really had our backs to the wall, and if an inspector from the government’s Labor Standards bureau had come and seen us we would have been in an awful fix. We were told that the younger employees doing digital work couldn’t spend more than six hours a day staring at their computer screens, but they were actually spending twice that amount. People would wake up in the morning and panic because they couldn’t even lift their arms. We had that sort of thing happen, but then by the end of the production the crew was surprisingly happy and upbeat, and I thought, “Now we really have to finalize this thing.”

I never thought about whether we should include scenes of Haku and Chihiro flying or not. But on my own, I did think about having Chihiro ride on a train. And since I spent so much time telling people we would do this, I was really happy when she finally did get on board. We were collecting sounds of a train audible through the shadows of the trees, or shots of the trains running, but from my experience that usually just results in train scenes and nothing more. So in that sense I thought it really wonderful to have Chihiro actually ride on the train, even better than flying through the air. I actually wanted to include a few more train scenes, but we were ultimately unable to do so because of the structure of the film. Since I had spent a lot of time talking about the train idea, it got to the point where those around me were asking if there wasn’t some way we could include the other scenes. I planned to tell them that, if we included them, this could wind up being like Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. Unfortunately, we couldn’t include the scenes. It’s the sort of thing that happens often in making films, and it can’t be helped.

—Princess Mononoke was a huge hit, and it’s been four years since then. Tell us, frankly, do you think that Spirited Away might be an even bigger hit?

MIYAZAKI: No, and it’s something I’m really worried about. Movie theaters aren’t doing well these days, and it’s so hot I’m afraid people won’t come to see the film.

—How confident are you in the film?

MIYAZAKI: I never feel confident in the films I make. But having gotten this far, it’s now the producer’s job. I just create the films and then hand them over.

—In watching No-Face, he seems sort of like us, a man who is sometimes a little shy and quiet or even bored, but who quickly becomes excited over the most trivial of things and can act completely crazed too. Did you, as the director, depict him that way, believing that he was an intrinsically good being? And one other thing. In this film we see the susuwatari, or soot sprite creatures, again, for the first time since they appeared in My Neighbor Totoro thirteen years ago. Do you have a particular emotional attachment to them?

MIYAZAKI: When I’m not around, the producer’s apparently been telling everyone, “No-Face is Miya-san’s alter-ego.” Yet even without getting intellectual about it, I think there’s probably a bit of No-Face in all of us. As for the susuwatari, I just thought they would look great in that scene, working in the boiler room with Kamaji. And we probably used them because we ran out of other ideas. [laughs]

—When you announced the production of Spirited Away at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, you seemed under a great deal of pressure, and you talked about farming out some of the animation to Korea. Can you tell us how that actually worked out? Were you satisfied with the work? Also, how did you express your appreciation to the members of your staff who were sent to Korea to work?

MIYAZAKI: Looking back on it, working with the people in Korea was wonderful. We weren’t trying to exploit the difference in workers’ wages and make the film cheaply; we asked them to help because we needed their help. The producers who helped us were great, and they did better work than we had expected; of course, that was probably also because we didn’t know what they could do.

And the four staff members from Ghibli who went over to Korea all came back looking healthy and happy. I was a little disappointed in that regard because I had thought they would all come back looking a little worn-out and emaciated, but they all came back in glowing health. [laughs] The food was delicious, the people kind, and one of our guys even came back and spent all his time looking at ads for condominiums in Korea because he wanted to move there to live. But that aside, after Spirited Away launches successfully, I’m hoping to take the completed film over to Korea with the producer and others to express my thanks to everyone. I’d like to show them how the film they worked on turned out, and to have a special screening. I’ve got it on my calendar.

—Other than Chihiro, in Spirited Away the characters all seem to inhabit their fantasy world in a very wild and uninhibited way. Nowadays, when telling old fables, it almost seems as though the old fairy tales have been defanged; it’s almost as if Momotarō the Peach Boy goes to Onigashima Island to destroy the demons, and as soon as he lands the demons surrender. What do you think of this trend?

MIYAZAKI: Right after the end of World War II, the old children’s fairy tales—such as “Mount Kachikachi,” in which a fox kills the old lady—were changed into something quite different, and they have been watered down relentlessly ever since. And this has been part of a larger process in which the old fables have lost their power among children. I think this happened, probably, because people who don’t believe or understand the power of fables have been fiddling with them in all sorts of ways. It’s true with the fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm too; they’re filled with incredibly bloody tales of murder. Even “Little Red Riding Hood” originally ended with the child being eaten by the wolf. It’s as if it were saying that stupid girls get eaten, and that’s the way the real world is. The basic story itself is a great one, and it has probably survived by being later changed into one where a hunter rips open the wolf’s belly and saves Little Red Riding Hood.

As for the story of Momotarō, I suspect that it became mixed up with Japan’s invasions of countries overseas during the war, because the structure of the story lends itself to that, and the story itself was probably used that way. People should really stop fiddling with the old fairy tales.

—You previously announced that you were going to retire, so we’d like to ask you again about your plans for the future.

MIYAZAKI: Well, I really can’t work on feature-length animation anymore, at least physically speaking. I thought I wouldn’t be able to make this film, but I did, so I’m very happy in that regard. There’s a part of me that’s really impetuous, and it’s the reason I say, for example, that we ought to create a museum, and then wind up getting boxed into the idea and forced to go along with the project until it’s finished. So for me there won’t be any real retirement. I’ll just have to keep plodding forward. [laughs]

Rather than thinking about whether I’m going to make any more features or not, I prefer to think that if there’s something short that I want to make, that I ought to make it. But it’s the director who has to make the real decisions about this sort of thing, and that causes headaches for everyone else. For Spirited Away, the current chiefs of each section did a fabulous job, and they worked hard to cover for me, but—if I do say so myself—they’ll probably be grumbling much more next time.

“Don’t Worry, You’ll Be All Right”: What I’d Like to Convey to Children

From The Spirited Away Roman Album, published by Tokuma Shoten, September 10, 2001

Ten-year-old girls are even more formidable than you might think …

MIYAZAKI: Up until now, many Ghibli films have been rather complicated stories and included our opinions about the state of the world and that sort of thing, but Spirited Away has none of that. I tried to create something about which I could honestly tell my ten-year-old friends, “I made this for you.”1 So there are people to whom I want to show this film. But I originally started thinking about this project back before we began making Princess Mononoke, so the friends I mentioned have already grown up. It’s a bit unfortunate, but I would now like people who were once ten years old or are about to turn ten to see it.

The biggest motivation for me in making this film, and in deciding to create a heroine like Chihiro, came entirely from my young friends. I took making it as a serious challenge, so if they like the film I’ll consider it a victory for an old guy like me. And children are really honest in showing what they think. [laughs] So if I look into their eyes and they say, “Yeah, it was really fun!” I’ll know if they mean it or not. I’m sort of on tenterhooks right now.

—Is the heroine, Chihiro, modeled after your young friends?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t know if Chihiro’s modeled after them or not, but parts of Chihiro’s personality are exactly like theirs, and parts are not. [laughs]

—And the parts that are like them?

MIYAZAKI: Maybe the parts that are not so cute? [laughs]

—You mean in the beginning of the film, when Chihiro’s shown with a really pouty face?

MIYAZAKI: Well, those parts aren’t really so bad; I think that in reality girls around ten years old today tend to pout and whine even more. And I think it’s probably even truer of girls who have really gentle fathers who also try to be their “friends.” I say that because when doing the storyboards for the scene where Chihiro’s father is driving the car and turns around and says to his sleepy daughter, “Look, there’s your new school,” the women on the Ghibli staff all made the terrifying comment of “Wow, if it had been me, I wouldn’t have woken up unless he’d said that at least three more times.” [laughs]

But I thought that scene, where the story starts with a family move that Chihiro doesn’t want to make, was better depicted by showing her attitude rather than with dialogue. I don’t really think my little friends would take that sort of attitude with their fathers. If they were told the whole family was going to move, I think they’d probably jump up and down with excitement.

—Like Satsuki and Mei in My Neighbor Totoro?

MIYAZAKI: I think either is normal for children, whether they react like Chihiro did in the film or jump up and down in delight. The place you have lived up until then is the place you are most familiar with, and if you have lots of friends there, you would likely not want to move. And if that were the case for my little friends, I’m sure they would have had a different expression on their faces too. For the child concerned, there’s no contradiction between jumping up and down in excitement and pouting and whining in frustration.

In the course of making this film, I did come to feel that girls around ten years old are far more complicated and formidable than adults give them credit for. The idea that, in the process of moving, these kids would think that acting happier themselves would make their fathers happier, and that they would therefore deliberately try to act happier—well, I find it a bit frightening to imagine.

One of my little friends is in the second year of middle school, and she recently took the bullet train by herself for the first time to travel to her grandmother’s place in Okayama. When I heard that, I thought, well, the process has finally started, and how wonderful it is. And on her way home the girl apparently decided to stop by my workplace to say hello, because I found a little souvenir gift left hanging on the entryway door handle. I was so happy. I was so proud of her, and I thought it was so great. Actions like that really tug at the heartstrings of old guys, you know. And I sensed how scary kids really are. [laughs]

—In Spirited Away, we have a different impression of Chihiro’s parents than we do of parents in other films of yours. Were you being deliberately conscious of the differences in today’s parents and children?

MIYAZAKI: I had no ill intentions; I think there are lots of parents like Chihiro’s in this world, don’t you? Some parents, like those in Kiki’s Delivery Service, are very kind and understanding, but some are also like Chihiro’s mother and father. When making films, I sometimes feel as though I should work within a framework and draw the father or mother this way or that, but in Spirited Away it was the opposite; I wanted to smash that framework, and that’s why I drew them the way I did.

—Why did you turn the parents into pigs?

MIYAZAKI: Because they were getting in the way of Chihiro becoming the heroine. Children can’t possibly realize their true potential if they have parents around them always saying “Hurry up!” or trying too hard to be friendly, or trying too hard to make them happy. It’s like the old Japanese adage: “Children grow up even without parents.” Of course, there are those who might change it to “Children grow up even with parents.”

I frankly wasn’t trying to make some sort of ironic point by turning the parents in Spirited Away into pigs. Because they really were like pigs. There were lots of people like that during Japan’s economic bubble years, and after. They’re still around today. There are brand-name pigs, and rare-item snob pigs.

—Do Chihiro’s parents end up remembering that they were turned into pigs?

MIYAZAKI: They don’t remember it at all. The father’s probably still going around groaning that it’s a recession and his feeding trough’s not big enough.

The strange world Chihiro wanders into is Japan itself

—I’d like to ask next about the strange world Chihiro wanders into.

MIYAZAKI: That’s Japan itself. Until recently, the dormitories for female workers of textile companies or the wards in long-term care facilities all looked like the employee rooms in the bathhouse where Chihiro lives. That’s what Japan was like until just a while ago. I felt a real sense of nostalgia when depicting them. We’ve forgotten what the buildings, streets, and lifestyles were like just a little while back.

—But Yubaba herself lives Western style …

MIYAZAKI: That’s supposed to be something like Rokumeikan2 or Meguro Gajoen. I think that for us Japanese, what seems really deluxe is to have something that is a mishmash of a traditional-style palace, a grand Western-style (or quasi-Western-style) mansion, and something like the Palace of the Dragon King, and then to live in it, Western style. The Aburaya bathhouse, I should say, is really like one of today’s leisure land theme parks, but it’s something that could also have existed in the Muromachi and Edo periods. So what we’re ultimately depicting is the real Japan.

—There’s no giant central bath in Aburaya, as you would normally find in a bathhouse. Why is that?

MIYAZAKI: Probably because the characters’d be up to no good in it. [laughs]

—For the idea that the spirits would probably bathe in smaller baths, did you refer to anything in particular?

MIYAZAKI: There’s a very interesting festival known as Shimotsuki, where they summon spirits from all over Japan and have them bathe in an ofuro to make them feel better. It’s a festival held in the area around Gifu and Shizuoka.

—Is that what inspired you?

MIYAZAKI: Yes. I don’t formally study things like that, but I’m fascinated by them.

—Did you have any particular references for the images of the spirits that you depicted? For example, I was really amazed to see Oshira depicted as the God of Radishes.

MIYAZAKI: It’s all very haphazardly done. [laughs] I think the gods of Japan are really all quite modest. Of course, some have real problems because they’ve been saddled with all sorts of baggage, such as having been turned into gods for the nation-state. Tenjin3 has been turned into a god for those who pray for success in their school exams, and I’m sure it’s tough for him because he doesn’t even understand English. [laughs] Some traditional Japanese gods have even been lumped in with Buddhism and made into wooden idols of worship, but I don’t think that’s the way things originally were. What I’m trying to say here is that Japanese spirits originally had no form. And if people give them form without being careful, they start looking like yokai. And that’s also an area that’s really vague. Even the yokai in the famous scroll painting Hyakki yagyōzu4 were all given form after the fact. So in principle I didn’t want my designs of Japanese spirits to be based on existing images. But one exception is the masks at Kasuga Taisha shrine5. When I saw photos of them, they were too fascinating not to use as a reference, so I did use them. But when I gave form to the spirits, I didn’t want to make them look too much like deities. So if you ask me why I depicted the spirits the way I did in the film, well, it’s because I think Japanese gods are probably quite exhausted. So it also made sense to me that they would want to come to a bathhouse and stay two nights and three days. Sort of like in the Shimotsuki festival. And then, going further, I came up with the idea that they might even come to the bathhouse in a group, sort of like company employees who go on retreats together in Japan.

—In the “image music” album for the film, you composed the lyrics for the song “Kamigami-sama,” or “The Gods,” didn’t you? When I read the lyrics, I did get the impression that the gods were like us humans, often tired from the lives we live.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, we’re the same. And as we say in Japan, “The customer is always god.” That’s just a bit of a pun, but I think it’s true.

—Of the gods you depicted, the river spirit seemed particularly realistic.

MIYAZAKI: On my days off, I often join some local people in cleaning up a river, so I’ve actually had an experience very similar to that of Chihiro. I’ve really sensed that the spirits of Japanese rivers are feeling worn out, that they’re living in very sorry, pathetic conditions. It’s not just human beings who are suffering on these Japanese islands. So when I’ve been cleaning up the river, to get something out of it I have to get over the idea that I’m just dealing with filth, or ugliness, or just picking up awful things and thinking, Yuck.

What do Japanese need to live?

—In other works of yours, such as in My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, you also depict spirits that inhabit Japan’s nature. Why is this?

MIYAZAKI: As the late Ryōtarō Shiba said, despite the fact that Buddhism and Confucianism were imported into Japan, we Japanese still have our own primitive religious beliefs. For example, I really like the story of Sasajizō; the grandfather and grandmother who appear in the story really have few wants. When the grandfather can’t sell any more straw hats, he can’t buy any rice cakes, but he feels so sorry for the jizō that he brushes the snow off of him, gives him a straw hat, and then goes home. Then the grandmother says, “You did a good thing.” Well, I often think how wonderful it would be to live like that, to be satisfied by something like that. I dream of a life with someone like that old woman. To be so pure is the supreme goal. Even now, I think that deep in the hearts of us inhabitants of these islands these ideas remain—to be purified, to purge, to get rid of defilement, to be refreshed, to be rid of unwanted thoughts. Even now, I think that deep in our hearts we still pursue the dream of this kind of purity.

This is why, when we Japanese talk about preserving nature with German people, the conversations don’t mesh. Germans want to control nature, but we don’t want to control it, and we want to create a place where it isn’t controlled. We want a place that won’t be defiled by human desire or greed. It’s all right if something comes into this ecosystem and it changes as a result. But we don’t want the ecosystem to be defiled by human hands. This way of thinking may also be a major reason why Japanese have so much trouble communicating internationally, but it is also one of the more important elements that make us Japanese. Of course, there’s always the danger that this same aspect will get out of control and lead to a lack of realism and to too much self-sacrifice for the sake of the group, but when Earth has fallen on hard times, I think our ideals can also be an important support for us. I think it’s important to remember that we can’t control the world, that we need a sense of respect for it, even some humility. Europeans used to think this way in ancient times. The Celtic people have left us broad and deep traces of it. Sorry, I know that I’m getting a bit off track here.

—Do you think the spirits in Spirited Away would really traipse from the actual world that we inhabit to the Aburaya bathhouse?

MIYAZAKI: Why, yes, I do. [laughs] Because it’s a world all its own over there. Beyond the bathhouse, there’s a town, so Aburaya is actually on the edge of a town. But the train that used to run back and forth to the bathhouse recently just goes and never comes back. But who knows? Maybe it travels all around and returns three years later, or maybe it comes back after three days.

—Where is the train connected to?

MIYAZAKI: Why is it that people, who have so little interest in the actual world in which they live or in what’s going on around them, are so fascinated by the particulars of a fictional story? It always seems to be such people—people who normally never think twice about where the trains or trucks running by their houses or companies are going—who ask me where the train in this story is going. Chihiro has no interest in that sort of thing. She’s got her hands full with the reality going on around right around her. The world of Spirited Away is just like the modern world we live in, vast and vague. For the people who live there, it’s their world. They just happen to have been visited by someone from another place. And that someone happens to be Chihiro. Don’t you think that’s good enough? I wanted Chihiro to realize that there’s beauty in that other world too. That’s why I didn’t want to depict the world of spirits as one that is always so out of the ordinary. Worlds always have elements of beauty in them, and in this one, if it rains, the rain might even create an ocean. To me, that’s what a world is. To me, this is true of both the world we live in and the spirit world.

—Why did you make the people living in that world look like frog-men and slug-women?

MIYAZAKI: It’s because, in our daily lives, I think we’re rather like frogs and slugs. I’m including myself. I think I’m rather like a frog, but always saying difficult things.

—So you’re basically saying that the other world you’ve depicted is really this reality?

MIYAZAKI: Well, without depicting some sense of reality, no one would find this film interesting. But don’t get me wrong; I didn’t make this film to satirize or parody our reality. Imagine if a ten-year-old girl had to work at Studio Ghibli. It would feel like being surrounded by a large group of weird old frogs—some kind, some mean. That’s the sort of film that this is.

A film made for the children around the world who have to work

—Why, in the film, did you decide to show ten-year-old Chihiro having to work?

MIYAZAKI: I got the idea from a documentary I saw on the NHK TV channel, about child labor in Peru. I thought that, if I were to make a film for the sake of all the children on earth, it would have to be something that any child could understand, no matter what sort of life they were living. I really didn’t want to make a film that only Japanese kids would understand. And besides, the idea that children don’t have to work is really very new. My grandfather, for example, went off to work as an apprentice at the age of eight, and as a result he never learned how to read. That’s the way things were in Japan until recently. The only reason kids don’t have to work today is because Japan experienced a period of high economic growth after the war. In reality, most children in the world still have to work. I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, just that we need to remember it. In truth, people are social animals, so it’s not good for us to live without some sort of connection to society. We have to work.

—As a director, Miyazaki-san, it seems like you’re a pretty hard worker yourself.

MIYAZAKI: I certainly don’t dislike working. In fact, I love it. My own ego and ambitions always drive me to create ever-more respectable films, but then I usually wind up with something awful. Nothing would make me happier than to be able to draw storyboards that would allow the Ghibli staff to go home after an eight-hour workday and to create films that everyone would want to go see. But I don’t have the talent for that, so everyone here works themselves to the bone making films. That stated, of course, I don’t think working is a particularly sacred or glorious activity either.

By now the interview had already gone over an hour. As director, Miyazaki-san had been checking the key animation until late the previous night. His face gradually started to show his fatigue. But he kept talking.

People create the faces they wear

—I’d like to ask you how you create your characters and, in that regard, what No-Face actually is.

MIYAZAKI: There are No-Faces all around us. Because there’s only a paper-thin difference between evil spirits and gods. And on top of that, this film is set in Aburaya, a bathhouse. So once you open the doors, all sorts of things come in.

—To me, it seemed as though you were depicting the youth of today.

MIYAZAKI: I didn’t make the film with that in mind. No-Face is just a name and a mask, and other than that we don’t really know what he’s thinking or what he wants to do. We just named him No-Face because his expression almost never changes; that’s all. But I do think there are people like him everywhere, people who want to glom on to someone but have no sense of self.

—What about Haku? Why did you decide to use such a bishōnen, or pretty boy character?

MIYAZAKI: At first I had absolutely no intention of doing so. But if you’ve got a girl, you’ve got a boy; if there’s a boy, there’s a girl. That’s what makes the world. And since our heroine’s a tad ugly, I thought that without a fair and handsome boy, it might be too boring.

—Did you really draw Chihiro thinking she was ugly?

MIYAZAKI: No, but I really don’t think she’s your typical beautiful girl. I didn’t draw her thinking that at all. I wanted to depict a girl who would make viewers worry about what she would become in the future. And while I was drawing her, I thought that she would probably become cool. It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a person attractive or not. Because they can change so suddenly. Take people’s faces; I think that people create the faces they wear. So I didn’t want to draw Chihiro with your standard cute-girl face. And I think I was right in making that decision.

—When you gave a report on the production last March, you said that Yubaba was a character who symbolized a special type of “everyman.”

MIYAZAKI: Yes, I think she does.

—Well, if that’s so, why did you decide to create a twin sister for Yubaba?

MIYAZAKI: Ultimately, when we were getting down to the wire in the latter half of the production, Masashi Andō, the animation director, begged me not to add any new characters. So I created a twin for Yubaba. Of course, in retrospect, it could have been a taller, older sister and not just a twin. But either way, it’s still really like two facets of the same person. When we’re at work we’re like Yubaba, yelling and making a mess and getting people to work, but when we go home we try to be good citizens. This schism is the painful part of being human.

Taking Yubaba as a single character, we spent ten times more time connected to her, observing her, and thinking about how to depict her, than we did actually drawing storyboards for her—so much so that I don’t even remember how far we developed her in the storyboards. And the same thing’s true with Haku. When creating his character, all sorts of subconscious things emerged; he even appeared in my dreams. But when we actually put these sorts of characters into the story, we have to clean them up a bit, and while we’re monkeying around with all sorts of things, the characters gradually take shape. Of course, a lot gets left out. Sometimes when I look at the storyboards, I’m amazed. I had originally been imagining and thinking on a vast and complicated scale, and while my original ideas may seem to have been incorporated into the character, I also find myself thinking, “Is that all?” That’s the type of character we’re dealing with here, with Yubaba and Haku. What you see depicted in the film is greatly simplified.

An experience that shakes us to the core of our memories

—In the same report on the production that you gave, you also stated that this is not a “coming-of-age” story. Can you comment on that?

MIYAZAKI: When watching films recently, I often sense there’s something like a “coming-of-age myth” because they seem to imply that when you grow up everything will be fine. But in reality, when I look at myself and ask myself if I’ve really matured, all I can say is that I think I’ve gained a bit more self-control. Other than that it seems as though I’ve mostly been running around in circles for the last sixty years. So I wanted to overturn this stupid idea in films that if you just grow up and fall in love, everything will be all right.

—You say it’s not a coming-of-age film, but doesn’t a change occur in Chihiro between the time before she ventures into that other world, at the beginning, and the end, after she has returned to the real world?

MIYAZAKI: I’m not so sure. All I can say is that I didn’t want to make the “other world” entirely a dream either. That’s why, in the last scene, after Chihiro returns to the real world, you see leaves covering the family car. And also, even though Chihiro may not notice it, we decided to leave the hairpin that Zeniba gave her. So it’s all supposed to be something that really happened. Otherwise, the whole thing would be too sad, right? Actually, this story is unexpectedly sad. Especially the ending. Don’t you think so? After all, just when Chihiro has finally been accepted by the people she has met in the other world, she has to leave it. If she could have stayed a little longer, she could have gotten to know the frog-men and the slug-women better. She would have realized that there are all sorts of people in the world, including good people and stupid idiots. But she has to leave it all behind. It’s very sad, really. Even I, the one making the film, felt sad.

—So are you saying that Chihiro doesn’t remember what happened in the other world?

MIYAZAKI: Does anyone really remember everything they’ve done? They don’t, in my opinion. But I do think it’s like Zeniba says, that we “never forget anything that happens.” Even though humans might not be able to recall everything that has happened to them in the past, the memory of it still exists somewhere.

When making a film like Spirited Away, which is basically a film for small children, I sometimes find myself recalling experiences from childhood that I normally can’t remember at all. It’s quite mysterious how memory works. When working on this film, I remembered a water purification plant that I visited on a third-grade field trip. On a grassy hill, there was a reservoir for the plant. Looking at it from a window, the reservoir had a giant dome shape, but inside it was filled with water, and the water then poured out of that and flooded into what appeared to be a large underground space. I recall that for a long time afterward I drew nothing but pictures of it. And when making the film this buried memory came back to me vividly. So what I’m saying is that these childhood memories remain in there somewhere.

—Why do you think you were so attracted to an underground water tank?

MIYAZAKI: I really don’t know, but there must have been some reason because I was attracted to it the moment I saw it. Perhaps I had a memory of something similar in me, from something slightly earlier, or even earlier than that, in my DNA for example. I sometimes think that there’s something piled up in the human mind, something that is in our memory that we can’t recall but haven’t forgotten, or something buried even deeper, like the stones that make up a foundation. It might include things like our DNA, something at the extremities, something that we don’t understand very well at all, something connected to something else that is completely mysterious. Recently, we’ve been experiencing abnormal weather patterns, and I feel almost as though the trees are trying to search deep into their memories—that they’re trying to recall how they survived before in much hotter eras. Last year the Japanese zelkova trees were all exhausted because they couldn’t adapt to the heat, but this year, at least so far, they seem to have recovered their health. So I think that the memories we recall may come from something we experienced momentarily as babies, but a lot of them may also come from something much more ancient, from before we were even born. But of course, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Sorry. It’s just what I think.

The zelkova trees Miyazaki-san refers to may indeed have suffered terribly last year because of the water shortage. But we can also see that Miyazaki-san starts to make all sorts of associations from water. In his work, “water” functions as a type of cradle for memories; it is a purifying force in the world, yet it is also something that ever so gently accepts and supports people. If fantasy is something that indirectly depicts the reality and truth deep within the mind, then Miyazaki-san is clearly trying to get to the core of not only a theory of fantasy, but of creativity itself.

Fantasy opens the door to the subconscious

—Spirited Away seems to contain all sorts of elements from both fantasy and children’s literature, including not only Alice in Wonderland, but also Tales from Earthsea, and even Krabat.

MIYAZAKI: It really is a mix of all sorts of things, isn’t it?

—Did you do that intentionally?

MIYAZAKI: No, it just happened that way as we went along. I think certain motifs appear over and over again in our deep psyches. Even Krabat isn’t something that the author suddenly thought up, because it’s based on a folktale that’s been handed down from the Middle Ages. So when making Spirited Away, there were many things I wanted to include but couldn’t. When working on it, I frankly felt like I was lifting the lid on areas of my brain that I wasn’t supposed to expose. But creating fantasy is all about lifting the lid on your brain, flaunting things that you normally don’t expose. It’s about treating the world we discover there as though it’s reality, to the point where the real world itself sometimes seems to lack reality. At some point, this other world takes on a greater reality than that of our own ordinary lives. In just talking about this subject now, we lose a type of reality, because all the focus is on the other world.

—When drawing storyboards, do you sometimes feel as though the other world you’re creating is the real world, or even that you’re existing in that world?

MIYAZAKI: Yes. I often feel that way. Sometimes I can’t even tell if something really happened or if I just imagined it. Of course, we do have a production schedule, so that keeps me grounded. Sometimes when I sleep here, I wake up suddenly with the shivers, wondering what I’m doing in such a ridiculous place. Then I wonder if I’m really going to be able to complete the film. When you create something like this, there’s always a part of you that gets eaten up by the work itself.

—You get eaten up by the work?

MIYAZAKI: Yes. There definitely is something like that. I always wonder why we have to go there, but perhaps it’s best described as having to bear a certain element of madness. Right in the middle of creating a film, I often feel like I’m operating under some sort of spell, or curse. I feel like a lid on my brain—one that I normally never open—has been opened, and that an electrical current connects me to some other faraway place.

—Does this always happen when you work on a film?

MIYAZAKI: That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought much about that before. Usually the lid on my brain lifts after I get in the groove of making the film. Then I think, ah, it’s opened up! But when I’m making a film, I spend all my time thinking not about superficial matters but about what’s going on deep down. I open the door to my subconscious mind. And when that happens, suddenly the threads all connect, and I think, ah, so this is what I really wanted to do all along, but in the real world it may not actually work. And of course, if I dive too deeply, I might never come back at all.

—Never come back?

MIYAZAKI: Right, because my whole reality would then be in the film itself.

—You mean the real world would seem unrealistic?

MIYAZAKI: It would seem unrealistic.

Miyazaki-san fell quiet for a while. The time we spent waiting for him to answer seemed both like an eternity and a single second.

MIYAZAKI: The distance I maintain from a film differs from day to day. When I’m really into a film it seems like there’s a lot of consistency, even when there are lots of contradictions. Even though, when I step back, it seems as though nothing’s consistent. For an instant, I really fall into the cracks. It’s really interesting. What used to seem real loses all reality in an instant. And then, what seems to have had no logical consistency or coherence suddenly emerges intact. Then when I go back to the storyboards it all seems too simple. I think, Wow, so this is the way the drawing was really meant to be.

—When you’re drawing storyboards, do you feel as though your mind is really open?

MIYAZAKI: To draw storyboards is to open a lid and peer deep into the mind. Of course, there are sketches that don’t require this, and those are the ones that are not so important to me.

—In conclusion, at the beginning of this interview you said that you made this film for your little friends, but what do you think ten-year-old girls today really need?

MIYAZAKI: That’s not a question I can or should easily answer. Basically, I think I just want them to know that the world is deep and filled with variety. That there are infinite possibilities in the world they live in and that they are a part of this world. Perhaps it’s enough just to say that the world is rich and precious and that they hold it in their hands. I honestly made this film just wanting to tell these young girls, “Don’t worry, you can make it all right.”

The Heart That Accepts a “Lonely Man”

Tokiko Katō (Singer)

Hokkaido Shimbun, April 27, 2001, evening edition

I’ve been aware of Katō-san’s songs ever since “Hitorine no komoriuta” (Lullaby for Sleeping Alone, 1969). Even she’s probably forgotten all about it by now, but I sometimes still find myself humming the song or listening to a tape of it while working.

I first met Katō-san while creating Porco Rosso (1992), when I asked her to play the part of Gina, the madame of the bar where the pilots always congregate. We used her “Tokiniwa mukashi no hanashi wo” (Once in a While, Talk of the Old Days, 1987) as the end theme for Porco Rosso, because for a certain generation the song has incredible resonance, and there’s an overlap in theme. In the story, Madame Gina also sings the song “Le Temps des Cerises” (The Time of Cherries), which emerged during the Paris Commune and was also played at the funeral of President Francois Mitterand, so I knew I had to get Katō-san for the part. For the film, I used the section where she just starts singing a bit (actually at Sungari, the Russian restaurant run by Katō-san’s older sister, Sachiko). She has a fabulous sense of intuition and was able to understand the hidden messages in the film, and I’m really glad that we could work with her.

Katō-san is a very domestic person. And that’s one of the great, and somewhat unfortunate, things about her. Were she the type who fell over and over again into self-destructive romantic relationships, exhausting herself, her love songs might have demonstrated a particularly interesting development. But she’s a very rational person, and that’s also good. The secret behind the fact that, rather than focusing on the songs she has already sung, she is focused more on the future, is that she has a good husband and very dependable daughters. When I once met her with her husband and daughters, I really enjoyed seeing how much the daughters supported their mother. Katō-san is the type who might say, “Well, even if the men aren’t up to it, I am, and I’m not going to let anything get me down,” and that’s the way she’s probably always been. I suspect that the men around her think that she’s really tough. But she’s also got a very gentle spirit that can be very accepting of lonely men too. She’s always telling me I grumble too much, or that I shouldn’t go around moaning and groaning all the time.

Katō-san’s songs have an element of narcissism, but the fact that they don’t have any self-pity is one of the great things about them. The songs “Shiretoko ryojō” (Traveling Moods in Shiretoko) and “Biwako shūkō no uta” (A Song for Sailing Around Lake Biwa) hold out just to the right point and are very refreshing. And their logic keeps them from being sappy. It’s okay for them to contain an element of traditional Japanese folk music, because it’s appealing. And to have this without self-pity is pretty good too. It fits the personality of Madame Gina. But in that sense they may also not be very Japanese.

As far as I’m concerned, Katō-san doesn’t really have to put out any more CDs. At Sungari restaurant, where all the exhausted men gather around drinking wine, she can just say, “What? Tired, are you? Well, I know all kinds of things’ve happened, but here, let me sing for you,” and then belt out a couple of tunes. Of course, on some days she probably wouldn’t feel like singing, and that would somehow feel cultured. With that in mind, I planned to get a piano for my art studio, but I’ve hesitated because it would make the space too crowded. If I do get one, it’d be a real luxury. But I’m sure she’d again tell me something like, “You’re being awfully selfish. You think a woman would put up with that?”

It’s a Tough Era, But It May Be the Most Interesting of All: A Conversation with Tetsuya Chikushi

Shūkan Kinyōbi, Weekly Friday, January 11, 2002

CHIKUSHI: Some questions must be asked, even if they seem silly. Your most recent film, Spirited Away, has set box office records in Japan. Why do you think so many people have seen it?

MIYAZAKI: I really don’t know. Some of the issues we thought about when making the film, or that caused us to ponder what to make, must have resonated with audiences.

CHIKUSHI: Well, speaking as one of the members of the audience, one thing I can say is that it was fascinating. When I left the theater after the film ended, I had an incredible sense of satisfaction, of being fulfilled. In the era of directors like Ozu and Kurosawa, in the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, you could feel how directors were able to control everything all the way to the edges of the screen. They composed everything you could see at the edges the way they wanted, from the way the telephone poles stood, to the stirring of the trees. And I think the dramatic drop in the ability of the director to control the screen composition is what has led Japanese films to their current awful state. But with animation, it’s a different case; you’re also able to create everything we see on the screen, from edge to edge.

MIYAZAKI: Well, actually, the staff members all get together and draw it. Of course, I have to direct them, though.

CHIKUSHI: But because you control the screen totally, I think people feel they need to see your films more than once, and that’s why they go back and see them again.

MIYAZAKI: I was told that people couldn’t understand Princess Mononoke unless they saw it more than once. So we actually talked about how if we made hard-to-understand films, audiences would come back to see them over and over again, and we would make more money. [laughs]

Uneasy over concepts of justice

CHIKUSHI: In my case, I wasn’t able to see Spirited Away at first because the theaters were too crowded. As a result, I wound up seeing it after the terror attacks of 9 /11. I had all sorts of feelings about the attacks, but mainly what I would call a type of despondency or helplessness predominated. In other words, a feeling that all forms of expression—including music and even images—were being rendered meaningless. Terrorism is a form of violence, and the reaction of countries like America is also violent, and where these two trends compete there is also a strong sense of helplessness and discomfort. I just feel that something’s not right.

MIYAZAKI: Everyone seems to feel that way. It seems as though all those who feel they have to make a statement, or say that terrorism has to be destroyed or that we have to fight and so forth, are all responding out of proportion.

CHIKUSHI: Right, and what they’re fighting about over there is, frankly, a monotheistic world. Each side tells the other that it “has absolute justice on its side” and hates the other. In Japan, even Prime Minister (Junichirō) Koizumi has been going around saying all sorts of things, but none of his words have any power behind them.

MIYAZAKI: Right. They don’t.

CHIKUSHI: So that’s the context in which I saw Spirited Away. Japan was in a confused state, with almost nothing to say to the rest of the world about the state of affairs. But when I finished watching the film, I finally felt that maybe Japan did have something to say, that maybe it did have some message to impart after all. That was my biggest thought after viewing the film.

MIYAZAKI: I’m very happy to hear you say that.

CHIKUSHI: In the film we see the otherwise-scary spirits of rivers and mountains, or nearly every deity under the sun, gather together at the Yuya, or Aburaya, bathhouse, the main setting for the story, for their therapeutic baths.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, all nameless spirits.

CHIKUSHI: So when all the spirits gather there, it’s really a representation of the world of polytheism, of many gods. And when you send this film out into the world, you are in effect sending a powerful message; you are saying to those in the world fighting over their belief in only one god that there is indeed another way of looking at things, that another worldview is possible.

MIYAZAKI: Actually, when we were trying to decide whether or not to release Spirited Away in America, we had some folks over there look at it. They said they could understand it up to a point. But they also said that when Chihiro, the heroine, was given a bitter dumpling by the river spirit, they thought she would use it to defeat Yubaba (who controls the bathhouse) in a fight. Instead, the plot turned in a totally unexpected direction, they got completely lost, and that was it. So I really felt the inflexibility, or tenaciousness, of gods in monotheistic religions.

CHIKUSHI: Conversely, what’s also interesting is that what completely confuses people is in itself an incredible power, or even a message. I’m sure the film will also be seen in Asia, in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, right?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, but I’m not sure that Asia really has the primitive type of polytheistic world we’re talking about here. I’m not completely sure about some aspects of that now. I’m not even sure how Japanese people would have reacted to this film if they had seen it during the years of Japan’s high economic growth. They probably wouldn’t have understood it either.

CHIKUSHI: Maybe you’re right.

MIYAZAKI: That’s why I think Spirited Away is something extremely local—it’s from what I would call a “land of aboriginals on the edge of East Asia,” a place never completely civilized by Confucianism, where there are lots of older local customs and Shinto rituals. It’s the product of a land where there are still lots and lots of different shrine rituals.

On the other hand, if people in Japan are wondering whether they should send warships because they have to do something to help fight against terror, I think rather than worrying about whether it’s right or wrong, or how it should be interpreted in the context of our constitution, it would be better to decide whether it would be good or bad for Japan. I’m worried to death about whether the Koizumi cabinet’s doing this, worried the way a kid would be: What on earth is the old man thinking?

CHIKUSHI: Well, the person we’ve got for prime minister now has a hot-blooded streak, so he’s prone to more and more autosuggestion. Right after 9 /11, his first response was the same as everyone else’s, to basically say that the whole thing is terrifying. But then he started saying that he would make his own decision on the matter, right? And everyone was going around looking at him like he was a liar. Thinking that maybe he had been told to “show the flag.”

MIYAZAKI: Well, the people of this country really don’t want to go to war. The economic war took place within the framework of foreigners’ logic, so it’s not thought of as having been a war. So at least we’re not a country full of nationalists screaming about going to “war.”

On the other hand, the histories of America and England are filled with wars. So it’s easy for them to start quoting passages from the Old Testament, saying all sorts of things that sound good, and then plunging into war. That’s why, when I saw Bush—the guy with the awful face, with close-set eyes, and that heartless look—and I’ll say this directly—every time he said we had to “choose which side to be on” I kept saying over and over again, “Neither, damn it.” What Bush calls “justice” is the kind of thing where, if you get a hundred people together, you can get one hundred different interpretations.

CHIKUSHI: I think that’s what makes us feel so uncomfortable.

MIYAZAKI: I’ve heard people say that Islamist suicide bombings started after the Japanese Red Army staged their attack in Tel Aviv. That suicide bombing was exported from Japan. It’s really amazing.

CHIKUSHI: What’s even more amazing is that recently Rokusuke Ei has been saying that he thinks Japanese people may actually like terrorists. At year end, on TV and so forth, as you know, they always show the popular story of the forty-seven ronin of Akō, but he says that if you really translated the title into English, it should be “47 Terrorists.”

MIYAZAKI: Right. Who knows how many people Golgo 13, the hero of the eponymous manga story (Takao Saitō/Saitō Productions, Shōgakukan/Leed Publishing Company) has killed? So even if someone suddenly says that we should hate all terrorists, we feel like we’re really not on a solid footing. And in spite of that, the general mood makes us feel as though if we do say anything, we’ll get in trouble, and that if I, for example, suddenly say something here, the PR guy (from Ghibli, who is sitting in on the conversation) will make a face, as if to say that here I go off making some dangerous remark.

They say it’s always better to be honest. Really. I agree completely.

An era when young people will become healthy

MIYAZAKI: The artist Shūsaku Arakawa, who lives in New York, says that the key point here is the Palestinian issue. So then the question is whether there is any solution to the problem. Well, Arakawa says Japan has the world’s most advanced technology for installing giant pilings in the sea and then constructing a surface on which to put soil and create artificial land. In fact, he says that Japan’s far more advanced in this than any other country. So he proposes that since we have this technology, and since we would have to pay the costs of any war that might occur anyway, that we should use the money instead to create a city on a giant man-made landmass somewhere in the Mediterranean.

This would be a city free from all the various problems that have cursed the issue, such as history itself, so he says that Palestinians and Jews, and even Buddhists and Hindus and Christians, should all gather there together to create a new sacred space. Of course, the original sacred sites of the Holy Land would be kept as is, but he says that creating new sacred sites would be the best way to achieve a solution. It’s been one of the most interesting ideas I’ve heard so far.

CHIKUSHI: And if people were serious about this, the amount of money it would cost would be nothing compared to what they’re already spending on wars.

MIYAZAKI: I agree. If only the prime minister of Japan would make a speech like that at the United Nations, it would really make our young people feel a lot better. They’d probably stand up a lot straighter.

CHIKUSHI: With 9 /11, I think what’s come into focus is a tremendous worldwide form of monotheism, one called “globalism.” It’s taken a huge hit. In Europe, lots of people hate the idea of a world where America’s the only deity before which everyone else has to genuflect. As for China, it will continue to operate for a while under the monotheistic religion of money-worship, and so will Asia in general, but sooner or later people there too will realize that money can’t buy happiness.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, soon. I think it will happen soon. Sooner even than in Japan. I think lots of people already realize that.

In the twenty-first century, there’ll obviously be chaos on a material and political level, and it may be a tough period. But compared to the twentieth century that we’ve been living in, all sorts of things that we take for granted will be overturned, and we’ll be forced to confront a “Copernicus-style” revolution. If today’s young people open their eyes, I think this could be the most interesting of all ages.

Right before the bubble appeared in Japan’s economy, the whole world seemed covered in concrete, and wherever you looked in Tokyo it all seemed so hopeless. And I wondered if something might change it. We now know how fragile it all really was. And I think this idea might energize young people.

CHIKUSHI: As far as the terror this time is concerned, the reaction we’re seeing is that of civilization going backward, of things happening in a way capable of instantly destroying everything that’s been built up, including all international rules.

MIYAZAKI: But it’s weird to have had fifty thousand people all gathered together in one place (the World Trade Center), just staring at computers and thinking about how to make money. It’s totally weird. And then if you ask what should be done about the five thousand who died, well, that’s a really painful question. But that doesn’t mean that going into a building, punching a computer, and making money is necessarily the best way to live.

CHIKUSHI: When I spoke with you before once, you said that out of all the children in the world, Japanese children have the least sparkle in their eyes. And that may be true, but you also said that if one were to take them out into nature and let them loose for a week, that the sparkle would come back. And in that context, at the beginning of Spirited Away Chihiro’s not very appealing at all and seems numb to everything around her. But then she gradually becomes more and more alive. In watching the film, I was reminded of what you had talked about.

MIYAZAKI: Drawing the storyboards for that—where she’s just lolling about in the backseat of the car and ignoring her father—was new for me, and a new form of expression. But the women on our staff all said that in their experience, they wouldn’t have answered like that after their father addressed them once. When in a snit, they’d have made him address them at least three times.

Today’s kids are ruined even before they start going to primary school. Some say they’re ruined even before going to kindergarten. In the old days, children were little imps and balls of energy, and they had to be carefully trained so they wouldn’t do outrageous things. Now they don’t have any energy. The breakdown in classroom discipline is the perfect example of it. So before we think about how we should educate kids, we’ve got to get them to be little devils again. To get them to be the sort of kids you’d want to yell at, saying “Why you little brats!”

I’m not saying we should blame everything on MEXT [the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology]. It’s not that the people at home are bad people, or that when bad people raise kids the kids turn into bad or boring people. Lots of mothers out there love their kids as much as they can. They try as hard as they can to do everything right, but still they worry they’re not raising their kids in the way recommended by parenting manuals and then agonize over the fact that they feel they have to love their kids but can’t love them enough.

Agriculture will come back when annual salaries are halved

CHIKUSHI: If the people of a nation can become either wise or foolish, the question is, “When did foolish people become so?” Specifically, I’m wondering when the Japanese people became so foolish.

MIYAZAKI: I’d say it was probably around the end of the Meiji Era, when Japan won the Russo-Japanese War. I think that Japanese people have a psychological complex—that they’ve been depressed ever since the feudal system collapsed, when Commodore Perry arrived in Japan and used his gunboats to force us to open our land to outsiders. When Japan actually won a war 1905, it amplified this complex, to the point where people started thinking, “Hey, we’re really a first-rate nation now!”

CHIKUSHI: And so, after World War II, the battlefield basically just switched to economics, but we kept doing the same thing, and we lost again.

MIYAZAKI: I recently saw something someone had written to the effect that one dollar would eventually be worth around 250 yen. It occurred to me that, if so, our annual incomes would basically be halved. Even if gasoline were harder to find, and even if the price of imports went up, since everyone’s income would go down together, people would probably understand.

It’d be okay, because we’d still be able to eat. Of course, I don’t know what would happen to the sixty-five-yen hamburgers, but there’s a real chance that a weaker yen would blow some life into Japan’s ailing agricultural industry. In fact, people might stop talking about purchasing food from China and start making the food they eat by themselves; it’s a perfectly reasonable idea, and it’d be a lot easier to do if people’s incomes were halved.

It’s not a scary idea because it’s not just Japan that’s in danger of sinking; it’s the whole world. We should have been prepared for something like this happening at the end of the twentieth century. The population of Earth may not become 10 billion; it may in fact drop to 2 billion. All sorts of things can happen. But like they say, it’s better to think positively and keep on living and raising our kids. That’s why I made Princess Mononoke. Our current civilization is at a dead end. What we really need is young people who can see far into the future, much farther than we can, “with eyes unclouded.”6 That’s why I keep telling people that they don’t really need to go buy Louis Vuitton products and so forth, that it’s okay to go back to the days of shopping with an old-style shopping basket in hand. Who needs video games? And we don’t need to be using all this electricity. It’s even okay to take a bath only once every two days.

CHIKUSHI: Right. Succeeding generations will probably come to think of that as normal. They’ll adapt.

MIYAZAKI: When you open the newspapers these days, there are all sorts of articles about people suddenly being thrown out of work because some IT company has gone out of business. Since they don’t have any savings at all, after paying the rent with their unemployment insurance they’re left with only fifty or sixty thousand yen and wondering how in the world they’re going to get by. With the government beating the drums for IT, people are always eager to jump on board, right? But they’d be better off thinking of it as a lesson well learned. It’s not a good idea to swallow everything the government says because, if you listen carefully, everything commentators on the economy say comes with wishful thinking and unstated disclaimers, in unwritten parentheses at the end, as in “the economy will see an upturn in two years (hopefully)” or “(if not we’re in trouble).”

It’s so disgusting. They’re like frogs, but to make that analogy would be an insult to frogs. [laughs] When I think of how those crass old jerks have had control over Japan’s politics, it makes me furious.

CHIKUSHI: What started with the fear of terrorism and is now being spurred on by the BSE [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease”] panic is, simply put, insecurity. People feel insecure for a variety of reasons, of course, but the things I mentioned came completely out of the blue, so then everything else became scary too.

MIYAZAKI: It’s a logical stage for a people with no sense of history to arrive at, because they’ve forgotten the obvious fact that good times are always followed by bad times. We might be paying a slightly high price to learn our lesson, but things’ll eventually work out. Of course, before they do, we’ll probably go through some rough times. We’ll probably be faced with all sorts of even more idiotic pickpockets and robbers.

CHIKUSHI: When times are bad, it’s hard to think of those times as “interesting.” When people don’t have enough energy to do so, it accelerates a trend toward insecurity and an increase in stupid thieves.

MIYAZAKI: I really wonder what will happen thirty years down the road. One thing the newspapers never talk about is what the world will be like when the ten-year-olds like Chihiro turn forty. All the economists and economic journalists ever think about are the numbers right in front of them and whether those numbers are going up or down. And reporters on politics only talk about the immediate political situation. That’s because when we’re facing the end of civilization, reporters are in unknown territory. And just when we’re talking about how it all might happen, Boom! on 9 /11 those planes crashed into the World Trade Center. When that happened, I honestly thought then that this was the start of something new. Not that it was good or bad but simply that it was the start of something.

CHIKUSHI: The “slow food” movement is spreading now, but it’s not just about slow food; it’s about slowing down the pace of everything. A movement declared in some little town in Italy is now gradually spreading throughout Europe, to maybe about twenty-one places, and in those towns they do everything at a slow pace. In other words they’ve deliberately decided not to advance the clock, and to go slow. It’s as though they’re telling other people, “If you want to really relax, come visit our towns on your holiday.” They’re declaring that they will not be part of the rat race. As the antithesis of big city life, I think this movement probably also has a bright economic future.

MIYAZAKI: But no matter how big I talk about these things, if a personal friend were to become sick or lose his or her job, I’d still feel helpless. I’d be beside myself. Here I am, helpless in an ordinary, daily sense, but at the same time this weird thing, this mass consumption civilization, has finally begun to move toward its demise. At Ghibli, several guys on the staff buy piles of sixty-five-yen hamburgers and go on hamburger binges. They do it as a joke. But they don’t do it in a leisurely fashion; it’s like they’re rushing to kill themselves.

Here’s another example. Someone suggested buying a ranch. I said I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a ranch if I bought one, but I went to see it anyway. The original owner had no desire to be in business any longer, and the beef cattle hooves had grown so long …

CHIKUSHI: You mean they hadn’t trimmed the hooves, right?

MIYAZAKI: Right. It was awful. It occurred to me that these cattle had never once in their lives been outside in the fields absentmindedly munching on grass. They’d just been tethered inside their barn stalls, forced to eat the feed mixture they were supplied, and then they were turned into meat. I’m sure there’ll be cosmic payback for this someday.

CHIKUSHI: One thing you wrote about Spirited Away that really shocked me was when you said that “if you say No! you’ll be turned into a chicken and have to go on laying eggs until you’re eaten.” Now, that’s really cosmic retribution. Of course, in the film the parents are turned into pigs …

MIYAZAKI: Recently, my friends and I use the word asamashii [despicable or disgraceful] a lot. It’s a word that’s fallen out of favor these days, but it seems perfectly suited to describe the current Japan. It originally referred to things that should have been the most embarrassing and shameful of all.

CHIKUSHI: There’s a problem with language in Spirited Away, isn’t there? Some of the key words for the young heroine are simple, such as when she declares repeatedly, “I’ll keep working here.” I watched this section, thinking that you were trying to tell us how much power words have.

MIYAZAKI: Actually, we thought about having Yubaba use an actual labor contract of some sort there, but since no one would get it even if we included an explanation, we just left it with her saying, “We’re using a boring old oath.” But there is a labor agreement in effect in her world because she has to give work to those who want it. Because that’s the kind of society Japan originally was; people had to give work to those who wanted it. To want to work is to want to live. To live in a specific place.

We skipped all the explanations. The same with the fact that Yubaba and Zeniba are really the same person. I’m that way too. I’m a completely different person when I’m at Ghibli, when I’m at home, and when I’m out and about in the community. In fact, I live in a most schizoid fashion. I was worried about how children would accept this aspect of the movie, but they seem to have accepted it with no problem at all, so I’ve been greatly relieved.

CHIKUSHI: In a more moralistic world where there’s nothing but good and evil, there’s certainly no rule that says one has to respect those who say they want to live. Because in such a world, evil characters are simply killed off. That’s probably why, after watching films of that sort, everyone comes out of theaters feeling happy, because they all agree with what they’ve seen.

And by the way, the person working with Kamaji in the boiler room, who appears in the beginning …

MIYAZAKI: You mean the girl Lin?

CHIKUSHI: Yes, in the beginning Lin seems to be a very mean and standoffish person, but then she suddenly winds up showing her humanity, right? I imagine that everyone enjoys seeing that process because it’s different from the stereotypical character development we normally see.

MIYAZAKI: But that’s the way it is in the workplace.

CHIKUSHI: And in most human relationships.

MIYAZAKI: Right. At Studio Ghibli, I never go out of my way to help someone unless I think there’s some benefit in doing so. I’m sure it’s true of folks in the editorial offices of Shūkan Kinyōbi [Weekly Friday, the magazine in which this interview was originally published]. Right? [laughs] But on the other hand, if I think someone’s really giving it their all, why, then I’ll really go out of my way to help or teach them, even if they’re totally off the wall in many ways. Actually, I feel like I’ve made a movie about the inner workings of Studio Ghibli itself. There’s great material to work with all over the place.

I read in a short story by the British writer Robert Westall that during World War II when a new pilot would join a unit, those who had already been in it for some time often would go out of their way not to befriend him. It was because the newcomers were usually the first ones to be killed in dogfights, and the veteran flyers simply couldn’t afford to be friends with all of them. They would therefore only befriend those they thought might survive.

The courage to accept a challenge

CHIKUSHI: Every time I meet you, Miyazaki-san, you always say you’re never going to make any more films, but you also always seem to be talking about the next one.

MIYAZAKI: Well, even if I did decide to make another, it wouldn’t be finished until the summer of 2004. And frankly I get quite a thrill out of imagining what the world will be like in three years. Will there even be movie theaters? It’s not just the economy. Nobody thinks the world will continue as is with the problems it has, including our political and ecological issues. When I think of how the lives of children in the future might differ from today, I hate to say it, but I think it’ll be even tougher for them.

The trend has been accelerated by the passenger planes that recently crashed into the Twin Towers. In other words, they’ve forced us to confront our problems. If I’m going to create a new film for audiences three years in the future, I have to start thinking about what I’m going to make now. But we have to be entertainers. And here we’ve been presented with these incredible problems. For me, the issue is whether or not to take up the challenge. It’s not just something that I can decide entirely on my own, because the problems are being forced on us by the era in which we live, so I either have to seize the opportunity or step down. I don’t really know if a new film’s possible, or if I can even complete it, but it seems to me that the courageous thing to do would be to take up the challenge. Of course, I do worry that this all sounds a bit too heroic.

CHIKUSHI: At the press conference, when you revealed that you would indeed be making a new film, I noted that you used the word kongenteki, or “fundamental,” multiple times.

MIYAZAKI: I don’t know if “fundamental” is the right word or not, but I do think that several basic issues will become clearer as we go forward. What it means to be alive, what family means, what it means to eat, and what it means to own things. And I think we’re entering an age where we’ll also be asked what it means to make things. We’ll be forced to think about these things because the world’s not working right. I don’t want to make films that are behind the times. At the same time, I want to make films that viewers find truly interesting. Films that’ll make people feel a little more relaxed or make them feel good for about three days. I also want to make films that ten-year-old girls can see and then, when they become mothers, will want their ten-year-old daughters to see. I want to create films that both generations can watch together and love.

That also means I can’t afford to create films that follow the fashion of the moment. I was beside myself when some people—who were so moved by the actions of the New York City firemen—begged me to make a film about that subject. But that’s not the kind of film I’m talking about. When the whole world seems to be talking about going to war, we’ve got to make films about something totally different. That’s what I believe. When everyone’s going on and on about how peaceful the world is, well, that’s when we’ve got to make films that show people there are always traps awaiting us, no matter how peaceful things seem to be.

CHIKUSHI: What you’re talking about is clearly difficult, but nonetheless fascinating.

Tetsuya Chikushi Born 1935 in Ōita Prefecture. Journalist. Newscaster. Graduate of Waseda University, Department of Political Science and Economics. Joined the Asahi Newspaper as a reporter in 1959. After a stint at a branch office, he worked as a journalist in the political section of the Tokyo headquarters as a special correspondent in Okinawa when it was controlled by the US military, as a foreign correspondent in the Washington D.C. bureau, as the vice director of the overseas news bureau, and as the managing editor of the weekly Asahi Journal, and also as a member of the editorial council. In 1989, he left the Asahi Journal, and from October of that year until March of 2000 he worked at TBS as the anchor on Chikushi Tetsuya’s News 23. He has received numerous awards, including the Galaxy Award and an International Emmy (Award of Merit). Among his books are Newscaster (Shūeisha Shinsho), Tabi no tochū meguriatta hitobito (People Met in the Course of Travels, 1959–2005), Surō raifu: kankyū jizai no susume (Slow Life: In Praise of Moderating our Pace) (Iwanami Shoten), Tairon: Chikushi Tetsuya “News 23” kono kuni no sugata (A debate: Tetsuya Chikushi “News 23” and the State of this Country) (Shūeisha). Deceased in 2008.

Once Again, a World Where People Believe Everything Is Alive: A Dialogue with Tetsuo Yamaori

Voice, published by PHP Kenkyūjo, January 2002 issue

People are looking for something more fundamental

YAMAORI: Many of your works, Miyazaki-san, seem to feature stories of children straying into alien worlds and discovering new powers in themselves. Even in Spirited Away, a child enters Yubaba’s world, an almost magical, hidden village, where she is able to exercise her latent abilities. It reminded me of a theme that folklorist and ethnologist Kunio Yanagita often talked about—the child who encounters a spirit and is spirited away.

MIYAZAKI: Well, when I was making Spirited Away, rather than such a universal theme, I was actually thinking of how children today perceive reality. For example, for kids today, there’s no reality at all behind the idea of defeating Yubaba. Yet when you think about what happens to kids around eighteen when they start working, why, they’re exactly like Chihiro. When someone tells them, “Hey, the boss is calling you, so go see him,” why, they’d surely panic.

YAMAORI: So what you are saying here is that people in the same company, even if they’re colleagues, often feel like complete aliens, and that the issue is how to get along with them?

MIYAZAKI: Young people today get jobs without being at all ready. I think they start working without having learned what they should have learned before getting a job, and then when they’re employed, they suddenly have to confront society. There’s a huge gap today between their physical development and the life that society demands of them. I suspect that kids around twenty today are much more childlike than the contemporaries I knew, who would’ve loved to go to high school but had to start working as soon as they graduated from middle school.

Reality changes depending on the era we’re in, so as a creator I feel as though I should always be aware of the condition in which contemporary children find themselves. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke may both be films that, on the surface, don’t seem to have very modern sensibilities about issues, but they’re also films that we created because we were trying to figure out the best way to engage with our era. Because, though we try to avoid pandering to the fashions of the moment, we also live in this era.

YAMAORI: So in other words you have to sense the trends of an era and tailor your work to it. And on top of that, you have to express something fundamental.

MIYAZAKI: Yes. With the act of terror that occurred in New York in September 2001, I feel that the time has come for me to pay attention to even more fundamental issues. It normally takes me about three years to make a film, so my next work won’t come out until the summer of 2004 at the earliest, and I have to make sure that I don’t create something that’s already behind the times. I have to make sure it’s something that, when children go to see it in the summer of 2004, they will realize, “Ah, this is exactly what I wanted to see!”

Now, in the next three years all sorts of other absurd, unforeseen incidents may occur, and children may then have even more serious problems to worry about. Yet if I want to do something about it, I simply have to create a film that captures something even more fundamental.

In this age, when we have to be prepared for the possibility of two or three nuclear bombs going off somewhere, there’s really no sense in making films with messages like “terrorism is bad,” or “life is precious.” We may not be able to give children direct answers to questions such as “Why were we born in this kind of place?” but we at least need to create something that conveys our own position, and our own feelings, as adults. The time has come when we are really being tested in this regard.

YAMAORI: Yes. In the speech that Bush gave on September 11 to the victims and the families, he quoted the passage from Psalm 23 in the Old Testament that says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.” He did it to comfort the victims’ families. These are the words of King David, who created Israel in the tenth century BCE. And in the first Gulf War ten years ago, American tank crewmembers slipped the words of Moses, from the Old Testament, into their pockets.

It’s basically a way of saying “Our God is a fortress that will protect us.” The god in this case is the god of anger in the Jewish faith, but either way, it’s interesting to note that whenever the state or a people feel threatened, what they evoke is not the New but the Old Testament. It is, ultimately, the god of anger. It’s the god who punishes humans for their sins. And it is the god evoked when one’s back is to the wall and there is nothing else left to depend upon. The fact that it’s not the words of Jesus talking about love that are evoked here really shows the state of their minds.

So of course, on the Islamic side, the word jihad has to be used. On a very deep level, I think the elements for conflict in civilization are still very much in existence.

We may be seeing the revival of a Dostoevsky-style world. What I mean is that, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, he gave us all the patterns for the terrorism we’ve witnessed and for revolutionaries in general. And what’s impressive to me is that at the beginning of his work, Dostoevsky quotes an episode about Jesus from the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament.

It really makes me wonder what the literature of the twentieth century was all about. Twentieth-century literature has always been referred to as having transcended the Dostoevsky-style literary world, but the recent terror attacks are like a declaration that this idea is now invalid.

MIYAZAKI: Up until now, I also thought the Dostoevsky-style era was over. But then it was as if I suddenly had my feet swept out from under me, for everything started to come undone in random ways. It made me realize that in reality nothing is really over after all. We are still in an era of great convulsions. I really feel that this weird and ridiculous monstrosity, what I’d call a mass consumption civilization, has started thrashing about in its death throes. Imagine the tens of thousands of people who were all gathered together in those twin giant towers, tapping on keyboards, all to make money. That seems to me an even weirder style of civilization. So when people tell me we have to “protect” that sort of civilization, my question is “What is civilization?” We’re all up to our necks in it and enjoying the benefits of it, but to my way of thinking that doesn’t mean Bin Laden doesn’t have a point. But of course, because we can’t allow terrorism, we quickly get all wrapped up in very tricky and complicated emotions. So sometimes I think that we ought to let Bush and Bin Laden just slug it out together in a fistfight and settle matters between themselves. [laughs]

YAMAORI: I don’t necessarily disagree with your feelings, but don’t you think there’s also a sense that we should “repay a debt” to America? In the postwar period, because of the US-Japan security alliance, we were protected by America’s nuclear umbrella and enjoyed fifty years of peace. And we were also able to achieve economic prosperity. On top of that, we always idolized postwar American culture, especially Hollywood films, and they gave us hope and dreams. Since I remember this, I personally feel beholden to America. I feel this on the basic level of humanity and human empathy.

Still, as you say, we are left with the problems this modern civilization has created. And if so, then even while feeling indebted to America, it seems to me that the Japanese people might be able to play a role as some sort of mediator.

MIYAZAKI: I don’t feel very beholden to America. Of course, I’m not going around mouthing simplistic anti-American slogans like hanbei kyūkoku, or “Oppose America for National Salvation,” [laughs] but I just don’t seem to like American culture.

That aside, when I think about a role Japan might play, what does occur to me is Poland’s Jaruzelski. He was the last president of Poland, when Walesa was active with Solidarity. And I think he was a great man because he didn’t cause any fatalities when repressing Solidarity. One person died in an accident, but there was never any bloodbath. And at the same time, he was able to keep demonstrating an attitude to the Soviets of “Hey, we’ll take care of this ourselves,” and as a result the Soviet Union didn’t intervene in Poland. In other words, Jaruzelski pretended to be repressing Solidarity while he was really restraining the Soviets. I think he’s the man most responsible for the fact that the Soviets did not intervene.

Now, I know that Jaruzelski won’t be commemorated as a hero with monuments, and that he wasn’t very cool looking, but he was the type of man who could bear the brunt of criticism while navigating a crisis. And it seems to me that the world today needs more people like him.

YAMAORI: That makes me think of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon’s forces were the equivalent of today’s multinational coalition forces, and they really pushed the Russian forces of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov into a corner. Kutuzov was forced to retreat in silence. He kept retreating, without fighting, and even abandoned Moscow. Even when Moscow was burning, he forced himself to keep retreating. But then it started snowing. And in winter he turned around and completely routed Napoleon’s armies.

Tolstoy, in his novel War and Peace, says that Kutuzov paid closer attention than anyone else to the sounds and signs of his era and that he listened to the voices of the people. I think that Japan and the world really need leaders like that today.

MIYAZAKI: What you say is certainly true for smaller countries. And Japan is, after all, a small country. We lost a military war and also an economic war, so it’s time for us to wake up from our bad dream and live within our means.

In that sense, when I read the newspapers recently what I find the oddest thing is that they feature stories that, on one hand, proclaim that “civilization will come to an end in fifty years,” or “the earth cannot survive.” On the other hand, they also feature stories proclaiming that “the economy will recover in about two years.” Now, when the world’s going to end in fifty years, it seems ridiculous to talk about having an economic recovery in two, but business reporters only look at business statistics in the economy, and political reporters only look at the political situation. Meanwhile, local news reporters are telling us to “engage in recycling to save the earth.”

“Eating” is a big theme

YAMAORI: I think that now, rather than talk about the rise and fall of civilizations in fifty or one hundred year intervals, it would be better for us to think in spans of five hundred or a thousand years. We could learn far more that way.

For example, if you take the area around the Afghanistan of today and rewind history about two thousand years, you find that’s when Gandhāra art7 really flourished. That’s where they had the great Buddhas of Bamiyan and where, in the first and second centuries, Buddhist statues were first created. The people in that area were able to create such amazing things because of the fusion of three civilizations—the Indian empire from the south, the Greek and Roman empires from the west, and the Chinese empire.

We have to teach younger generations that civilizations also experience phases and that we ourselves have to be more aware of them. On the one hand, as you said, our modern civilization might not last another fifty years. In fact, even I sometimes feel like we’re reaching an end-of-times moment. But at the same time, I don’t think that our future will necessarily be completely bleak either.

MIYAZAKI: Actually, the future may indeed be bleak, at least in the normal sense of the word. For example, people are always wondering if the population on Earth will grow to 10 billion or not, but in my case, given my personality, I always feel like saying, “No, it won’t, and on the contrary, it’ll probably suddenly plummet to about 200 million.” [laughs] That statement aside, though, we don’t even know what’s going to happen in the very short span of the three years leading up to 2004. In the film business, we’re always wondering what sort of films we should be making going forward, but by then, if we’re lucky enough to be able to keep making films, that may be a nearly impossible question to answer.

YAMAORI: Do you think you might want to tackle the issue of hunger?

MIYAZAKI: I think I probably would. And not only hunger. “Eating” could also be a big theme. For example, with all the recent uproar about mad cow disease, I’ve always thought that someone in the world of journalism would say, “I feel so sorry for the cows; let’s all take this occasion to stop killing and eating them.” But there hasn’t been a single such person. The other day, on TV, I saw pictures of pigs with mad swine disease in Malaysia being slaughtered. Since they couldn’t kill them individually, they had dug a huge hole and were just pushing the pigs into the hole. And the poor pigs were alive. I don’t care what people say about pigs just being “animals”; those who engage in this sort of thing are doomed to destruction. Even Buddha wouldn’t tolerate it.

YAMAORI: It’s not exactly clear why eating beef became taboo in India, but trying to find the answer to that question would be like trying to uncover the basic character of Indian civilization. For example, some people say the high rate of Alzheimer’s in the United States might be related to mad cow disease. If that’s the case, if we use Indian civilization as a mirror, it might be a sign of America’s impending demise.

MIYAZAKI: Well, before making all sorts of comments about the nutritional aspects of eating meat, if we don’t really need to eat cows, it seems like this presents us with a good opportunity to talk about quitting. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, just that if we don’t need to eat them, we should be able to talk about stopping. In my case, since I’d really hate to give up the fish base used in miso soup, even if I could stop eating beef, I’d still have to keep eating my fish. [laughs] So I could never be a true vegetarian.

Of course, I know I’m a bundle of contradictions, so when I see tuna being hauled in on a line I think, “Wow, humans are terrible,” but when someone offers me tuna sashimi, I of course eat it and it tastes delicious.

YAMAORI: Either way, in the future we’ll probably see more and more problems like hunger, AIDS, and mad cow disease appear in greater frequency and concentration. And then the question is what sort of animation you’ll be making, Miyazaki-san.

MIYAZAKI: That’s an interesting question. But perhaps I shouldn’t use the word “interesting.” [laughs] I’ve always been attached to the idea that our little studio should be a group of people who continue to make quality films, and as a result I’ve always been running about in complete confusion when actually making them. So for me, if the summer of 2004 is my last chance, and if I think that nothing after that matters, it’s like a huge load off my shoulders.

YAMAORI: That’s it. You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve always thought that the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark is fundamental to Western civilization. Basically, the idea that when a giant flood threatens the earth only a select few people survive—well, it’s a survival strategy. And all subsequent survival theories stem from that.

In contrast, in Buddhism or in the philosophies of Laozi and Zhuangzi, the idea is that if a catastrophe is going to occur and kill so many people, we might as well all die. It’s not a survival strategy but a theory of the transience of life. And at some point in time, we’ll all probably be forced to choose between these two theories—between a theory of survival and a theory of transience. It’d be going too far to presume that, when disaster strikes, our current civilization would be totally destroyed and there would be nothing we could do about it. But if we’re at least mentally prepared for that possibility, we can go on living in the belief that something good might also happen. That way, if a catastrophe occurs, well, it just occurs, and humans will probably somehow manage to keep on going.

A mindset of walking on the ground and being observant

YAMAORI: Up until now, compared to the rest of the world, Japan has existed in the midst of an extremely precarious natural environment. As a result, I think we’ve also created a civilization that can respond in an extremely flexible way to the scarier parts of nature. But recently, it seems to me, we’ve largely lost this sort of attitude or readiness.

MIYAZAKI: I believe it was the anatomist Takeshi Yōrō who once noted that when people directly witness the aftereffects of an earthquake, they’re inclined to exclaim, “Who could do such a thing?!” But someone who deals with nature and has had the experience of slaving to create rice paddies, and then often seen them destroyed overnight, is unlikely to think that way. According to Yōrō-san, city folk are always inclined to assume there’s some guilty entity behind it all.

And speaking of cities, several years back I had the opportunity to ride on an airship. After taking off from Okegawa City in Saitama Prefecture, we traveled to the suburbs of Tokyo and back. It took two hours, and we flew at an altitude of only about three hundred meters, and from that height it looks like buildings all the way to the horizon. There’s no greenery visible at all. Whenever I thought, “Hmm, look, that’s interesting, there’s some vacant lots there,” it was usually a graveyard. [laughs] In other words, it showed me how much humans have destroyed nature, how much of the original scenery has been lost, how the land has been plotted down to the centimeter level, and how so many people are living packed together. When I imagined the web of electrical power and water mains and sewage pipes—the “comforts of civilization”—that weave their way through all this, everything somehow seemed indescribably hopeless to me.

YAMAORI: But the impression you get differs according to your altitude. I’ve seen some aerial photography taken of the Japanese archipelago from north to south at an altitude of three thousand meters, and from that height all you can see is forests and mountains. You can’t see any large plains at all. It makes you realize how in the Japanese islands, and in Japan, we really are a society of forests and of mountains. Yet if you were to descend to one thousand meters, then you probably would see the plains. And those would represent our agricultural society. Then, if you descended even further, to the three hundred meter altitude at which you flew, Miyazaki-san, you’d see only homes and industrial areas.

MIYAZAKI: Think of all the registries for property titles. If the originals ever went up in smoke, I’m sure it’d feel awfully good. No one would know who owns what land anymore, silly squabbles involving warped greed would probably end, and everyone would feel better.

YAMAORI: Then we could just go back to the world of mountain spirits … [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Whenever I come back to Japan from America on a jet, and we approach Narita airport, I always think, “Ah, what a beautiful country this is,” but then as our altitude decreases I start to think, “This is an awful place …” [laughs] I think what we’re saying here, conversely, is that if you want to know about the real state of things, you shouldn’t observe them from too high up. I feel the same way when I look at plans for gardens or houses, because the design perspective is always that of God; they’re not looking at the world from the eye level of a human on the ground. In my case, if I could just look at the paths I walk along in my favorite spots from fifty meters up, I’d be happy. Once we start thinking about life from an altitude of ten thousand, or even three thousand meters, it’s too much.

YAMAORI: It’s really important to keep the mindset of walking on the ground and being observant, isn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: Yes, it is. And as far as speed is concerned, why, normal walking speed is just fine for me. Westerners may talk about how they “want to break the sound barrier in a car,” and actually try to do so, but I frankly don’t get it. I don’t understand how anyone could be motivated by something like that.

YAMAORI: Whenever I go to India I try gradually to cover the paths that Gautama Buddha walked, using a car a bit and walking. It’s about five hundred kilometers from Lumbini to the mid-Ganges region. But it seemed to me that to understand Buddhism, it would be important to walk this same five hundred kilometers just as the living Buddha did. Sometime after that I went to Israel and traveled by bus over the path that Jesus walked from Nazareth to Jerusalem. It’s about one hundred and fifty kilometers. It seemed to me that this was the minimum distance—the one hundred and fifty kilometers of Jesus and the five hundred kilometers of Buddha—that one needed to walk to understand the essence of both Christianity and Buddhism.

People today worry about global warming and desertification, but messages crystallizing the wisdom of humanity have often come out of the desert. It’s of course true of Jesus, but the area where Buddha lived, between northern India and central Nepal, is also quite dry, and when traveling there it feels like you’re surrounded by desert. Even Confucius traveled and walked around the desert areas of China. It seems to me that truly deep philosophies rarely emerge from heavily forested regions, or times.

We need a worldview resembling a religion of all things and all life

YAMAORI: From ancient times, the Japanese archipelago has been covered in greenery, so great thinkers—who could consider things in a radical new way—have never appeared here. But of course you might also say that we’ve always been a very lucky people.

MIYAZAKI: If Jesus and Buddha were men of the desert, it seems to me that Japanese are true natives, or aborigines, in the sense that we’re really people of the land. We’re natives of islands with an amazing abundance of greenery on the edge of East Asia. I personally like the aboriginal aspect of Japanese, and when I see ancient festivals being performed, I hardly notice any Confucian influence. And while we may have superficially been influenced by Buddhism, if you look at a variety of Shinto rituals, it seems to me that things really haven’t changed much from ancient times. And Japanese gods are unlike the gods of desert cultures, for we don’t seem to have any that could save our souls.

The most amusing example of this is the vows people make nowadays to the gods in a Shinto wedding ceremony. I’m sure it’s tough on the traditional gods themselves. They’d understand it if the vows were, in exchange for a happy lifetime marriage, to repair the thatch roof on the Shinto shrine or to donate a torii gate. I’m sure the gods of Japan are used to that sort of thing. But if the vow were just “to be married for life,” they’d probably say, “Well, hey, work on that by yourselves.” [laughs]

YAMAORI: Right. That’s the sort of vow you make to a god in a monotheistic religion. And in that sense Japanese spirits are not really 100 percent gods. Japanese spirits really consist of more than half-human elements.

MIYAZAKI: They say Japan’s polytheistic, and it’s true that we do have a lot of gods or spirits, but to me Japanese polytheism still seems totally different from that of Hinduism.

YAMAORI: It’s probably better to call Japan “pantheistic.” I personally call it “a religion of all things and all life.” And five or ten thousand years ago, people all over the world probably believed in this same religion.

MIYAZAKI: Come to think of it, that does make sense. Once, when I was breaking up our ofuro bathtub to exchange it for a new one, the kids said they “felt sorry for it,” so I felt obliged to put them in the bath and take a photo. A farewell photo of the bath. I bet Japanese are one of the few peoples left on earth who would feel this way. The question is whether this has changed along with recent changes in our lifestyle or whether it remains deeply rooted as an archetype. I do hope it remains.

YAMAORI: In your works, Miyazaki-san, you depict nature, animals, yokai, ghosts, and of course humans all as living beings. So I see the world you depict as a religion of all things and all life.

Up until now, in every era and in every culture, different civilizations have tried to dress up this “religion of all things and all life” in a variety of costumes and tried to add all sorts of new forms to it. But to tell the truth, I suspect that if these civilizations ever completely forgot their original worldview, they would wither on the vine.

MIYAZAKI: Well, one thing we can say is that America right now has absolutely none of that original worldview.

YAMAORI: Right, because whether it’s the Taliban or Bin Laden, America will pursue them to the ends of the earth and destroy them. And with that kind of fixation, we’ll never see empathy for the weak nor any idea of forgiveness emerge either.

MIYAZAKI: That’s why, as an East Asian aboriginal, it makes me want to have Bush and Bin Laden both duke it out together to settle affairs. They’re both monotheists, but here in the Japanese archipelago our way of thinking has been that our gods don’t get angry at us; on the contrary, we put our gods in the bath to make ’em healthy again. So that’s the level at which I’d like to see Bush and Bin Laden resolve things. You don’t suppose we could get the government of Japan to propose this? [laughs]

Tetsuo Yamaori Born 1931 in San Francisco, California, United States. Raised in Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture. Scholar of religion. Professor emeritus at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Professor emeritus at the National Museum of Japanese History. Graduate of Tōhoku University’s Literature Department, Indian Philosophy section. Withdrew from the same university after accumulating credits required for a doctorate in the literature department. Past positions include associate professor at Tōhoku University and the National Museum of Japanese History, president of Hakuhō Women’s College, president of the Kyoto University of Art and Design Graduate School, and director of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. In 2002, he received the Tetsurō Watsuji Culture Award for Aiyoku no seishinshi (A Spiritual History of Romantic Desire, Shōgakukan). His publications include Rei to niku (Spirit and Flesh, Kodansha gakujutsu bunko), Nihonjin no shūkyōkankaku (Japanese Religious Sensibilities, NHK Library), Shi no minzokugaku, nihonjin no shiseikan to sōsōgirei (Ethnology of Death: Japanese Views of Life and Death and Funerary Rites, Iwanami gendai bunko), Shinran wo yomu (Reading Shinran, Iwanami Shinsho); and numerous others.

So, Where Do We Go from Here?
An Interview with the Winner of the 2001 Kinema Junpō Best Ten, Reader’s Choice for Best Japanese Film Director

Kinema Junpō (Kinema Junpōsha). Late February 2002 issue

It’s truly an honor to be selected. In accepting this award, all I can say is thank you, but as a film director, I actually don’t feel very comfortable with my own face getting so much exposure.

Films do not get made without a director. But it’s also the sort of work that doesn’t go anywhere with just a director, no matter how hard he tries. The director’s role is to stand on the bridge and turn the ship’s rudder in the direction of an invisible destination beyond the horizon. Since there are no charts available, the director must rely on supposition. Giving directions to “Head that way!” he must not give in to his own insecurities. If the staff were to engage in debates and then take a vote on the proper direction to proceed, the voyage would be meaningless, and the only thing one could say about it would be that the crew had partaken of meals together while the ship remained afloat. For the ship would eventually sink.

The ship—or in this case the film studio—is a living thing, so it is important to keep an eye on everything from the condition of the ship’s hull to its speed and the direction of the wind, and of course to pay close attention to the quality of the food provided to the crew. But even if the ship does arrive safely at some new island, the captain must never assume all the credit. Without an owner, a ship cannot even leave port. And it also needs a capable navigator, an engineer, and a boatswain. It even needs someone to tally the figures. And the crew must all be basically healthy, able-bodied workers. Even if they differ in individual abilities, they must be able to work together as a group or they won’t be effective.

It doesn’t matter if the ship is brand new or if it is an old crate, but it must always be properly maintained.

It’s hard to do things right these days

It’s hard to do things right these days. To do your work right, to perform your duties, to stay awake on your shift no matter how sleepy you are—in our era, we have become a people who are rarely capable of doing these things properly.

I know I’m skipping ahead a bit here, but the point is that even Japan has entered an era when it’s difficult for us to create feature-length animated films.

There are many young people in France, for example, who would also like to make animated feature films, but they probably can’t. It’s not just an issue of cost and labor conditions, but also because they may often feel that so much centralization of power, or obeying the captain’s orders, is a negation of their own individualism. And this trend may be particularly noticeable among people who want to create animation or draw manga.

In the 1950s, some very good animated feature films were made in the Soviet Union, but after the death of Stalin, the criticism of him, and the thawing that followed, artists broke into groups of individuals, and it subsequently became impossible to create feature-length works. But one could say, I suppose, that this also made it possible for some true individual artists, such as Yuri Norstein, to appear.

The point is that Japan, too, has now finally arrived at the same place.

Even more serious problems than our generation faced

There are lots of animation directors in Japan. And there are still plenty of people working in animation. But I don’t see their faces. I haven’t seen any new people since Hideaki Anno appeared. His animation could be called both self-deprecating and honest in the deconstructive style that it employs, but I don’t see it continuing. He has, in other words, managed to create the stylistic equivalent of a dead-end street. And up-and-coming directors, in promoting a historical relativization of civilization, of self, and even of youth, while fully capable of moving beyond this, have nonetheless run into an even more difficult issue than my generation ever did, for they have gathered staff members about them who are ever more falling into the trap of ego and increasing isolation.

To make a film requires a type of toughness. Anyone can create animation if all that is required is length, but that would hardly result in something worthy of the time invested and sacrifice made for the inhuman work we call “feature-length animation.” So my personal feeling is, therefore, that a short and sweet era has ended.

Where do we go from here? As for me, I intend to use the remaining time allotted me to continue walking forward.

This Is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make

Hayao Miyazaki, Executive Director of the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
Pamphlet titled “The Ghibli Museum of Mitaka; In anticipation of the opening of Mitaka City Animation Museum,” February 25, 2002

A museum that is interesting and relaxes the soul

A museum where much can be discovered

A museum based on a clear and consistent philosophy

A museum where those seeking enjoyment can enjoy,

those seeking to ponder can ponder, and those seeking to feel can feel

A museum that makes you feel more enriched

when you leave than when you entered!

To make such a museum, the building must be …

Put together as if it were a film

Not arrogant, magnificent,

flamboyant, or suffocating

Quality space where people can feel at home,

especially when it’s not crowded

A building that has a warm feel and touch

A building where the breeze

and sunlight can freely flow through

The museum must be run in such a way that …

Small children are treated as if they were grown-ups

The handicapped are accommodated as much as possible

The staff can be confident and proud of their work

Visitors are not controlled with

predetermined courses and fixed directions

It is suffused with ideas and new challenges

so that the exhibits do not get dusty or old,

and investments are made to realize that goal

The displays will be …

Not only for the benefit of people who are already fans of Studio Ghibli

Not a procession of artwork from past Ghibli films

as if it were “a museum of the past”

A place where visitors can enjoy by just looking,

can understand the artists’ spirits,

and can gain new insights into animation

Original works and pictures will be made to be exhibited at the museum

A projection room and an exhibit room will be made

showing movement and life

(Original short films will be produced to be released in the museum!)

Ghibli’s past films will be probed for

understanding at a deeper level

The café will be …

An important place for relaxation and enjoyment

A place that doesn’t underestimate

the difficulties of running a museum café

A good café with a style all its own

where running a café is taken seriously and done right

The museum shop will be …

Well prepared and well presented

for the sake of the visitors and running the museum

Not a bargain shop that attaches importance only to the number of sales

A shop that continues to strive to be a better shop

Where original items made

only for the museum are found

The museum’s relation to the park is …

Not just about caring for the plants and surrounding greenery

but also planning for how things can improve ten years into the future

Seeking a way of being and running the museum

so that the surrounding park will become even lusher and better,

which will in turn make the museum better as well!

This is what I expect the museum to be,

and therefore I will find a way to do it

This is the kind of museum I don’t want to make!

A pretentious museum

An arrogant museum

A museum that treats its contents

as if they were more important than people

A museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant

Hayao Miyazaki
Executive Director
Ghibli Museum, Mitaka

Children Have a Future That Transcends “Imagination”

Talk reproduced in the January 2002 issue of Gekkan Φ Fai (Monthly Φ Phi) (Fuji Research Institute)

We opened the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka last year (2001) in October. We call it an art museum, but only because we had to include the word “museum” in order to make it a foundation. In reality, I thought we would be better off calling it an “exhibition” or a “show-and-tell” hall. In this era, rather than using pompous expressions about how good the museum would be for children and so forth, I just wanted to create a space—a space where we could show things to children that might make them exclaim “Wow! That’s cool” and accept the images as they are.

In the beginning, the idea was to build a hill, put a museum inside it, and then create an entrance at its base; the exit would be on the top of the hill, and parents and children could eat bento box lunches there or simply dash down the hill. But we ran into a lot of restrictions, and what you see is therefore only a tenth of what we had originally planned. Still, we tried to be creative because we wanted to design a space where children could feel a sense of relief, be excited and feel like throwing off their inhibitions, and where the local people could enjoy it as well.

We weren’t content to just line up a bunch of figurines or dolls based on popular characters, or to greedily tempt people with rows of video monitors constantly replaying scenes from our films either. We felt that we needed to create free spaces for children, where there might be something in the shadows, or places to secretly hide and weep or plot mischief—if we didn’t, the kids would be bored. I definitely didn’t want a space brightly lit throughout, where you could too easily see everything.

“Things” are created through an accumulation of labor

When you enter through the museum doors, you quickly see a staircase that descends right in front of you. Coming from the bright park outside, most people are at first a bit reluctant to enter a dark, virtual space. But we tried, using this short distance, to create a stairway that would make people think they are about to enter a slightly strange and mysterious place. On the first basement floor, there is the “Saturn Theater.” This is a small theater, and it’s where we show original Ghibli animation that can only be seen at the museum. We’re currently showing a work entitled “Kujiratori” (Whale Hunt), and in January of this year we’ll start screening “Koro no daisanpo” (Koro’s Big Day Out). We’re still working on “Mei and the Baby Catbus” and plan to show it in the fall.

Across from the main hall, opposite the Saturn Theater, we have what we call “the room where things start to move.” A variety of gadgets and contraptions displayed here illustrate the principles of filmmaking, including a zoetrope, which was one of the first moving-picture devices. So it’s all very low tech, but this has a wonderful effect. When the exhibit we call the “rising sea currents” first began moving, even the staffers that had created it were in awe.

Another example is “Bouncing Totoro.” On a turntable about two meters in diameter, we’ve recreated three-dimensional models of the characters that appear in My Neighbor Totoro. When the turntable is rotated and a strobe light is shined on it, Totoro appears to hop and the Catbus runs about. The modelers did a fabulous job, and the sculpts of the Catbus legs, for example, are so good that we would be proud to exhibit them anywhere in the world.

I love this space, especially because the people who created the various mechanisms and gadgets on display were so generous with their time and innovations. It’s because we still have people who can do this sort of work that I’m not ready to give up on Japan yet.

In the same room there’s also a “panorama box.” It just sits there with no explanatory signs or anything accompanying it, and when you look at it, nothing seems to move at all. When adults take a brief peek at it, they usually comment that it looks like the “bottom of the ocean.” But when children take a look at it, they usually change their perspective and start exclaiming things like “Wow, there’s a demon!” and then they start to find all sorts of hidden things all over the place. When I hear some kids say they’re exhausted from staring so long at this undersea scene, I’m really happy, and I feel like we “really did it.” [laughs]

We also created a fake window in the bathroom with a natural scene painted on it. The interesting thing is that some people say that it’s “fabulous,” and others don’t even notice at all. On the other hand, it’s not always just adults who look at the panorama box, think it just shows the sea bottom, and then pass on by. Sometimes children do too. In other words, there are some children who are already “adults,” while there are also some adults who are still “children.”

In the Special Exhibit hall on the first floor, we are currently showing materials used in the making of Spirited Away, including all the drawings. We wanted to convey to young people the fact that animation relies on human effort and requires a huge amount of labor to create. At Studio Ghibli we do use computers, but our animation is still largely something physical, drawn by hand. So the idea was to have people realize this by showing the huge quantity of material we use. I don’t mean some vague concept of “information.” I mean to get them to understand that animation is a very concrete and human sort of process. Sometimes high school students come to the museum and find themselves amazed, and when that happens, frankly, it makes me very happy.

To understand this exhibit, people have to really think for themselves and stretch a bit. We’re aiming a bit high here. We didn’t want to aim too low by just pandering to the needs of the visitors. This is the way we’ve always created animation at Ghibli.

On the same floor, we also have a mock-up of a Ghibli animation studio, as well as a space showing “Where Films Are Born.” It’s a replica of our work environment, and we made it in the hope that more young people would get a taste of what the studio environment is like and even be inspired to create animation in the future.

We have all sorts of equipment on this exhibit floor, and we knew that children always want to touch everything and move it about. But we were still surprised by how true this is. Anything they can turn, they turn, and if there’s a box they’ll always try to open it. So anything that might easily break when turned we specially designed so that it wouldn’t break. For boxes, since kids are always going to open them, we deliberately put various surprise “treasures” inside. But only the kids who open the boxes can see them. We’ve tried to implement the same concept not just in this particular area but throughout the museum.

We’re thinking about prohibiting photography throughout the museum. The reason is because parents always want to take souvenir photos. Even when they could let their children freely run about the museum, they’re always telling them to go “Stand over there!” for photos. Yet children want to make the most of the present, so they easily get irritated with this sort of thing. It’s really funny, the way parents are. They’re doing everything they can to keep recording “happy memories” for the future. But at the museum we need to help liberate children from such parents.

In the 21st century, humanity has to think about the next civilization

Children have the same problems adults have. Parents, who have a worry fit whenever their children declare they won’t go to school, just keep saying they want their children to go to school and study because they want to cover up for their own insecurities. They neglect to have their children do any of the chores they should be doing, and they’re only happy when the kids are studying. They also think that buying all sorts of “things” for their children is a form of love, and we can see the results of that all around us.

Children today are frail, good, and easily hurt. They’re proud, yet we can see that they’re unable to defend themselves by putting on emotional masks. They’re extremely sensitive, to the point where they are emotionally vulnerable. When still small, through play and a variety of other channels, they’ve learned to put up defensive walls to protect themselves. But they haven’t really had enough time to do so properly. It’s both ironic and tragic that today’s children have to be living in such a tumultuous era.

I fully understand and agree with the desire to have children educated in a relaxed way, in a way that gives them room to grow. On the other hand, I also understand the need for a good education in the sciences and the desire of parents to tell their children that if they don’t study hard and work hard there will be terrible consequences to pay. But these two positions don’t entirely mesh. I think we have to give children back the energy that they once used to have, to give them the energy that once gave them strength and allowed them to stand up to a little adversity.

The current reality in Japan is the result of a people having spent decades pursuing material well-being. But it’s not just the Japanese people who have done this. Our present world is the result of all sorts of people trying to create a society where people don’t kill each other and where there is no more hunger. The question is what we do about this. We just have to start without a good idea in mind. Children will respect adults who start to try to take action on a variety of fronts, even if they don’t have a clear idea of how to get the economy back on track in three years or how to stop global warming. The problem we’re forced to confront now is that there are no such adults doing this.

In the twenty-first century, we’ll have to rethink human history in the context of cycles of the earth and the universe and reconsider what sort of civilization we’ll need for the long term. Of course, if you ask me what to do, the only thing I can think of is that, rather than talk about fancy goals, we should start by doing what we can do, even if it means just cleaning up the rivers in our community. It seems like a far more serious and responsible approach to me than just stewing in irritation and blaming others.

I plan to release my next film in the summer of 2004. I have no idea what sort of era we’ll be living in then or what people will be thinking. But we have to make our films in that context. It will probably be my last chance to create animation. I will probably be forced to release my film at a time when truly terrible things are occurring in the world of children. And I am sure I will be questioned then about whether I am really facing those issues. All the work I have done up until now and all the high-and-mighty-sounding things I have said will probably be put to the test in the summer of 2004. I will have to demonstrate what I believe with my film. Because that is the only thing that truly connects me to the world.

Nothing Makes Me Happier Than Watching Children Enjoy Themselves

Three months after the opening of the Ghibli Museum

Graph Mitaka, vol.14, published by Mitaka City, March 2002

I have learned the obvious from running a museum: I’ve learned how hard the service industry is and that, unlike making a film (where work ends when we finish the film), a museum’s work starts on opening day. And this has been quite a shock. I’m a bit of a scatterbrain, so I tend to get involved in things that seem like they might be interesting only to wind up in these sorts of situations.

I do not believe that our art museum should be a place that just imparts meaning to old things by arranging them for display. Instead, I believe it should be a place that hints at our civilization’s future and inspires people. For that to happen, it must not be a place run by a subcontracting organization that just tries to showcase Ghibli films. We have to keep creating, and creation is very hard work.

Museum exhibits are creative works, as are films. Yet we require something that transcends the work of traditional curators, for they have tended to concentrate on evaluating what has come before us and refreshing our understanding of it. In our case, we must also pool our wisdom and work hard. And unless we succeed in attracting young people who have skills and find meaning in our work, it won’t even matter whether we have good attendance, or even whether the visitors enjoyed the museum.

Going forward, we won’t stop creating the films we show in the museum. We won’t produce wilted and withered works, nor will we produce any boring works that might be labeled too “wholesome” or “conscientious.” The latter types are the easiest, because if we create works that are “happy and healthy” people will like them even if they aren’t good. But we want to continue to create something different—real films that are bold and liberated from the constraints of the ordinary TV and theatrical feature markets. But of course, to create one under-fifteen-minute-long Ghibli short takes 300 million yen, and some people wonder why. [laughs] We would of course prefer to have a production budget of 100 million yen and sponsors who put up money but don’t complain, but in this era they unfortunately don’t exist. That’s why we have to augment our budget with revenues from the museum shop and get by on our own talents.

Gramma’s shortcake

The Ghibli Museum café was developed by a housewife who’s raising four children. We had her create what she would consider the ideal café. The shortcake served there is just as grandmother might have made it—laden with organically grown and sun-kissed strawberries, using real cream and flour and soft, unrefined brown sugar—and it’s not only very filling and rewarding, but also very popular. I supported all this, of course, but it costs a lot to make. Still, this is the sort of thing which, if we didn’t try hard to preserve the spirit of the person who produced the shortcake and maintain its quality, after a few years it would become boring. So even though all the ingredients are expensive, the idea is to keep on making the shortcake and not turn it into mere merchandise, as if that were the most normal thing in the world.

There’s a big difference in having visitors to the museum wind up at the café at the end of their tour, thinking upon leaving that, “Wow, that was a great café,” or thinking that it was just “par for the course.” So we consider the café to be one of the important exhibits in the museum.

The way things are exhibited in the museum is one of our most important and difficult challenges. We want the museum to be something that will be supported and survive even if Studio Ghibli goes out of business. To make that possible, we need to create a place where we can properly broadcast our ideas and propose new things. It’s all right for the museum to have a nostalgic component, but we must also make it a place to showcase our premonitions and include provocative new ideas.

And of course I’m also dreaming of the day when people say they wound up becoming animators because of a visit to the Ghibli Museum.

A starting point for curiosity

The exhibit on the first floor of the museum, called “Where a Film Is Born,” is the sort of room I dreamed about as a boy. It contains all sorts of strange and eccentric things, things that no one else has. It’s a room, but it’s also derived from a room in my brain, so it has to be a room with lots of hidden stuff, and lots of stuff of which even I am unaware. Because films are born from an accumulation of junk like this. Because films are born from an accumulation of things that go back long before us, before our parents, grandfathers, and even great-grandparents.

So the illustrations on the walls should have other illustrations pasted on top of them; that’s the way it has to be. It’s a room I see as never completed and as dying unless we are constantly adding and subtracting things.

There are only a few of my personal possessions on display in this space, some that I’ve bought and collected, some that I have been given, and some that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. [laughs] When I ask who brought some of them in, no one will tell me. On the other hand, there are also things that disappear day by day. Children probably grab some of the chocolate coins in the treasure chests, but that’s okay. Ideally, we’d like to make it so that they could physically play with every single thing in the space, but we’re unfortunately not in a position to make it quite that open yet.

At Studio Ghibli, we don’t make our films with long banks of computers and everything lined up in a systematic and neat order. Our films are created by “humans,” who are surrounded by physical “things,” and the finished films are also physical “things.” I know that some people say film, as a communications medium, is “information,” but we want our visitors to know that our films are not “information.” Our films are physical “things.”

In conjunction with that, the visual footage we exhibit in the museum is not in digital or video format. Instead, we deliberately use film. And that’s because even children can intuitively understand how film is projected. They can understand it, and they’re interested in it. But if they’re just interested in the images themselves I fear they will never be inspired to become creators and will miss something important. That’s why I think it’s important for people to start by getting interested in things like pinhole cameras and cyanotype images.

No photography is allowed in the museum

We had to use the word “museum” when we named our facility, but we were really aiming at something more akin to an “exhibition” or “show and tell” hall. In terms of structure and space, we wanted to create something that would make people want more, something that was not just quiet and perfectly ordered and clean. I frankly don’t like most art museums, especially the kind that treat a few paintings with such importance and just arrange them on walls for display.

We’ve prohibited photography in the museum. We had to do so. It’s because, unfortunately, too many people come just to take photos. While they’re in the museum, instead of enjoying it, they’re always milling about, trying to shoot pictures, and this is especially true of most of the adults. We found that the adults are always telling the children to “hey, move over” so they can get a good shot at something or putting kids on the Catbus just to photograph them, and that won’t do, because we think the children should be liberated from their parents’ cameras. For children, being photographed wherever they go is just a meaningless ceremony, and the parents are the only ones who suffer from the delusion that this is a sign of their affection for their kids. So we don’t allow visitors to use any still or video cameras inside the museum because it’s stupid. We also do this because we want our visitors to view the museum with their own eyes and to use their time in the museum more effectively.

But of course there are some people who will never see anything in the museum even if their cameras are confiscated. For such adults, my policy is that those who are beyond redemption are simply beyond redemption. For children, there is always hope. Some children may quickly grow into boring adults, but new children will always appear. There are always children.

We’ve recently seen an increase in the ratio of children coming; it may cause our income to plummet, but it personally makes me very happy. [laughs]

A nation that has failed at child rearing

Children don’t have enough real-world experience these days, and it’s a critical problem. It’s a bigger problem than all the economic chaos and other things that people like to talk about. Frankly, Japan has failed at rearing its own children. Parents have failed, and the children they have raised have become adults, and today we see, increasingly, that they don’t have a clue what to do.

Among my friends in their forties, several are of the Ultraman generation, and this problem seems to have become increasingly common among them. When television first came out in Japan, the people who made such an issue about its harmful nature eventually gave up. The people who said that reading manga was harmful also gave up. And the people who gave up worrying about these new forms of entertainment also learned a lesson. When video games came out, they feared that if they criticized the games as harmful they would be labeled as being behind the times, so despite their age they started playing video games themselves, and they became old guys with whom the younger generation could communicate. So from top to bottom of the age ladder, everyone and everything has progressively become stupider. Nowadays children who live in the countryside have even more time to play video games than those who live in the city, so both groups have essentially the same problems.

We need some sort of major reform. And it should start with educating people on how to become parents and then move to preschools, kindergartens, and even elementary schools. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology has been trying to create a more pressure-free educational system by loosening everything up, but all we get is loosened-up education. Some people want to study, so they should study. The problem is that we are also trying to force people who don’t want to study to study. Some people have the ability to learn from hands-on experience rather than from abstract thought, and there are a lot of things that only they can do. Right now, it’s plain to see that we are just smothering their talents. Believe me, there are lots of people who say they would rather have become craftsmen than artists.

I feel as though our whole approach to creating spaces for little children, not only inside the home but also in public—in fact our entire approach to building cities—may be completely wrong. And I believe it is a serious problem.

People talk about accessible and “barrier-free” environments, but when you’re raising children, there’s really no need to make the inside of the home completely flat in preparation for old age. It’s much better to have different levels or steps and to have a totally mixed-up design. It’s all related not only to our sense of balance, but to the working of our brains and the dexterity of our hands. And contrary to popular belief, young Japanese today are certainly not good with their hands. Frankly, they’re totally clumsy and dullards to boot. Compared with the rest of the world, the Japanese probably fall into the dullard camp. Even in terms of working with their hands, they’re steadily getting worse and worse.

Rather than teach children how to use computers as we do today, we should teach them how to use knives freely, to tie and untie knots, and to master the basics of what humans used to learn in the Stone Age. To be able to use fire means to be able to start a fire, to keep it burning, and to be able to put it out. Children should learn from experience how much is required to keep a fire burning and also how to know that the fire is really out when they try to put it out. I really wish they would teach these things in our elementary schools today.

Interacting physically with the world

It seems to me that we’re doing everything under the sun to make sure that children lose their sense of curiosity. We adults give them all sorts of things like television, animation, and manga—things they can passively lap up—and we call these things “industries.” But I’m against having them run rampant. I’m frankly embarrassed to read headlines in the business sections of newspapers today about cartoon films earning tens of billions of yen [laughs], or video game boxes selling in the millions.

We have to fundamentally change things, but we can’t do it all at once. Still, we have to start somewhere, so our hope is that this museum can help in some small way. It’s another reason we don’t have signs in the museum telling people which direction to go.

We frankly wanted to do much more with the museum, but even to build a wall at a slant involves all sorts of safety standards and manufacturers and regulations, so we found ourselves quite constrained. Why do we need special smoke dispersal devices over there when we can just create lots of escape exits? Why do we need special firewalls in areas where it doesn’t matter if something burns? We wanted to make the spiral staircase even narrower and even more clap-trap, because otherwise it would be boring to climb.

I am told that all those involved cooperated to the limits of their authority, but we were still never able to build things the way we really wanted. Whenever anything happened, there was always someone to screech, “Hey, who’s responsible for this?” so we kept going for the easy-to-pass approach. They’re trying to remove almost all elements of danger from this city. But I hardly think it means we’re going to be safer; on the contrary, everything will just become more unstable.

If our children were happy and healthy I wouldn’t worry, but they’re not. Individually, of course they’re all wonderful children. But the twenty-first century will be a tough time to be alive. Of course it’ll be a tough time for everyone around the world, but I don’t think our children have inherited enough drive and energy to confront the problems they are going to have to face. They have the capability, but they keep being raised so that they can’t exercise it. And once they reach twenty years old, it’s too late.

Lots of people now graduate from art school but can’t draw. Sometimes it’s because they’re too fixated on the manga they encountered as children. Sometimes they haven’t had enough interaction with the real world to gain new experiences and develop their own styles. It’s important, in the process of experiencing things, to physically interact with the world and learn about it. Not just to see things, but to touch them, to smell them, and to taste them. Even this table here has some sort of flavor, but of course I’m not about to lick it now—because I know, from having tried as a child, that it doesn’t taste very good.

Children stopped experiencing such things with the advent of the TV age. They think what they see on TV is reality. I have some foolish friends who are so proud of the fact that they’ve got their three-year-old grandchildren playing on computers and that they can draw some pictures, but there’s lots of time for children to learn how to use computers later. If we teach children how to use computers at such a young age and then delight in their computer prowess, they’ll just turn into useless humans.

Over at Okegawa, there’s a nursery school where they’ve created a playground with all sorts of bumps and unevenness. And because the children aren’t told what they can and can’t do all the time, they reportedly become really energetic in no time at all and start running around snot-nosed, having a great time. So does that mean that they’re going to turn into uncouth barbarians? I hardly think so, because when children are served mackerel and see others around them using chopsticks, why, it’s in the nature of children to quickly try to imitate them and learn to use chopsticks themselves; they certainly don’t have to be told every this and that thing.

I dream of a world after the collapse of our mass consumption civilization

I’m looking forward to seeing how much the current free market fad corrodes humanity. Economic activity is supposedly justified by demand. I hear talk about buying and selling the rights to pollute with carbon offsets, or venture capital companies manipulating genes to extend life. But it’s awfully strange when people feel justified in satisfying demand simply because it exists, or even thinking it’s their duty to help people who want to live forever, just because they exist.

If you ask me how many more years a civilization based on mass consumption can continue, well, some people may say fifty years, but I’m holding out hope for only thirty. There’ll be enormous turmoil, and all sorts of awful and stupid things will happen, including misery and disease and war, because that’s the history of the human race. It’ll be awful, but it will be all right in the end because we’ll at least see the end of a mass consumption civilization.

Of course, what I call a “mass consumption civilization” includes animation, so I too find myself in a dilemma with no solution. But that’s what living in this world is all about. When there’s no escape, I have no choice. I have to confront the era I live in and continue to make films. Planning film production requires taking into account the essence of our era and what today’s children are feeling (not what they want) in their lives.

I believe in the power of children

More than anything else, I love to see children enjoying themselves. I often tell people to bring not only their own kids to the Ghibli museum, but those of relatives and even kids in the neighborhood. As long as they pay the admission, the parents can just smoke cigarettes and loll about; the kids will be fine playing on their own. And once I see that the children are happy, then I find myself feeling happy.

It’s the same thing with films. When little children are enjoying themselves it reverberates throughout the entire building. When adults see children squealing in delight, you can also see their own faces relax. There’s nothing complicated about it. It’s moments like these that make adults feel ecstatic.

If we properly create this sort of time and these sorts of spaces for children, they have the power within themselves to become healthier and to become more positive and motivated. All we need to do is create a space for them where they can be free, so that they can recover their original spirits. If they think the world is interesting, then they will become more curious. And if the adults—who must create the space they need—tell them the things they need to know to become full humans, the children will understand.

Children are much, much better than adults. I know from experience that it’s almost impossible to motivate and energize old guys over fifty who are lolling about. Believe me, I haven’t given up on children, and I never will.

We Should Each Start Doing What We Can

Greenification is good, and everyone knows it

Midori no bokindayori (Report on fund-raising for greenery), National Land Afforestation Program, Spring 2002 issue

Including the time when we were making Princess Mononoke, I’ve been to Yakushima Island three or four times. Twenty years ago I also went to see the ancient and giant Jōmon sugi cryptomeria tree there.

The forest on Yakushima has a special, otherworldly mood to it, even where it seems a bit torn up. And every time I go there, I am impressed again with the power of greenery. I know some people find Yakushima’s evergreen forest to be dark and depressing, but I feel the opposite; I find myself thinking, “Hmm, this is so eerie, there must be something interesting here!” and being overjoyed. [laughs]

I truly hope we can preserve the unique environment that exists on Yakushima. And to do so, someone should charge those entering the mountains an entry fee. It would probably be best to have a reservation system also, limiting the number of people who can go to visit the actual Jōmon sugi.

I’m sometimes asked what it is about trees that I find so attractive. But it seems to me that even the question represents the height of irreverence. After all, our lives depend on trees, and we exist at their mercy. For example, I believe that we will one day pay a terrible price if people arrogantly and indiscriminately destroy forests, simply because they want “a more profitable use of the land.” In fact, we’re already paying the price.

Everyone knows what’s right or wrong. The question is whether we can do it or not. Everyone knows we should be early to bed and early to rise, exercise, chew our food well and eat in moderation, and not lie. But of course, we can’t. [laughs] We want to increase greenery and make sure we have good air and clean water. We all know that. But even so, we still build our houses right to the edge of the property line to obtain the maximum building-to-land ratio. And, while lamenting that we have to cut down fine trees, we cut them down anyway.

That stated, there’s no way around it; each person still has to go forward, doing what he or she can. We built my studio without cutting down the trees that were here. So, as you can see, the room’s a bit uneven. And a tree from the neighboring property overhangs our roof. We were encouraged to cut it, but I had them leave the branches as they are. We had the gutters widened a bit so they wouldn’t get clogged with leaves, but as far as I’m concerned I’d prefer to let the branches grow freely, as they please.

We also built this studio using laminated Japanese larch wood from Nagano Prefecture. It would have been cheaper to use a steel frame for the building, but since we’ve planted so many larch trees in Japan it seems a waste not to use them. If you think about the waste heat generated by people using computers, it’s better to build wooden offices for them. Then there’ll also be more demand for larch lumber, and the forests would be better managed.

It’s not just about economic efficiency

For Japan, “greenification” means more than just planting more trees in open unused spaces; it also means increasing greenery in the cities. Half on a lark, I’ve gone to plant trees in Shiretoko, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It really felt good to do so, but it also occurred to me that trees should really be planted in the places where it is most difficult to plant them. In other words, we ought to create forests where the land is most expensive. Forget about emphasizing the always-hoped-for economic benefits. We should simply go ahead and create forests where we think they are most needed. In other words, we ought to be able to bypass all the cost analysis and market-focused approaches and simply choose places where we think, “Wow, what a wasted space, let’s plant some trees here,” and turn them into forests or urban greenbelts. Of course, this involves individual value judgments.

Forests absorb carbon dioxide, but there are huge problems involved with carbon offset and carbon trading policies. Do we have to trade even the air? What a bleak future we will have if we always think in terms of making money off something as basic as the air that we need to live. Life shouldn’t be just about making money. There has to be something more important. If there isn’t, there wouldn’t be an animation industry.

They say that if we greenify all the roofs of the big buildings in Tokyo, the city’s average temperature would go down about 1.6 degrees centigrade. So that means, I assume, that if we greenified all the roofs of all the buildings it might even go down 3 degrees.

In thinking about this, and the fact that we have a little bit more economic flexibility in Japan these days, I felt as though we should start by doing what we can, and as a result we’re planning to cover the roof of the building under construction here with grass. We’re not going to use regular lawn grass or naturalized plants, but grass and soil from a regular old levee. In reality, we found a great levee with wonderful growth, and because that land is going to be developed, we’ll simply take it and replant it on our roof. The building will be made of laminated Japanese larch.

When the umaoi and kutsuwamushi katydids start to chirp on the roof, the praying mantises will also come flying over. And it would be great if we could have lots of buildings like this. So we’re hoping that this particular building can serve as a model. In the last few decades, with all the chaos that we’ve had, we’ve lost good building models for both houses and cities. Compared to the old days, we’ve got a certain economic leeway now, but people don’t know what to do. Yet if you look at shopping arcades, you can see how if just one good shop opens up in the arcade, the entire street gradually improves.

Wooded areas grow as a loose organization

Urban greenery is increasingly viewed as precious, but even in olden times, on samurai estates greenery was always highly valued. It’s just that as the land on these old estates was subdivided through inheritance and so forth, the trees were cut down. It therefore seems to me that there ought to be some way to change the tax system so that if greenery is inherited and preserved, property owners could be granted a reprieve from taxation and only be taxed if they decided to use the land for other purposes. There are many people who face this sort of issue with wooded areas on their land. I’d personally like to see these properties treated the same way farmland is.

Of course, it’s important to have local movements protect as much greenery as they can in their respective areas. In my case, I’m involved in a local neighborhood movement to preserve a little area of nearby woods. Several times a year, on a Sunday, volunteers show up and do the work. There’s no contract or any official rules involved. But those who don’t show up on the agreed day don’t have a say in what we should do to protect the environment.

Of course, those who show up sometimes have arguments. If one person says, “It’d look good if we got rid of this dead tree here,” someone else will of course reply that “If you remove that, the insects won’t have any bedding.” Reaching a consensus can be a real headache. So we usually somehow come to vague agreements. Somehow or other, we all work together “to clean things up.” In the process, someone will always say, “Well, looks like that got cut,” and someone else will say, “Well, too bad, I guess.” When we cut grass, there’s always some old granny who really wants to whack everything completely back. [laughs] If someone says that the grass normally grows to such and such height and that “We should leave it as is,” then we normally leave it, but the next morning, if we go back, we often find it mowed. And then someone will chime in, laughing, “Ah, it’s Granny at work again!” [laughs]

Children also join us, and they have a real-life, nonvirtual experience in the woods. The actual work we do usually takes about three hours, and after that we all drink sweet sake wine and call it quits. We work in a fairly small area, right where the river curves, and while there are no trout lilies, it is rich in vegetation, with lots of flowering windflowers and buttercups.

I believe that having local residents work together like this changes their consciousness. There’s even one couple who say that participating in the movement makes them want to live out their days in the area. Unfortunately, we don’t really have that many members in our little group. We’ve agreed that we’re not going to go around beating gongs and banging drums just to increase our numbers. Instead, we’re talking about going forward with the loosest possible organization. Interacting with greenery requires a long-term, relaxed perspective and a lot of patience.

The Lights of Zenshōen

Asahi Shimbun, evening edition, April 19, 2002

I make a point of walking on Sunday. It’s not strenuous walking, and it really amounts to little more than a two to three-hour stroll, but it’s a good way to distance myself from my work. After thirty minutes of walking, I can clear my head. And the result of this is obvious the next day, the instant I sit down at my desk. When I don’t walk, the week feels long and heavy, whereas when I do, I hold up fairly well until at least mid-week.

⭑

Along the course I follow on my stroll there is a place surrounded by holly hedges. It’s the National Tama Zenshōen,8 a sanitarium for patients with Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. The gates are always open, and the hedges are always trimmed low, but in the past I was always hesitant to enter. I had only the average person’s knowledge of Hansen’s disease. Among the things I knew were that it wasn’t very contagious at all and that it was no longer untreatable; in fact the government policy of isolating patients from society had only helped to entrench fear and prejudice among the general population and not helped eradicate it at all. But I didn’t think that I had the resolve or the qualifications to really confront what lay beyond the hedge. I felt it would have been too impolite to venture in just out of curiosity.

While we were producing Princess Mononoke, I took my first step into the Zenshōen grounds. Work was difficult, not going anywhere, and even my regular strolling could not stop a great insecurity from occasionally welling up in me nor stop my mind from spinning. I don’t know what motivated me, but late in the afternoon on an early spring day, I suddenly decided to go through the hedge.

The first thing that caught my eye was a row of huge cherry trees. The tree trunks were glowing from the rays of the setting sun in the west, and the tips of the not-yet-budding branches were spreading high into the sky. I was overwhelmed. What amazing life force these trees have, I thought. I was overcome with something akin to fear; and that day I turned back without going further.

The next week I went back again. I even went, with bated breath, into the history center on the grounds. It was beyond my expectations. In a silent space, there are written records of people who have confronted Hansen’s disease. And the records reflect both the extremes of human nobility and the stupidity of society at large.

To me, the most moving aspect was to see the records of people who had lived there. No matter how much suffering, they also clearly revealed joy and laughter. Human lives by nature tend to become vague, but this place revealed them more vividly than anywhere I had seen.

Like a young person rebuked by an elder, I left the museum feeling chastened, thinking:

I must not live carelessly.

⭑

After that, Zenshōen became one of my special places. I went walking there every Sunday. It was always clean and quiet, and the people who lived there were all modest and reserved. It may have been my imagination, but it always seemed as though it was the people visiting from the outside world who were noisy and boisterous and even a bit arrogant.

A few buildings, no longer in use, have been left on a corner of the Zenshōen property. They include lodgings for people entering the facility and dormitories for girls and boys separated from their parents. There are also the educational facilities and the library that novelist Tamio Hōjō, who had Hansen’s disease, used as the setting for his short story “Bōkyōka” (Song of Nostalgia). One might imagine that such buildings would be infused with the disappointment and desperation of their former inhabitants, but there’s nothing foreboding about them at all. When I stood in front of these structures, I found dignified and warm feelings welling up inside myself. They’re all fine buildings.

Despite having been built at the beginning of the Shōwa era, these buildings have miraculously survived. I found this particularly interesting because in Tokyo most buildings of that era have disappeared. I was told that they were built by carpenters resident in the facility. Even the solid flagstones, planted in muddy roads for sufferers, were reportedly laid out by residents united in their efforts. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if the buildings at Zenshōen could be preserved. It seems important both for the history of the sufferers and the history of architecture.

Late at night, on returning from work, whenever I saw the lights of Zenshōen through the holly hedges, I had an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. By the time our film production had finished, it had become a sacred place for me.

⭑

The Japanese government eventually apologized to the victims of Hansen’s disease. I thought it was a good thing. I thought of all the tears quietly shed throughout Japan—not only by the sufferers but also by their parents and children, and those who had to suffer in silence as their friends were taken away.

On the Film Dark Blue World: A Dialogue with Producer Toshio Suzuki

From the film pamphlet for Dark Blue World, published by Albattos, October 26, 2002

—Do you watch movies often?

MIYAZAKI: I actually don’t watch films at all. I never watch them for my own enjoyment. It was hard for me even to watch the love story in Dark Blue World. There’s nothing to be done about it; things like that can happen. I have a strong desire not to peek into such worlds and get all excited about them. As for American films, they seem too manipulative, so I hate to give into that and get all excited. And with splatter films, as soon as the music starts warning us about what’s coming up, well, they just make me want to leave the theater. [laughs]

—What is it about Dark Blue World (directed by Jan Svěrák, 2001) that appeals to you?

MIYAZAKI: The standard I use to evaluate films is whether or not they seem natural. And Dark Blue World seems very natural. The director obviously knows about airplanes, and he shot them in a very realistic fashion. After all, these planes are really like what we would call kei-class mini-cars in Japan. The film does an amazing job of showing the basic fragility of a Spitfire fighter, for example. It’s not focused just on the power, the pizzazz, the firepower, or the speed of the plane, but on how fragile it is. I greatly appreciated the fact that the director also showed how the planes fall out of the sky so easily, burn so easily, and also refuse to take off right away. And he didn’t just layer on shots of pilots aiming, firing, and hitting their targets, but also showed how they themselves could be suddenly hit. They died so easily, and so senselessly, and I thought he depicted this in a very naturalistic fashion.

It’s not as though the film lacks any emotional impact, because it is shot in a way so that there is plenty of that too. When watching Dark Blue World, we have to remember that, ever since gaining their independence, for much of the latter part of the twentieth century, the Czechs were caught in the scheming between the big powers. The Prague Spring was crushed, as you recall. And the “dark blue” color of the title is nearly black, so it’s not a positive color at all. It’s the story of people living in a dark, shadowy world and era.

SUZUKI: You were quick to realize that this was a great film, Miya-san. In fact, you seemed to know that as soon as you heard that it was a joint production between the Czechs and British and that it was about the war. And as soon as you heard that the original Japanese title was going to be Kono sora ni kimi wo omou (I Remember You from This Sky), you also told them it was “no good,” didn’t you? [laughs] And then you suggested that a better title would be Cheko no jiyū kūgun (The Free Czechoslovak Air Force). Before hearing any of the details of the film, you must have subjectively known what it was about.

—The pilots in the film went to a foreign country—to England—and risked their lives fighting in the Royal Air Force, didn’t they?

MIYAZAKI: They went off to fight to save their homeland, not knowing it would later be absorbed into the Soviet Bloc. But when the war was over and they went home, they were thrown into labor camps. And those were really prisons. You can also see postwar Polish films—such as those of director Andrzej Wajda—that depict the same thing. In the sense that they were both nations that were ripped apart, Poland and Czechoslovakia were quite similar. There are also films about Polish pilots joining the British forces and fighting with them, but these tend to be a bit too emotional with lots of doom and gloom. It’s because Polish people like emotional and gloomy films. They usually even sing songs meant to cheer them up in a gloomy fashion. For example, when the workers of Solidarity were barricaded in their factories, they set up a radio station to broadcast appeals to the world, but when you listened to it, it sounded like everything was all over and everyone was going to die. Their basic tone is depressed. But Dark Blue World depicts the era as “dark blue,” and whether referring to Germany or Russia, in a variety of ways distances itself from direct issues of love and hate. I felt it was the sort of film that could finally be made only now, in the twenty-first century.

—How did you feel about the love and friendship, and also the encounters, partings, and loss depicted in the film?

SUZUKI: I could really feel the humanity of the individual characters, such as the woman instructor who teaches the Czechoslovakian pilots English. In that sense, it’s really an awesome film. It’s basically about how people’s lives are at the mercy of history, politics, and nations. And the dog was great too.

MIYAZAKI: I love how the dog survives to the end. And I also love how both friendships and romances are shown positively. The film even avoids negatively depicting the scene where the protagonist is reunited with the woman he loves. And the actresses are all great too. Of course, I can’t really say if they’re beautiful or not. [laughs] As for the aerial combat scenes, the director could have focused on exciting sequences, but he went out of his way to avoid overemphasizing them. He wasn’t trying to sell the film just on the basis of the combat scenes. If you look at the film as a commercial venture, it’s almost as though he deliberately and bravely created it so that it wouldn’t be a huge commercial success.

SUZUKI: Basically, he hasn’t really used the combat scenes in a feel-good fashion.

—And then there are the scenes of training with the British Royal Air Force. And the scenes of the training to fly fighter planes by riding bicycles.

MIYAZAKI: I’m sure you could find infinite examples of that sort of stupidity in the military. A few years back I saw an article in a newspaper that said when the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces were once doing some live-fire drills, they wound up one shell casing short, so everyone was made to search for it. The Self-Defense Forces, after all, are the most worthless part of the government bureaucracy. That’s because they’re never subject to public criticism for anything concrete. So no one ever criticizes them even if they create a totally useless tank. The only thing that gets discussed is whether tanks are necessary or not. That’s the way the Self-Defense Forces are.

After interviewing members of the Ground, Sea, and Air Self-Defense Forces, Mamoru Oshii, the famed animation director, once said that he found that the Air personnel take the most pride in their work, the Sea force members only somewhat, and the Ground forces are the absolute worst. They are in fact serving under the Americans, so there’s no real reason for them to exist at all. The members of the Air Self-Defense Forces, who actually think they might be able to win in a fight, well, they still have some spunk to them. The Ground Self-Defense Force members are already confident that they won’t be able to stand up to any enemy in a one-to-one match. Interestingly, the Self-Defense Forces always have video rental shops across from their bases, where the most frequently borrowed work is reportedly Patlabor, the Movie (directed by Mamoru Oshii, 1989); the service branch most frequently watching it is none other than the members of the Ground forces. I don’t really know if it’s true or not, but that’s what Mamoru Oshii says. Patlabor 2: the Movie (1993) shows soldiers guarding Tokyo against tanks, and when members of the real Ground Self-Defense Forces saw these scenes they were said to have been overjoyed.

—What’s your favorite scene in Dark Blue World?

MIYAZAKI: It’s where Karel, in deciding to drop an inflatable dinghy to Franta, turns his plane around and flips over. I was really impressed by the way they showed that. It seemed very realistic to me when he so suddenly sank into the waves. And then the scene ends, with Franta having hauled himself halfway into the dinghy. There’s no explanatory shot showing a lifeboat later coming to rescue him or anything of that sort. When I saw Lord of the Rings (directed by Peter Jackson, 2001), whenever a member of the group was about to die, they seemed to talk forever. I suppose the director did this to give them time to say their last words before they expired. There are more and more films being made these days in the same contrived way, but in Dark Blue World, while the director was depicting such desperate air battles, I never sensed anything like that. I really liked that aspect of the film.

—The air battle scenes in Porco Rosso are also wonderfully realistic. Where did you get the idea for them?

MIYAZAKI: Well, you can understand if you ride in an airplane. For example, if you take a ride in a glider, you first have to have a small plane with about a hundred horsepower pull you in order to get off the ground. Then, the wire linking you to the towplane is suddenly released. It banks and quickly pulls away, leaving you floating in the air. It’s amazing to see how fast the towplane disappears from sight. When two gliders climb, going round and round on the same updraft, they suddenly seem to stop for an instant. Aircraft in three-dimensional space are totally different from those on the ground. It’s really pretty.

—We rarely see those sorts of aerial images in live-action films.

MIYAZAKI: The Americans are really good at shooting scenes using airplanes. It’s because they have many more opportunities to ride in planes. In Japan, we’ve had people who can hardly drive a car making films, so we’re really bad with moving and tracking shots. It’s one thing to know how to look at scenery from a train, but from the perspective of a car the field of vision unfolds right before your eyes. It’s something Japanese cameramen have been really bad at. And when it comes to shooting aerial scenes they’re even worse. It’s because they don’t have the chance to fly. It’s all about realizing how things will look when your perspective is continually moving. Shooting in the air is really difficult.

When I had the opportunity to fly in the skies over France, we had two planes, and when we came out from under a cloud we once nearly crashed into each other. That’s because when you’re not flying at a low altitude and you’re in the clouds, you totally lose your sense of right and left and up and down. The French pilot said it was really touch and go. [laughs] On a day when the wind was really strong, we flew in one of the old beat-up planes below a hundred meters. Lower than even the power lines. With a headwind, the plane’s speed started to drop more and more, to the point where the trucks on the highway beneath us were going faster than the plane. [laughs]

SUZUKI: At one point nearly everyone fell asleep, and the pilot and I were the only ones still awake. So when we were going over a mountain range he turns to me and asks me if I want to take over. He let me pilot the plane, and it was the biggest thrill I’ve ever had in my life.

MIYAZAKI: I wanted to see the relationship with the clouds, so I had the pilot skim over the top of a vista of a sea of clouds. I could also see places where there were holes in the clouds. In Dark Blue World, there are some really good shots of this. When the pilots in the film say, “There’s the enemy, but I can’t see him!” they slip between some clouds, then exclaim “There’s the enemy plane” and attack. It’s not easy to shoot scenes like that because it’s hard to find the right cloud formations when you need them. I don’t think there’s ever been a film with aerial combat scenes where the cloud cover has been used so well.

—Did you feel it was very different from Hollywood films?

MIYAZAKI: Americans like to show planes being strafed and then exploding, and of course that’s the only sort of film they usually make. In that sense, American films are probably also the most out-of-date and simplistic. In American films, as long as it’s an enemy, you can kill as many people as you want, and that’s true of Lord of the Rings too. You can kill indiscriminately without worrying about whether they are civilians or military. As long as it can be called collateral damage. How many people have they killed in the attack on Afghanistan, anyway? Lord of the Rings is an example of a film that shows that sort of thing with no qualms at all. If you read the original novels you can also tell that the people being killed are really Asians and Africans. And I think the people who don’t understand that, who go around saying how much they like “fantasy works,” are really idiots.

Remember films like Indiana Jones, where blam! the white guy shoots the guy with his pistol? It makes me incredibly ashamed to think that there are Japanese who get a thrill out of that. They’re the ones being blasted in scenes like that. I can’t believe people can watch those films without being aware of this. They have no sense of pride or perspective on history. They don’t have a clue what a country like America really thinks of them. When some young guy in our studio said he was going to go to Paris wearing a shirt with “US Army” emblazoned on it, I asked him how he could be such an idiot, and he just said, “It’s the fashion.” Of course, the moment he got there he had his passport or something stolen, and I felt like it served him right, but that’s neither here nor there. [laughs]

It’s all right for some individuals to be ignorant of historical facts as long as they stay in Japan, but for an entire people to be ignorant is a formula for disaster. I see Dark Blue World as a film that’s aware of this problem; it’s not made from a sense of nationalism or pent-up historical grievances, but as an attempt to show how people truly lived in a difficult period. And that’s the nice aftertaste the film leaves us with. When the guard at the end takes a catnap, the prisoners take a tiny break. I don’t know how Franta has the strength, but his face reveals his joy at simply being alive. It seems to me that this scene is what connects the long, “dark blue world” the Czechs experienced to the image of the sun finally shining in the hall. It’s really sudden; right there, we see Franta looking up at an image of angels drawn on the ceiling and the light pouring in. It’s sudden, but I think it probably expresses a certain mood that Czechs are able to share among themselves.

There’s no way Americans could ever understand anything like this. They’re too busy making films like video games. You also can see that with Pearl Harbor (directed by Michael Bay, 2001). And Saving Private Ryan (directed by Steven Spielberg, 1998) is one of the worst films of this sort. The aerial forces do their bombing, and then it ends. But the one war the Americans couldn’t win that way was Vietnam. Because the Americans made films about Vietnam, they had to make films about “not understanding” things. Films about “not understanding Asians,” like Apocalypse Now (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). I really can’t understand why Coppola made a film like that. They say that airplane fans loved to watch the scenes of the choppers flying with Wagner’s music playing, but most airplane fans are idiots. It would have been easy for the director of Dark Blue World to make his film the same way, but he completely avoided doing so. Airplanes are fragile and break down easily, and so do humans. When I watched Dark Blue World I was so impressed with the way the director consistently maintained his perspective.

—What constitutes a good movie for you?

MIYAZAKI: I thought Babette’s Feast (directed by Gabriel Axel, 1987) was a really good film. Have you seen Gloria (directed by John Cassavetes, 1980)? Now that was a really good B-grade film. When I was teaching at the Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II animation school, I got into an argument with one of the students about whether Gloria was dead or not. The student said that both the woman and the kid were dead at the end. That the kid had also been killed. I thought the film actually ended on a happy note, but I wound up seeing the last part of the film again later when it was shown on TV. And they really were dead. There’s no license plate on the limousine that shows up at the end, and if you look, there are other clues in a variety of places. The gangsters are firing away at her from above the top of the elevator. The film also gives the impression that the elevator slides down in a whoosh and that they get away, but the building itself is only two stories tall. The director doesn’t show them dead on the screen because he wants to fool people who’ve paid money to see the film, but anyone who watches carefully knows they’re really “dead” at that point. So, anyway, my student had reportedly been unable to stop crying from that scene on. On seeing the film again on TV, I called him and said, “I give up. You’re right.” He also went to see the remake of the film and said it was awful. Gloria’s really boring if you watch it on television dubbed into Japanese. All that fabulous slang just gets watered down. The insults in the original are great. Of course, it’s been over a dozen years since I saw the film.

—Have you seen any interesting films recently?

MIYAZAKI: Well, A Sunday in the Country (directed by Bertrand Tavernier, 1984) is pretty old. [laughs] Not too long ago, on late-night television, I watched an old film by Tarkovsky. It seemed to be full of significance and importance, but it was totally incomprehensible. For me, films are no longer something I can afford to watch just for the distraction they offer.

SUZUKI: I really liked Tasogare sakaba (Twilight Saloon, 1955). It was made by Tomu Uchida in the early fifties.

MIYAZAKI: That was set in 1953 or ’54 and completed in ’55. But it doesn’t seem old to me, even today. I first saw it when I was in middle school, and I liked it a lot. And when I saw it again recently, it was far better than I remembered. It made me really happy to feel that way.

—In conclusion, do either of you have anything you’d like to say to those who go to see Dark Blue World?

MIYAZAKI: Well, most of all, I’d just like people to see it. That alone would make me happy. And if they’re normal people, I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. They’ll also understand how ignorant we Japanese are of current history and how helpless we are here in Japan in its current condition. The pilot in the film, Franta, is probably supposed to be someone born around 1920. He gets out of the prison camp in 1951. The Prague Spring takes place in 1968. If he’d led a normal life, he would’ve been a real old geezer by now.

SUZUKI: The director alludes to it at the very end of the film, that the men had their honor restored in 1992.

MIYAZAKI: Right. In other words, these are people who would have spent between seventy to eighty years living in the cracks of history. I can easily understand why the film was a hit in the Czech Republic, and I’m really glad it was a hit. Japan still hasn’t resolved its issue with the military. Maybe it’s related to the inhuman aspects of the old Japanese military. Or maybe it’s related to the fundamentally inhuman aspects of any military. Or maybe it’s related to the inhumanity of history.

SUZUKI: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was also a really amazing film. It’s about how one family is tossed about by their country’s history. Then there’s Joint Security Area (directed by Park Chan-wook, 2000) [laughs], about soldiers from North and South Korea, which tries to give us history as is in the context of an entertainment film. It’s something nobody in Japan ever tries to do. Everyone here’s just making films about people they personally like or dislike. But of course I should watch what I say. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: War films are hard to make. In Japan, they’re hard to make because individuals aren’t very visible in society. Nowadays anyone can make films about hoodlum punks and the sex trade. There’s really no difference between now and the old days, when they used to say that anyone could be a soldier or a hooker. There just aren’t any outstanding people with independent personalities. It’s one of the great weaknesses in Japanese intellectual history. And Dark Blue World is the sort of film that makes us realize that.

Toshio Suzuki Born 1948 in Nagoya City. After graduating from Keio University, joined publisher Tokuma Shoten and, after working for Shūkan Asahi Geinō (Weekly Asahi Entertainment), in 1978 helped launch the animation magazine Animage. While working as a magazine editor, also became involved in the production of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and other animated films by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Has been a full-time member of Studio Ghibli since 1989 and has subsequently worked as a producer. Published books include Shigoto dōraku: Sutajio jiburi no genba (Work As Entertainment: On the Scene at Studio Ghibli, Iwanami Shoten), and Jiburi no tetsugaku: Kawaru mono to kawaranai mono (The Ghibli Philosophy: Things That Change and Things That Don’t, Iwanami Shoten).

Comments on Receiving the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film

The world currently faces a very unfortunate situation, and I am therefore sorry that I cannot experience the full joy of receiving this award. However, I am deeply grateful to all my friends for the efforts they have made so that Spirited Away could be shown in America, and also to all those who rated my film so highly.

Hayao Miyazaki
March 24, 2003

The Fujimi Highland Is Fascinating

Lecture titled “A rebirth of the highland Jōmon kingdom,” given in conjunction with an exhibit of objects excavated from the Tōnai site, upon their designation as important cultural treasures

From a talk given August 4, 2002, in the Fujimi Township, Minami Middle School gymnasium Published inYomigaeru kōgen no Jōmon ōkoku: Idojiri bunka no sekaisei (Rebirth of the Highland Jōmon kingdom: The Universality of Idojiri Culture), Gensōsha, March 21, 2004

As was mentioned in the introduction, I have occasionally barged into the Idojiri Archaeological Museum to talk about my own personal fantasies and be treated to tea and refreshments, so it was hard for me to turn down an offer like this, to give a talk here. [laughs] Another reason I accepted is because the museum, located in a town (Fujimi-machi, in Suwa-district, Nagano Prefecture) of only fifteen thousand people, is doing such a wonderful job. Many museums in Japan have objects sorted for display in dusty glass cases, but if you take a look here you’ll see how much new research is also being done. I therefore think of this as a living archaeological museum. Local governments across Japan are struggling with budgetary issues these days, so I can easily imagine how hard it must be for this museum. But we can also evaluate the wisdom of local governments by how well they manage and maintain such institutions in difficult times. So one reason I shamelessly decided to speak here is because I truly want the Idojiri Archaeological Museum to continue in its work.

My encounter with Eiichi Fujimori’s Jōmon no sekai (The Jōmon World)

I should note that I am a great fan of Eiichi Fujimori, who did the excavations around Idojiri and Tōnai, which in turn became the basis for the Idojiri Archaeological Museum. I never met him while he was alive, but in my late twenties I read his book Jōmon no sekai: kodai no hito to sanga (The Jōmon World: Ancient People and Their Natural Surroundings, Kōdansha). People sometimes talk about having the scales fall from their eyes, and I can’t say that they all fell off when I read his book, but a lot of little ones definitely did. [laughs] Since it was such a key experience, Eiichi Fujimori also became someone of great importance to me.

In The Jōmon World, Fujimori writes about finding the remains of a burned-down house when doing his excavations. He discovered lots of charcoal and some things that looked like carbonized loaves of bread. You can see this today in the museum. There are two objects in the shape of bread rolls. There were apparently four originally, but two were too broken up to be restored. And in addition, there were also two similar things, perhaps made as snacks, for children. They’re not just made round, but in a twisted form like a sweet pretzel or other treat; in other words, they appear to be some sort of bread that’s been deliberately twisted a bit and perhaps given to children. When first excavated, they say you could even see finger marks on them. They took plaster casts of them, though, so you can’t see the prints anymore.

Today, most people probably imagine people of the Jōmon period (12,000 BCE–300 BCE) to have been unkempt, hairy people with beards, wearing furs, stooped over, carrying deer carcasses as well as weapons with which to whack things. In other words, it’s an image of people who are backward, often described with words such as “barbaric,” “crude,” or “savage.” But where did we get this impression of them? Someone, at some point, drew the first picture for us of what “primitive people” looked like. And if you dig into the matter, it appears that it was Europeans.

For example, to recreate what Neanderthals looked like, in their drawings European artists would try to add flesh to the skulls that had been excavated. But the resulting images would then differ drastically depending on whether they added beards or not. Or whether they added unkempt hair or hair tied in a bun or a topknot. I personally think that the Neanderthals definitely wore their hair up, but the Europeans apparently unilaterally concluded that “they were primitive, and there is therefore no way they would have done up their hair or worn any kind of makeup,” and they went on to reproduce images of Neanderthal faces that looked as crude as possible. And we’ve seen these drawings and photographs over and over again and concluded on our own that the Jōmon people probably looked the same.

But then, when I read the story of the Jōmon bread—and how Jōmon parents probably made little pieces with a special twist to delight their children—it didn’t seem like the sort of thing that truly savage people would do. It made them seem more like us. Or even like a people who were more affectionate and sensitive than we are. The Jōmon period—which had always seemed to be mainly stone axes and arrowheads and weapons—suddenly came alive for me.

Humans do not necessarily become more advanced and wise with the passing of each era. The people who lived during the thousands of years of the Jōmon period were certainly not just savage and rude barbarians. And Eiichi Fujimori was the first person who taught me this.

Most ethnic groups and nations believe they are advanced and that others are behind. Through the power of their cannons, white societies were temporarily able to occupy the world, so when they enslaved or attacked other racial groups, they would say of them that “they’re backward and below livestock in status, so it’s all right to kill and capture them.” When it came time to recreate what primitive peoples like the Neanderthals may have looked like, I suspect this is what led them to use the images they did.

After that, I read several more books by Eiichi Fujimori. And the more I read them, the more I liked them. Now, I’m not really in a position to talk about this, but Eiichi Fujimori only graduated from middle school. As he himself admits, he led the low life for a long time, changing jobs over and over and wandering about, but ultimately—because in his youth he had once found an arrowhead on top of a hill—he says he decided to return again to studying archaeology. At the end of his life, he was running a lodging house.

It is normally extraordinarily difficult for someone like Fujimori-san to do archaeology. Usually, you have to become an academic. And usually, in order to become an academic, you have to have graduated from a university somewhere and studied in the labs of some academic faction. If not, even if you write about archaeology, no one will review your papers. But Fujimori-san’s writings are extremely good and exciting to read. So it’s not just The Jōmon World; he has other famous and fascinating works such as Kamoshikamichi (Path of the Japanese Serow-Antelope, Gakuseisha), and quite a few young people have read some of his books and then decided to become archaeologists.

On the other hand, some people say his writings are too romantic or always trying too hard to be stylish. But who would understand if he had merely written that some “breadlike carbonized material has been excavated”? It is precisely because he wrote that the bread had been deliberately “twisted for children,” that the scales suddenly fell from my eyes. And in that sense, Eiichi Fujimori completely transcends the normal category of a scholar. To those like me, his expansive spirit is best conveyed through his books.

I should also mention that Fujimori-san passed away in 1973, right when I was in the midst of creating Heidi, Girl of the Alps. I suspect that some people probably still remember, but that was also during the oil shock, when the price of oil suddenly skyrocketed. There was a rush on items such as toilet paper, and paper largely disappeared from stores in cities. Since we artists make a living drawing on paper, the lack of it was a huge problem for us. Even the newspapers became awfully thin. When Fujimori-san passed away, the evening editions were down to just four pages, or one double-page spread.

I waited, certain that someone would eventually write a memorial essay or paper giving Fujimori-san his proper due, but no such thing ever appeared. Was it because there wasn’t enough paper available? I don’t know, but it made me angry. He had made hugely important contributions to our knowledge with his theories on Jōmon-period agriculture, among many other things. Frankly, I felt as though the mainstream media had gone silent on him, and that I couldn’t allow.

I got all worked up about it on my own and, as I recall it, after work went puttering off in my car, searching for his home in Kamisuwa. I asked an old lady manning the local tobacco kiosk, “Is Eiichi Fujimori’s house around here?” and she replied, “Ah, Eiichi-san,” told me where it was, and I went off to visit it. His wife wasn’t home, but his daughter graciously came to the door, so I was at least able to ask her where his grave was.

After being told that “I might not be able to find it,” I took off and discovered that nearly all the graves in the area were inscribed with “Fujimori.” [laughs] In fact, the Kamisuwa area, as I discovered, is blanketed with Fujimoris. I kept searching all over, and then in the corner of the cemetery finally I found a tombstone with the inscription “Fujimori Family Grave.” When I looked at the epitaph at its side, I saw the name “Eiichi” and the name of his youngest sister who had passed away at three. The grave had nothing on it mentioning his contribution to archaeology at all, but for some reason that made me very happy.

But this is the sort of story that young children in the audience may not understand, so I suppose I should really start singing a song at this point. [laughs]

So after that, if you were to ask me if I began to seriously pursue the study of archaeology, I would have to respond no, not at all. In fact, I spent the entire decade of my thirties not doing so. During that time, if I had started walking about in a more serious fashion, as I do now, I might have been able to see far more things, but unfortunately I didn’t start until I was past forty, into my mid-forties.

I also forgot to mention earlier that, over thirty years ago, there was a gentleman named Kunugi who served as art teacher at the Minami Middle School in the Fujimi township, teaching woodblock printing to children. As a result of this my wife’s father—Kōshi Ōta, the woodblock artist—wound up building a little mountain cabin in Eboshi. And when I came here, I realized that this was also Eiichi Fujimori’s home turf. It was an amazing coincidence, but I just wrote it off as nothing more than that, and ten more years went by. [laughs]

Walking in this area

I started going on walks in the area out of curiosity, and above here you’ll find a forest called Sanrigahara, I believe. It’s now covered almost entirely in Japanese larch and red pine. If you go further up the mountain from Sanrigahara, you arrive at Hirohara. I went expecting it to be mountainous, but then I noted that the characters on the signs for Hirohara are “broad” and “field,” which led me to think, “Ah, so this area used to be a broad plain.” At the time, I was a bit of a smart-aleck city slicker, and I had heard nothing but stories about how planting Japanese larch ruined the mountain environment. In those days there were lots of newspaper articles to that effect.

I think most locals here well know why Japanese larch was planted; twenty years later, it was to become a cash crop. It could be sold for telephone poles. And it could also be used as supporting timbers in mines, so people thought it would make them money, and they continued to plant it from the middle of the Meiji era—the 1890s—until around 1965, so that it now makes up the forest that covers the southern foothills of Mt. Yatsugatake.

Because Japanese larch was planted the ecosystem lost much of its diversity, and it became harder for animals to live there. You can see this if you walk through the area, because there’s nothing but larch all over, and nothing else can grow in the soil. It takes forever for the tree leaves to decompose, and if you rake them a bit, you can see that they’ve often been piling up for three or four years. If people had planted Mongolian oak or konara oak instead of larch, wild animals would have been able to live in the area, and the forest would have been enriched. So on the basis of that, Japanese larch is always used to illustrate the failures of Japan’s forest management.

Be that as it may, on a whim I once read a book by the village old-timers about the Kikkakezawa River. The Kikkakezawa is a terrifyingly turbulent river, and according to the book, in the old days when there were downpours, heavy flash floods used to occur, the force of them rolling giant boulders along with them. But as a result of planting lots of Japanese larch and red pine in the area the river is said to have become much calmer.

Seen this way, for this area, the planting of Japanese larch has also had good aspects. And this is true not just of the Kikkakezawa River but also other rivers in the area, such as the Haasawa, Kanosawa, Kōroku, Yanosawa, and Tatsuba as well. The Tatsuba River often overflows its banks, and while building lots of sand-trap dams has certainly helped stop the worst of the flooding, the planting of large quantities of Japanese larch to create a forest cover has also helped tame the entire area. So not acknowledging this and just accusing locals of “planting nothing but larch,” is really a formula for angering them and making them think that city folk don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Of myself, I thought, Ah, what an idiot I too have been.

The point is that people like myself, who arrive in the area later, tend to forget about the local conditions and, in looking at the forest, immediately make false assumptions. “Ah, there used to be a fine forest here,” we say, “but the locals obviously cut it down and planted nothing but Japanese larch.” Then we suddenly want to add, “What a stupid thing they’ve done,” and exclaim, “Save the forest!” But that’s not really the way things are. With people living here for such a long time, the surrounding land has gradually been changed. In fact, I personally became interested in this area when I began to wonder what places like Sanrigahara and Hirohara looked like before they were forests, when they were still fields.

If you continue way down past the grounds of Minami Middle School, there’s a commute route for the children. It’s a mountain road that crosses the Kikkakezawa River and heads toward Tsutaki. Of course, I would be exhausted if I had to travel round-trip on this road, but it’s only used by children on their way to school now.

There’s the old Asaemon samurai estate in Eboshi, with a road beside it that descends from there. From Tsutaki, if you go past Sankōji temple, there’s a road that ascends straight up a zigzag hill, where you suddenly come upon a Shinto shrine, and it’s a little scary. Prefectural Highway No. 17 runs over a bridge across the Kikkakezawa River. And right next to it there’s a narrow road with a small Buddha statue beside it. Descending this road, I suddenly found myself at the Kikkakezawa riverbed. I suspect that this is the road the people of Takamori used when traveling toward Koroku, but there are lots of roads in the area that no one walks along anymore.

When discovering and exploring these roads and paths, it occurred to me that the area may gradually be reverting to what it once looked like when these routes were used, before everyone started driving cars and train lines passed through. And with that, I began to think about what an interesting area it really is.

To Hienosoko

So here I finally arrive at what I really want to talk about, which is Hienosoko. Have you heard of Hienosoko? I’m sure the locals have. If you go there, you’ll find a spring that yields large amounts of wonderful water and, at an altitude of twelve hundred meters, the remains of what used to be a village.

It’s so cold in the area around Hienosoko that it’s very hard to grow anything, and even if you did wild animals such as boar and deer would likely cause a lot of damage by trampling your crops. So in ancient times people busied themselves doing a variety of other things, including felling trees on the mountains and collecting wild vegetables. Or they gathered kudzu and wisteria vines to make things. But they eventually reached their limit. According to a book I once read, in the Edo period, around the beginning of the seventeenth century, they finally had to abandon the village.

But it makes you wonder. Why was a village created in a place like this, anyway? And why was it called Hienosoko, which from the Chinese characters would imply that they were “running out of millet,” or even “out of food.” In Japanese, the name also has the additional sound of a place where the land is terribly, terribly cold, impoverished, and just plain awful. But when do people normally speak in such negative terms about the village where they actually live? I found myself imagining that it might have originally been called hie-no-shō, or “millet manor,” but that later some nasty person with a grievance had started writing it with the more negative-sounding Hienosoko. Still, I couldn’t come up with an answer to explain why there might have been a village there in the first place.

So here we come to this book I’m going to talk about. I’m giving you what is in essence a commercial for it, but just look at this. It’s titled Naganoken Fujimi Chōshi or “History of Fujimi Township, Nagano Prefecture” (vols. 1 and 2 published by the Educational Committee of the Fujimi Township in Nagano Prefecture), and please note how fat just the first volume is. I doubt that many people have read the entire thing. [laughs] It’s heavy. But if you’re interested in the history of this area, it’s extremely interesting. Of course, it’ll also cost you five thousand yen. [laughs]

Next, let me show you an illustration that I just drew. It looks a bit half-baked, like something I put together in a hurry because I couldn’t get my summer vacation homework done in time. [laughs]

The drawing (see plate no. 2) uses what to you may be an unfamiliar perspective. At the top, you can see the Kōfu basin. On the left I’ve drawn Mt. Yatsugatake and on the right Mt. Kamanashi, and in the foreground you can see Mt. Nyūgasa. This area around Haranochaya represents the watershed, so the Kamanashi River flows toward Kōshū. The Tachiba River, which flows from Yatsugatake, merges with the Kamanashi River here and continues on and on. In Kōshū, the Tachiba joins the Shio River, and I think it also joins up with the Fuefuki. I’ve drawn it all in a rough fashion, but what you can see here is Nirasaki’s statue of the kannon, or Avalokitesvara, the Goddess of Mercy (top right of map). [laughs] It’s not really this big; I’ve just drawn it big to make it easier to understand. This is just a concept sketch after all, and with concept sketches I’m allowed to take a few liberties.

And here’s Shinanosakai station. And a bit to the right of it, finally, is Idojiri, where the Idojiri Archaeological Museum is. The Kōroku, Shikanosawa, Kikkake, Haasawa, and Yanosawa rivers all flow in parallel down to the Kamanashi valley.

I think you’re all well aware of the famous sixteenth-century warlord Shingen Takeda and his bōmichi. It’s the military road the Kōshū forces took when headed for Shinano or Kawanakajima. From around Koarama, or today’s Kaikoizumi, it took them all along the foothills of Mt. Yatsugatake to the Daimon pass and Ueda.

Coming down from Shingen’s bōmichi, on my map you can see Hienosoko a little above the Tatsuba River. There’s a village there now called Tatsuzawa, but it was created later. It’s said that the people from Hienosoko may actually have moved to Tatsuzawa and created a new village there, but either way, I still found myself wondering why they built a village in the area in the first place, at such a high altitude.

From this point on I have to enter the realm of considerable speculation, but I’m not the only one, because even the aforementioned History of Fujimi Township does a bit too. And it states something quite revolutionary—that this area has ruins from the mid-Jōmon period. Now, I know people think the Jōmon people lived deep in forested areas, but they really lived on the edges of forests. It’s difficult to live in the middle of a forest, because every time you want to do something, you have to cut down trees. So the Jōmon people created their villages on the edge of forests, where there was usually some sort of clearing. As I mentioned earlier, the area around the Fujimi highlands is today covered in a forest of Japanese larch. But in olden times, they say it was all pasture or grassy fields.

According to Kimiaki Kobayashi-san, the director of the Idojiri Archaeological Museum, in the mid-Jōmon period, this area was actually very prosperous. The average temperature was relatively high, and people were apparently living all the way up into the Kirigamine area. Moreover, in those days, it was easy for people to live on the edge of the forests. I find myself in agreement with Kobayashi-san.

Nonetheless, the number of ruins that have been found suddenly decreases from the later Jōmon period on. And after that, until people start arriving in the Heian period (794–1185), the area seems largely deserted. In the Heian period, the government in the capital issued an order for people to create pastures, so this became an area in which to raise horses. Pastoral areas were created on either side of the Tatsuba River and were known as Kashiwazaki-no-maki and Yamaga-no-maki.

Today Fujimi is part of Nagano Prefecture, but it was originally part of an area called Kōshū. Kōshū continued all the way up to around Misayamagōdo around here, and to the left of Tatsuba River were Shinshū and Suwa. The Yamaga-no-maki pasture area later would become part of the preserves of the Suwa shrine in the area, and there was thus a move to ban the growing of any crops on it. And that was not, apparently, in the Heian period, but in the Kamakura period (1185–1333).

I know that this sort of talk may put people to sleep, but rest assured, things get more interesting going forward. [laughs]

The members of the Idojiri Archaeological Museum have been working hard on excavations in the area. And what this also means is that they are forced to run all over the place, because whenever there is any road construction being done, or whenever someone plans to build a house, they often run into some ruins or artifacts. And then they also find many items from the Heian period.

You might think they would find that houses from the Jōmon period were considerably more impoverished than those in the later Heian, but the opposite is true. Heian houses were truly shabby. The ones I’ve seen were single rooms of only three or four tatami mats in size. And they’ve found ruins of hamlets like these throughout the Fujimi highlands area. It appears that they were built when the pastures were created and that they were for the people who took care of the horses. For the horses to be able to properly graze, these people would probably have had to move from one area to another and then eventually come back to the original place. And in the middle of the grazing areas, paths or roads would naturally have been created. One idea that I really love—touched upon in the History of Fujimi Township—is that these roads may have been the origin of what became Shingen’s bōmichi military roads.

If you hike around the area, you will notice that water is most plentiful around the Hienosoko springs. And I suspect that these same springs were the most important place for drinking water in the entire pasture area. I also suspect that the route they used to round up the horses became the start of the bōmichi later used by Shingen’s forces. That’s what the History of Fujimi Township says. Of course, the book skirts the issue a bit by saying that it “may well have been, but further research is needed.” [laughs] In my mind, I concluded it “most certainly was.”

Images of a nomadic village

Let me show you another drawing. This is an umayoseba or “horse corral” (see plate no. 1). In modern Fukushima Prefecture, as you know, there’s a festival called Sōma-no-nomaoi. It’s basically a ceremony to round up free-ranging horses. At the right time of the year, they round up all the horses that have been out grazing freely and sort them, dividing them into “best horses” and other categories. In ancient times, in the winter, they would have been unable to keep the horses grazing loose out in the pasture, so they would have had to corral them someplace. And of course the resulting horse manure would also have been valuable fertilizer for the soil.

There would have been a large number of horses in the pastures between the Tatsuba and Kōroku rivers. In the Heian period, the government issued an edict that read, “Pastures with one hundred horses must pay a tax the following year of sixty horses.” But who would have been able to pay that kind of tax? It would of course have been impossible, so the herds would dwindle until the owners couldn’t pay any tax at all. Eventually, only wealthy private individuals would have been able to keep herds, in what were called shimaki or “private pastures.”

When I tried to imagine what the umayoseba corrals must have looked like, I couldn’t see them as having wood rail fences, because those would have had to be erected every year. Instead, I think the corrals probably used the slope of the land, and one side had stone walls. Herders would have had to round up all the horses en masse.

At one time, there was a hoopla made over the theory of Japanese having originally been a mounted or equestrian people. But there is a critical difference between nomadic, mounted people on the Asian continent and nomads in Japan, because in Japan stallions were never castrated. Because of this difference alone, some scholars even say that we Japanese cannot possibly be descended from a group of mounted nomads on the continent. On the continent, all the stallions, except for the stud horses, were usually castrated. Unless castrated, they were too hard to handle.

But Japan’s an odd country, and people in old times liked hard-to-handle horses. And when we say “horses” in this case, I should point out that they were quite short and, by today’s standards, like small ponies. Spirited horses could run fast and were good horses to have. So the Japanese tried to master riding horses who wouldn’t listen to them. In other words, all those samurai who appear in famous military epics on steeds with cool names like Surusumi or Ikezuki, well, they were actually all riding notoriously unruly horses.

Horses are usually ridden with a piece of metal called a “bit” in their mouths. And if the rider pulls on this, using reins, it hurts the horse, so the horse tends to obey the rider. But in looking at drawings from the Middle Ages, it is clear that in those days not all horses had bits. If the riders took really good care of their horses, they probably would obey anyway. Now, I don’t know if the people in this area used bits for their horses or not, but if they did, they would have also needed blacksmiths.

The point is that if Hienosoko were a place to round up horses, it would have required quite a few people, so that is probably why the village developed. If you look at the bird’s-eye-view map that I showed earlier, you can see that ruins called the Sunahara have been found in the Tatsuba riverbed. The riverbed is now all cultivated land, but on it people have excavated the remains of a previously unknown and unrecorded estate. It’s said to have been part of a village from the Middle Ages, but in the middle of the main structure there is a central room with a large sunken hearth and several smaller rooms, also with small open hearths. And there are also what appear to have been multiple, granarylike barns.

The most impressive structure is rectangular, with lots of pillars and roof eaves. I’ve personally decided that it was a stable, although it’s not described as such in the History of Fujimi Township. No matter how warm it may have been in the Heian period, in the middle of winter I don’t think they could have kept the horses outside. Horses were a valuable asset, so they would have had to fence them in or somehow shelter them. And to do so for a lot of horses, it seems to me, would have taken quite a large structure and a considerable number of people. Several sites like this have been found, and I think there was also probably a little village like it in Hienosoko too.

Earlier, I showed you a drawing I did of a horse corral, but that was of course done completely from my imagination. I actually intended to do about twenty of these drawings, but I was only able to do three. [laughs] Since I’ve no other choice, I’ll have to explain with words.

So let’s assume the rectangular structure found at the Sunahara site is a stable. And here I’ve drawn a concept sketch of a rectangular building with stones laid out on a split wood board roof (see plate no. 3). The entire area around it is fenced in. This is because I’m assuming they needed to block the wind.

The History of Fujimi Township engages in considerable speculation about how a family, with not all members necessarily being blood relations, might have gathered together in the room with the largest open hearth and eaten meals together. So I drew this illustration assuming the same sort of thing would probably also have occurred in Hienosoko. Right next to Hienosoko there’s a property called Yashikibei. Today it’s almost entirely covered over with resort homes, and I know it’s probably not possible, but if someone were to move away the homes and excavate the area, I’m sure it would be very interesting. [laughs]

There must have been a village at Hienosoko similar to that found at the Sunahara site. I’m sure there were also fields being cultivated there, but since this is an area covered in volcanic ash it’s not a very good spot to grow anything. After World War II, people who settled in the area ran into the same problem. The area looks very fertile, but unless you add a lot of organic material, nothing grows. That’s why this village was used for nomadic grazing.

And this is where it gets interesting. I think the bōmichi was actually not just used to round up horses, but also as a route that ran from Koarama to Ueda. This “I think” thing is amazing, isn’t it? Of course I think so because I want it to be so. [laughs] The bōmichi may have been created by warlord Shingen Takeda as a road on which to move his forces, but even before that, I think it was a route people took to go over the Daimon pass near Lake Shirakaba.

When raising horses, you also need to provide them with salt. And where would that come from? Well, in the old days, all the roads appear to have led in the direction of Ueda. In fact, Ueda was far more developed than Suwa. And if you go there today, the reason is clear. There are also all sorts of shrines and temples in the area because it is part of a large, flat basin. And in the summer it gets so hot you feel like you’re going to expire. It’s the kind of place where you’d think, “Ah, rice’ll probably grow here.” In addition, the Chikuma River runs through the area, and in ancient times it was much easier to travel and transport things on water than on land, so that’s yet another reason that Ueda was more developed so long ago.

To the people of Ueda, the area around here must have seemed like the end of the earth. The Kōshū highway, it’s important to remember, was developed much, much later. It was not until 1600, after the Tokugawa family seized power in Japan and ordered highways built, that it was fully traversable. Up until then, for people around here I’m sure Ueda was the most developed area.

From excavations of sites from Japan’s Middle Ages, we have found what are called naiji or “inner ear” pots. You can see them in the Fujimi Historical Folklore Museum next to the Idojiri Archaeological Museum here. The insides of the pots have hooks, through which loops or strings can be attached, so the pots can be hung over a sunken hearth. They are hōroku, or earthenware pots or pans, used to boil and roast food, to cook beans and dumplings, that sort of thing. And many fragments of these pots, dating back to the Middle Ages, have been found in sites of villages in this area.

But they could not actually make these pots here. In the Jōmon period, even though people were making all that pottery, after the Heian period all the kilns disappear. So where did they get these pots? Someone obviously had to bring them here. I think they probably brought them from Mino. But they may also have brought them from Ina, Ueda, or Kōfu. Some people say that they may even have brought them from the Bōsō Peninsula.

In ancient times, people truly moved around a lot, especially to transport things. In a story that I recently read about the Kamakura period, a merchant from Nara was carrying the heads of shovels and rakes all the way to Shinshū to sell. He deposited the money he earned from selling them with someone, but then he was later killed by bandits while attempting to cross over Usui Pass. A document, or petition, survives, indicating that a dispute later erupted over whom the money (which he had deposited) really belonged to, and it shows how far merchants were traveling by foot.

So the point is that what we call the bōmichi road was not just used by armies and horses but by lots of ordinary people too. My own mother was raised in a place called Ueno, north of Shichiri-iwa in Nirasaki. She often used to tell me stories she remembered about how travelers with packhorses would pass by her house in the morning. Sometimes, when she saw them resting, she would ask, “Gosh, aren’t you fellas cold?” whereupon they would respond, “Naw, we drank lots of daikon radish miso soup before we left in the morning, so we don’t feel the cold.” It shows, again, how many people used to travel through this area. And they must have transported all sorts of goods.

In the village of Hienosoko, people didn’t just raise horses; I’m sure they were also engaged in a type of transportation business. I don’t know if the word “transportation” really fits in this case, but by the Edo period, transporting things by horse and getting paid money for it was called chūma, and the same system probably also existed in far earlier times. And this also helps us understand why there would have been a village for so long in this area.

I once saw a documentary on television about China. It showed a town on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River where people make a living traveling, by boat, to and from a large town downstream. When returning upstream, the boats are hauled by rope. When going downstream, they just glide along with the boatmen poling, calling out to people along the way in a loud voice, asking them if they need anything—in effect making the rounds of their customers along the way. Some might ask the boatmen to buy them “some fancy clothes.” Or others might give them rice and ask them to sell it for them, “and use the money to buy my children some shoes.” So off the boatmen go to do their buying and selling, and then they haul their boats back. In the documentary I saw, one boatman bought a fancy dress for an older woman. It turned out to be not at all her size, but she nonetheless valiantly tried to put it on, complaining, “This is a bit too tight.” In reply, he insisted, “Nah, it fits you like a charm, lady.” [laughs]

I like to imagine the same sort of thing happening around here in the old days. Hienosoko, at the foothills of Mt. Yatsugatake, was on the route connecting Ueda and Kōshū. It was far more than an impoverished and freezing little village. In fact, it would have been alive with the sounds of neighing horses, of iron being forged, and of people coming and going, carrying goods from far away.

Thinking this way, we’re far less inclined to regard Hienosoko as a poor village where it was awfully tough to live, and we’re able to see it in a completely different light. If you go to Hienosoko now, the area below the springs is now all soggy and it’s hard to imagine anyone living there, but there is one place where they might have. If you take someone with fairly evolved senses with you, I’m sure they’d say, “Hmm, I sense the presence of something here.” [laughs] I personally really like that spot. I always sense the “presence of something” there. [laughs]

I think there used to be a fine Shinto shrine there. The structure is of course gone, but the citizens of nearby Okkoto still carefully clean it, and you can clearly see the outlines of the shrine.

Later on, Shingen Takeda’s forces in Kōshū became much stronger, and in the process of swallowing up first Suwa, then Ueda, and then advancing all the way to Kawanakajima, they clearly converted the old bōmichi route into a military road. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Hienosoko was at its zenith then, but there’s no doubt that its role in helping the military was extremely large, and that this was probably when there was the most coming and going of men and horses. After Shingen swallowed up Suwa, he built a road connecting Suwa and Kōshū, and after that much of the activity shifted there.

For Hienosoko, the most decisive factor in all of this was the eventual defeat of the Shingen forces and the start of the Tokugawa period. At that point, the Kōshū highway was completed, and it became possible to travel straight from the shogunal capital in Edo through Kōshū all the way to Suwa, and the route between Ueda and Koara was abandoned. In the process, the original Hienosoko disappeared.

Mysteriously, somehow, Hienosoko moved over to nearby Tatezawa, and there are of course a variety of theories as to why this happened. These theories are of course interesting, but because they’re really only rumors I shall refrain from discussing them here. [laughs] The people who moved to Tatezawa, and from Tatezawa to Okkoto, were people in the chūma, or the packhorse business of transporting goods.

Japanese villages in the old days are always said to have been farming villages filled with farmers, but as the historian Yoshihiko Amino-san has often written, in reality there were few farmers and lots of other people doing all sorts of other things. Some were in the horse transport business, some were loom weavers, some were running taverns, and some were even selling oil. The Japanese word for farmer today is hyakushō, but it is written with the Chinese characters for “one hundred surnames.” According to Amino-san, this is because it originally included a hundred, or a variety of, occupations. So today, when people think of the old villagers as all being farmers, they have the wrong impression.

An example of all this is the village of Tsukue. Because Tsukue was alongside the Tokaido highway, it had three or so taverns. In the History of Fujimi Township, the writers mention going through the inventories in three surviving storehouses attached to shops that went out of business in the Edo period; they found that the storehouses contained not only grains, but all sorts of things, including sake, stationery goods, and old cloth. In fact, they contained an enormous quantity of all sorts of wares. So the idea that people didn’t have much merchandise in the Edo period is a complete lie—vast quantities of goods were being moved around, and vast quantities were also being bought and sold.

The village of Hienosoko eventually came to an end, but why, then, is it still talked about and commemorated with a monument on the site? Throughout the Edo period, Okkoto continued to pay taxes for Hienosoko because, for the people of Okkoto, Hienosoko was an important source of water. Even when they no longer needed the water for horses used in the transportation business, they continued to need it for the rice paddies below. So in order to secure this water, they continued to bear the tax burden, and in the Edo period Okkoto became the biggest village in the area.

When I read about the history of Okkoto, I was so impressed by the way the villagers assiduously and carefully managed their affairs. I came to the conclusion that it was probably a reason that the villages in the Fujimi area had so few deaths during the Great Tenmei Famine (1782–1788). This is an extraordinary thing. Terrible famines occurred several times in the old days, but the villages in this area survived. In order to do so, they had to take extreme measures, for example, “making no sake for three years,” or “stopping all alcohol consumption,” and they thus gained a reputation among the surrounding villages as being miserably poor. But it is through such measures that they were able to prevent a bad situation from turning into a disaster.

What’s even more interesting is that the villages in the Fujimi area had no local lord to rule over them. They each ran themselves. There was a lord in Suwa, but the villages themselves were under the direct control of the lord of the entire domain. It is said that when the daughter of the lord in Kōshū was married to the lord in Suwa, as part of the betrothal money, the area became part of Shinshū. But since it was a border area, the locals had no samurai lord reigning over them. And since they had no immediate lord, they could trade directly with the domain.

I find reading these old documents fascinating. They show that in those days the headquarters of the feudal domain would have been almost what we think of today as government offices. For the domains, dealing with all the various people they had to oversee must have been a real headache. There are many references to this in the History of Fujimi Township.

Of course, one thing we have to be very careful about here is that, from the time they were small, the children of the local shōya, or village headman, were taught to write about how “poor” they were or how they were “suffering.” They could beautifully execute sentences such as “The crops are failing” or “We don’t have enough food to eat.” It reminds me of when I was once an officer in a labor union. It was the same then, because even if we weren’t really suffering or thinking things were so bad, we would still write demands like, “Our pay is so low that we can’t afford to eat!” [laughs] So I suspect that some of these old documents are the same and that we probably have to discount, to a certain extent, what the writers are saying.

A road to transport horses

I’ve diverted a bit from my main theme, so please now take another look at the bird’s-eye-view illustration I showed you earlier. I’d like to encourage everyone to someday take a walk in the area where Hienosoko village used to be. When you do, if you imagine a village there long ago, this lovely place will truly come alive. At some point, I suspect the Idojiri Archaeological Museum will probably start doing its own excavations there. [laughs]

In addition, near the areas known as Nishiyama or Nishikubo, you can see the former site of where a headman, Fuseya, used to live. And this site is extremely important. It relates to the routes once used to transport horses from the Kashiwazaki pastures to Kyoto. There’s no way someone like me could hike in that area anymore, but there is a route that climbs from a village called Kinoma to Mt. Nyūgasa. There’s also a route that comes up from the direction of Gōdo. And from there you can go to Ina. In addition to being used to take horses to the capital in Kyoto, Ina was an important market for people bringing horses from Shinshū to sell, so there must have been a route for that too. And extrapolating from that, I’m sure there would also have been pottery from Mino.

If you go to Kinoma, there’s a Kannon temple there. This was built as a rest stop for people coming across the mountains, and there is an inscription there to the effect that the temple was later transported down to the foothills because fewer people were traveling by it. But this shows that there were actually lots of routes in this area.

And in the same area, you’ll see the site of the old Fuseya estate. According to documents that survive from the Edo period, this was once a huge manor of over one hundred square meters. So there’s no doubt that the area around it was a major hub. In fact, I believe that the area around Kinoma was an important site for the routes to both Suwa and Ina.

If you keep this in mind when you visit the area, it will make villages such as Yasumido and Kinoma all the more interesting. Unfortunately, few people walk there, and most just fly by in cars, but if you get out of your car and stroll around, while I don’t want to exaggerate too much, you’ll be able to relate to the travails of our ancestors, and I recommend it highly.

A fascinating area

I find both the village of Okkoto and the kanji characters that make up its name particularly interesting. In fact, in one of my films, I once unilaterally decided to call a giant boar-god character Okkotonushi or “Lord Okkoto,” but of course that doesn’t mean there are really wild boars in Okkoto.

Okkoto is truly mysterious. I know some people who call it “Ottoko,” but in the old days they also used to write it with the characters for otsu (meaning “second party in an agreement,” or “strange” or “mysterious”) and kotsu (bones). But I don’t know why. I’ve never found an answer in the books that I have read. Why did they use the character for “bones”? One of my friends says it’s because there used to be a shaman there and that he roasted bones and made prophesies based on the cracks that appeared in the bones. But who knows? [laughs]

In the summer, the Fujimi township has what they call the Okkō matsuri, or festival, and when I learned this I thought, “Aha!” and for a couple of weeks I felt sure it was connected, but delusions usually turn out to be delusions, and the local people quickly dispelled that one of mine. [laughs] So I’m back to square one.

In thinking this way, and in going to visit the archaeological museums in Nirasaki and Kōfu and trying to see if they have the same style of naiji pots, all sorts of things start to seem to make sense. But of course I’m not a very serious person, so once I’m in the throes of a delusion I tend to think, “Aha!” or “Of course!” and not seriously study matters any further. [laughs] Still, in going about looking at things around here this way, I feel as though I get a much better picture of the area.

What used to be pastures in ancient times is now all forest. In front of Mt. Amagoi, in Japan’s Southern Alps, there is a place called Ōkurotōge Pass, and if you look out from there in this direction, it’s a truly impressive sight, for you just see a few villages and rice paddies scattered in the midst of vast greenery. It makes you marvel how humans could have created all this—how they could have deliberately brought all these trees here and planted them. People talk all the time these days about global warming and how we have to reduce our carbon emissions, but the forests in this area must be helping a great deal. So don’t go around thinking that planting a Japanese larch forest was a complete mistake.

On a personal note, when I built my own studio we used laminated wood. This requires creating lumber by laminating layers of wood together, and there’s a place in Suwa where they do this with Japanese larch, so I had them make it there. The point is, again, that larch can be really useful. During the Nagano Olympics, a skating rink made from laminated Shinshū larch was in the news, and since the laminates made it possible to create such a giant wooden structure, I am sure it could be used for far more buildings. In the future, there should be many more applications in ordinary residential housing too.

Going further forward with my delusions, I must say that, unfortunately, I do not expect Japan’s economy to recover soon. Things will probably continue in their negative fashion, but it’s also possible to imagine that we may be entering a new age of agriculture. For example, when walking through rice paddies and stopping to chat with the occasional solitary old man or woman working there, they often say that they’d prefer not to burn their rice straw because it could be used as good compost. The point is that the way of farming that we’ve struggled with up until now has finally reached its limit. We have to give up some of our rice paddies, to come up with some innovative ideas, and change the way we have been doing things.

These days, Tokyo sometimes gets so hot that you feel like you’re going to expire. When the Meteorological Agency says that it’s 34 degrees Celsius, in the city it’s really 38 or 39 degrees. When you walk around areas covered with concrete, it’s so hot you sometimes wonder if maybe an earthquake might not occur and wonder if it might not even bring some relief. [laughs] Children are closer to the ground than adults, so I feel even sorrier for them, but I feel the sorriest of all for the dogs. [laughs] Global warming is by definition taking place on a global basis, but in Tokyo it is truly incredible.

So, this place has a future. Don’t be in a hurry to sell your land. [laughs] It will become more and more valuable to use, and I want to encourage you to use it in a wise way. Don’t cut down the larch forests, because if you do it’s all over. Cutting them won’t even bring you that much money, I’m sorry to say. And as they sometimes say, the only way to make money is by doing bad things, so forget about it. [laughs] Seriously, though, this is truly good land here. And the water tastes mighty good too.

It’s also amazing to think about all the effort people have put into making the waterways and irrigation channels around here. Water flows from far away. Just try digging a channel yourself. If you aren’t careful, the water will never reach where you want it. And when you think of it this way, it’s clear that in the old days the villages around here also had some very clever engineers.

It’s when we revive the history and the geography and other dormant aspects of these ancient villages that this area really comes alive. In Aomori Prefecture, there is a historical site called Sannaimaruyama. It’s where people made a huge fuss when a large-scale Jōmon-era site was first discovered. When ruins and artifacts from the era were found, everyone in the area suddenly seemed so energized. [laughs] Why, when I went there, they even had Jōmon-era ramen. [laughs]

I’m not suggesting that you can revive a whole town with Jōmon ramen, but I do think that it’s extremely important for us to feel as though the land we live on, and where we were born and raised, is a good place. And in order to do so, we need to know about it. For me, the more I got to know about the history of the pastures and other aspects of the area, the more the image I had of Hienosoko as a “terribly impoverished place” changed. I became convinced that Hienosoko is, in fact, “a very good place.”

I was asked to speak here today by the Idojiri Archaeological Museum, which is so passionately involved with the mid-Neolithic period, and I know that I’ve veered wildly off the expected topic. But for those of you who do have a copy of the History of Fujimi Township, rest assured that it’s all right to just scan the parts that you are interested in. In doing so, I’m sure you’ll still find it fascinating. After all, even I haven’t read the entire thing. [laughs]

For example, how should we interpret all the earthenware at the Idojiri Archaeological Museum? Well, the museum director, Kobayashi-san, has put forth a daring theory. I think his theory is probably correct, and it’s something I suspect never even occurred to Eiichi Fujimori.

Judging from the shape of the stoneware and earthenware vessels, as well as other factors, Fujimori-san hypothesized that the original inhabitants here were not primarily hunters, but that they were engaged in agriculture. As a result, our ideas about agriculture in those days have changed considerably. Fujimori-san also posited that the Jōmon people began engaging in agriculture not because they were particularly advanced, but because they had to, because of global changes in the earth’s climate. Apparently, hunter-gatherer populations only have to work about two hours a day; that’s right, it’s only two hours a day. For comparison, people like me work twelve hours a day. In the studio. In other words, we’re six times busier! [laughs]

Well, what, then, did these ancient people do with all their free time? I think they probably played music and put on makeup. In fact, if you look at tribes of people often referred to as “primitive,” everyone always seems awfully relaxed. I’m convinced the Jōmon people also spent a lot of time doing their makeup, working on their garments, and doing a variety of handiwork. We’ve all seen drawings of Neolithic people wearing poncholike sackcloths, standing around looking out of it, yet I’m convinced they never looked that ridiculous. Since the Jōmon people were able to mold such beautiful clay pots, I’m sure they must have also decorated their bodies.

Moreover, in the Jōmon period, Japanese Neolithic culture was apparently quite extraordinary, with people living in small family units (of three or four members) creating villages—apparently quite rare in a global context. The Jōmon people knew how to farm. They knew, but in general they still continued a hunting and gathering lifestyle. They also at one point grew rice. But then they stopped.

In reading books about the history of food, Akita Prefecture is truly amazing. They eat all sorts of things there. And Nagano Prefecture’s amazing too. People still eat insects here! [laughs] I recently found myself in a bit of a fix when talking to someone who raised honeybees. He suddenly handed me some bee pupae, saying, “Want to try some?” Of course, I did as suggested. [laughs] Frankly, I’m sure that the Jōmon people regularly ate bee pupae too, and that’s why the custom remains in this area. It’s a fact that I find extraordinarily interesting.

In other words, the way I see it, it’s important to avoid a fixed view of things. To not assume that people were poor here, or well-off there, or that some people are advanced while others are backward. By opening our minds when we look at the places where we live, we can see them in a new and more open light.

On the Occasion of the Republication of Three Works by Yoshie Hotta

Hotta-san was like an outcrop of rock, soaring above the wide ocean. I have been saved by Hotta-san several times in the past, when I was swept out to sea by the tides and lost my sense of where I was.

Hayao Miyazaki

Illustration drawn for the obi (advertising band of paper placed on books) of Yoshie Hotta’s Rojō no hito and Seija no kōshin (Man of the Streets and March of the Saints) as well as Jidai to ningen (People and Their Era) published by Iwanami Shoten, February 29, 2004. Ultimately, only the text was used on the book’s obi.

Two Pages Are Fine. Just Draw Them!

Ano hata wo ute!: Animage keppūroku (Fire on That flag!: The Shocking History of Animage Magazine). Ōkura Shuppan, November 25, 2004

I owe a lot to Hideo Ogata, the first editor of Animage magazine. I’m a chronically slow person, and the only thing that made it possible for me to continue working on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was his dedication and encouragement.

The instant I finally finished the first installment of the Nausicaä manga series, my animation work, which had long been dormant, suddenly started up. And I was in charge of the entire production. Now, I had always believed that anyone in charge of an animated production should never simultaneously do personal work on the side, so I asked Ogata-san to release me from drawing the manga series, even though I had just started it. It wasn’t simply that I couldn’t manage two jobs at once; it was also because I felt like I was being crushed by the pressure of having to turn out the manga series.

I kept telling Ogata-san that I couldn’t possibly continue with the series, but he kept trying to persuade me, in a ridiculous fashion, of the opposite. Do anything, any way you want, he would say, just keep drawing the series. Even two pages a month is fine, just draw them. Now, no matter how you look at it, giving readers only two pages a month would be quite an insult, but he was entirely serious. And when someone tells you, with a straight face, something that completely defies logic, it conversely has a strange power of persuasion. Ultimately, I gave into Ogata-san’s insistence and began leading the very double life that I had so adamantly refused to lead.

When I created an animated version of Nausicaä, it was also Ogata-san who made the rounds of investors, persuading them that my obviously minor manga work in his magazine was really a huge hit. He himself had no idea how many paperback volumes of the story had been sold, and I don’t think he was even interested in knowing.

To this day, Ogata-san holds the unshakeable conviction that one should disregard risk or cost and always do whatever one wants to do. And of course the person who made him editor-in-chief of Animage, the late Yasuyoshi Tokuma, former president of the publisher, Tokuma Shoten, was the same sort of person.

Ogata-san’s fixations and obsessions opened up a path for me to succeed. His convention-defying decisiveness and dynamism helped make everything—from Nausicaä to the formation of Studio Ghibli—happen. Both Ogata-san and the president of Tokuma are the type of people one rarely encounters, and in my life, I will be forever thankful that I did.

Ogata-san, may you please live forever.

ENDNOTES

1 These are the young girls who come every summer to visit Miyazaki-san’s studio—the yamagoya or “mountain cabin.”

2 Built in 1883 in Hibiya, Tokyo, Rokumeikan was at the time one of the most impressive Western-style structures in Japan. It was created during the Meiji era (1868–1912) by the government as a place to socialize with Westerners, in hopes of renegotiating unequal treaty agreements the government had signed with Western powers. Dances and other events were often held for Japanese and foreign diplomats and high-society people.

3 Refers to Michizane Sugawara, a scholar and politician of the Middle Heian period (901–1000). He is worshipped as the “god” or patron of the arts.

4 An illustrated scroll created in the Muromachi era (1392–1507). A variety of yokai, or goblins and ghosts, appear one after another, showing us how Japanese of the time viewed yokai. This scroll was also a seminal influence on the development of the entire genre of yokai drawings.

5 A simplified drawing of a face design on a cloth, called a zōmen, used in old court dances and music. The ones in Kasuga Taisha shrine, in Nara Prefecture, are said to have been created in the Edo Period (1603–1868). In Spirited Away, the spirit known as Kasuga is shown wearing such a mask.

6 This was an important line in Miyazaki’s previous work, Princess Mononoke. In that film, the old Wisewoman of the village told the young Ashitaka, who had been cursed by the tatari-gami spirit, that he had to travel to a distant land, where, if he “viewed things with an unclouded eye,” he might well find a way to remove the curse. —Editorial staff of Shūkan Kinyōbi.

7 Hellenic-influenced Buddhist art.

8 A national facility for the treatment of Hansen’s disease, in Higashi Murayama city, Tokyo. First formed in 1909 as the prefectural Zenshō hospital (a public treatment center), and turned into a national facility in 1941. Covers a total area of 350,000 square meters. Occupants of the facility are active in a movement to restore and preserve the buildings on the grounds, and to create a commemorative “human rights forest” incorporating the lush surrounding greenery.

I’ve Always Wanted to Create a Film About Which I Could Say, “I’m Just Glad I Was Born, so I Could Make This”

From a press conference at the 62nd Venice International Film Festival
In the garden of Hotel La Meridiana, Venice Lido, Venice, September 8, 2005

—Tell us how it feels to have been awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

MIYAZAKI: I always thought it was something given to old people at the end of their careers, so at first I didn’t like the idea. [laughs] But then the festival director, Marco Müller, told me that “Clint Eastwood was given the same Golden Lion award and still kept making films.” [laughs] He said this with such passion that I finally told him, “All right then, I’ll accept.”

—When you were given your award, Marco Müller said that your work “brings out the spirit of our inner child,” and we’re wondering what your thoughts on that are.

MIYAZAKI: While always saying that I have to, or want to, make films for children, in reality I often forget about them. And that’s how I wind up creating films like Porco Rosso or even Howl’s Moving Castle. [laughs] But I still do want to show my films to children. If I can clearly answer the question of “Who do you want to show this film to?” then I can make the films. It’s something I always need to be certain about.

—In 2002, you won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and in 2003 you won an Oscar at the Academy Awards, but you didn’t attend either of the ceremonies. Why did you decide to attend the Venice International Film Festival to receive an award this time?

MIYAZAKI: I hate the idea of sitting around a table, not knowing whether you’re going to get an award or not, and waiting for the announcement. It just seems totally contrived. Of course, I realize it’s an entertaining spectacle for the media. [laughs] For the Berlin festival, I decided that if the decision had already been made in advance, that I would go. In a way, making films is like standing naked in front of people. And the work of a director is really quite exhausting. I don’t want to be in the pompous position of having to pretend to be fair, or to congratulate the person next to me who wins the award, so I always go way out of my way to avoid such places. [laughs]

—When Spirited Away won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was an example of animation competing on the same level playing field as live-action films. It seemed to have opened a new door for animation, but after that we unfortunately haven’t seen many new animated works that can stand on their own or compare to live-action works.

MIYAZAKI: I’ve no intention of trying to compare animated and live-action films or of getting involved in any competition between the two. And that’s partly because in current live-action films, there are lots of elements that could be called animation. In other words, you could say that live-action films themselves are already increasingly becoming a type of animation.

When we were making the TV series Heidi, Girl of the Alps, we always referred to it as a “film.” [laughs] I don’t know what people around us think, but we’ve always thought we were making “films” rather than cartoons. Even though we’re always looking at drawings instead of live action, after a while, in our heads it’s as though real, live humans are moving about. That’s the way we see it. And that’s certainly true for me as well. Even though we’re just looking at drawings, after a while an entire world is created. When the project is over, it seems as though that world really existed somewhere, and still exists. It transcends drawings. I often tell our staff that they’re not just creating drawings. They have to draw believing there’s a world out there; if they just try to make drawings, they’ll never get beyond that point.

—The worlds that you create are also very popular in Europe. Why do you think that is?

MIYAZAKI: Just imagine how much we’ve been influenced by Europe. I’ve led a totally different life than my father. I can’t sing hauta, the short love songs popular in the Edo period, or the longer form nagauta, often sung in kabuki theater; I’ve abandoned everything that was transmitted down to me and lived a life steeped in European culture. And in the process, people like me have tried to figure out where to put down roots. But if you consider how much literature, art, films, political philosophy, and ways of thinking we’ve had to accept from Europe, it’s only logical that when we create something, Europeans would accept it. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Europeans like my films. On the contrary, the fact that there’s been such an increase in European fans of Japanese animation makes me think that Europe is stuck in even more of a rut than I had thought. [laughs]

—How do you feel about Howl’s Moving Castle being released in Italy tomorrow?

MIYAZAKI: I try not to pay any attention to that sort of thing. And the reason is because I find it ultimately distracting. I’m the sort of person who really worries about people’s reactions. So I try not to get too close to that. It’s true of watching films in theaters and of film festivals too; I’m probably twice as sensitive to people’s reactions to my work as most would be, and I don’t want to be distracted by that, so I try as much as possible to avoid it. You know, if I didn’t enjoy entertaining people, I wouldn’t be in this business. But when I see people who don’t enjoy what I’ve created, it frankly breaks my heart. So I don’t even want to watch when they’re showing my films in theaters.

At film screenings, it’s not so bad if I have to speak before the film starts, but after it’s over, if I have to say something in public, I’m the sort who’s afraid the audiences might start throwing tomatoes or raw eggs at me. [laughs] Japanese audiences are very polite, so they at least go through the motions of clapping, but I’m always afraid of what they might really be thinking. I’m quite the coward. I think all film directors probably are. There are a lot of us out there who are shy and timid. But because of that we also notice all sorts of things. [laughs]

—That’s surprising to hear.

MIYAZAKI: It shouldn’t be. You can’t make a film if you’re the type who never worries about the details and goes about too self-confidently all the time.

—Both Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Future Boy Conan were shown in Europe, so many people are already familiar with your animation.

MIYAZAKI: I suspect that most people in Europe don’t even realize that we made those films. I hear lots of people say, “What? I thought those were made in Europe!” Or that they’re “shocked to learn they’re made by Japanese.”

I was at first afraid we’d run into problems if Heidi were ever shown in Switzerland. We tried quite hard to draw everything right when we made it, but there’s no way to get everything right just by studying some reference materials and doing a little bit of location scouting. So we always worried that we’d inadvertently make some ridiculous mistakes, the way, when we Japanese watch movies about Japan made by foreigners, we notice they sometimes have silly scenes of people walking on tatami-mat floors while wearing geta—that sort of thing.

—I saw the Heidi exhibit at the Ghibli Museum, and I could tell how much detailed research you did for the film.

MIYAZAKI: Well, that’s all thanks to Paku-san (Isao Takahata), the director. Without Paku-san, Heidi never would have turned out the way it did. He was the only one who could figure out how to adapt the original story. Now, if you ask if everything in the film comes from the original story, the answer is no, it’s completely different. Our Heidi has been given a completely different meaning, and that’s really one of Paku-san’s great achievements in this series.

—So as director, Isao Takahata was a major force in the production?

MIYAZAKI: From my experience, one of the most important things for a production is to have someone who’s passionate about it and ambitious, because that’s what makes it possible to mobilize both people and resources. But first, you have to have someone with passion.

After this film festival is over, I’ll be going to visit the Aardman studios in the UK. We’re hoping to feature an exhibit of their work at the Ghibli Museum. Aardman basically started out when two starving young artists holed up in a garage to do clay animation together, and then gradually friends and colleagues joined them. They didn’t have to sign up with a large production, and they didn’t have to go out and line up sponsors. So one of the important messages they have for us is that, even on a film, you still can start out as an individual as long as you really exert yourself. And that’s especially important for us in Japan to take note of. Joining Ghibli, for example, doesn’t mean anything in itself. The important thing is for people to start making what they want to make through their own effort. And if they do that, “doors will open.” But of course I should qualify that by saying that you still need “talent, effort, and luck.” [laughs] And luck is an important talent. I don’t think that’s changed at all in the twenty-first century.

—So you’re basically telling young people to “be passionate”?

MIYAZAKI: Well, I’ve yet to see an example of where telling someone who doesn’t have passion for something that they must be passionate makes them passionate. Some people are passionate, and I hope this exhibit will make them want to try doing something themselves. Plenty of people out there just think, “Well, it probably won’t work,” before they’ve even tried.

There’s been a huge increase in the number of young people who want to create visuals. And of course many of them also want to get friendly with computers and create something interesting. Now I obviously don’t think computers can become our friends. There are still some very interesting things—some quite simple—that can be done with a pencil. Of course, it’s no use for me to just say that some interesting things can be done. I just hope that young people realize that they “have to do it themselves.”

—Director Tim Burton reportedly said of your work that “In this computer age, I find it amazing that Hayao Miyazaki still draws by hand.” Do you think that was one of the reasons you won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement?

MIYAZAKI: At Ghibli we actually use plenty of computers in a variety of different ways. But at the same time we have staff members on hand who also understand the advantages of an analog approach. The appeal of an analog approach is actually quite connected to human physiology. And the Ghibli computer graphics staff do all sorts of things in the hope of eventually being able to express that physiological element with computers.

—Creating feature-length animation must be physically and mentally exhausting. After Princess Mononoke, you announced that you were going to retire. What are your thoughts about that now?

MIYAZAKI: If I were going to retire, that would have been the best time to do it. I probably could have started doing all sorts of new things then. [laughs] I think it’s important to start enjoying the retired life as early as possible. And that would have been my best chance.

—Did you decide to keep going because Ghibli’s grown so much larger?

MIYAZAKI: No, the biggest reason is because I’ve got this nasty part of me that always makes me want to do a little bit more. I was worn to the bone after Mononoke, and I really thought it was all over for me. I was convinced hardly anyone would come to see the film, so I thought I’d never have a chance to make another one. But ironically, as a result of thinking this way and having given it my all, people actually did come to see the film, and I did get another chance. To tell you the truth, we put so much into the film, in terms of both money and manpower, that we were prepared for Ghibli to go under. The human investment was huge. I often begged the company not to make such impossible demands on the animators. Even our producer, Toshio Suzuki, told me, “Miya-san, this is the last time you’ll ever get to spend this much money on a project.” [laughs] I thought I would have no choice but to retire after making the film, because we had convinced ourselves that not many people would come to see it. And with that, I also thought it would be conceited of me to think about making the next one. I’m not kidding about this, either.

—But you nonetheless did come up with an idea for another project that you wanted to do, right?

MIYAZAKI: One thing about film directors is that once you become one, you’ll always be one. You’ve never heard of “former film directors,” or “retired film directors,” right? It’s a job that elicits all sorts of bonnō, or worldly desires and passions in the Buddhist sense, and no matter how many years you work as a director, you never become a more wonderful human being. It’s a job in which bonnō just increases. [laughs] It’s true of directors even at eighty or ninety. There’s no change.

—Is there any particular message that you still want to convey to people?

MIYAZAKI: You mean what I should say for appearances’ sake here? Or how I really feel? [laughs]

—Both, please.

MIYAZAKI: It’s a bit embarrassing to confess how I really feel, but I’m always thinking about how many fascinating things there are in the world. There are so many beautiful and wonderful things—even things I haven’t yet seen—that I’d love to introduce to children. That’s what it’s all about. I’m not limiting myself to the medium of film. There are lots of beautiful things outside the world of film. [laughs] That’s what I believe.

—In making your films and in looking forward, is there any one particular theme you feel is most important?

MIYAZAKI: Well, to put it in high-sounding words, I want to touch children’s souls. And their souls consist of far more than just purity and innocence and gentleness. These aspects of children are of course important, but I’m talking about something much more basic. Children are filled with things more violent, things they inherited while still in the womb, things so ancient that only their DNA remembers. And these things are particularly present in babies. Of course, in the process of receiving all sorts of training, children become boring adults. Or, perhaps I should say, they are forced to become boring adults. Now, I know that if children didn’t go through this process and jumped straight to the adult stage, we’d have huge problems. But I still think there’s something about children’s souls that adults cannot easily approach. I would love to be able to make films that move children at this level.

I’m not saying I personally want to revert to having a childlike spirit; that doesn’t work if you don’t have children around you. But the interesting thing is that children are being born around me, among the Ghibli staff and others. People keep getting married, and they keep having babies. And when I see these young children, it makes me think I might be able to create another film for them. Of course, to the children being born into this age, the future of which is so in doubt, I find myself wanting on one hand to tell them, “Well, you certainly picked tough times,” but more often I feel like saying, “Thank you for being born.” Frankly, I want to tell them “Congratulations!” or “Welcome!” Yet there’s always the issue of how to best create a bridge for them to the real world we live in. Because it’s not easy to build that bridge. All I can do is to create films that help children feel glad that they’ve been born. That’s what I’d love to be able to do. In so saying, though, I get further and further away from the normal formulae and normal styles of making films. It’s a big problem. [laughs]

The Question Is Whether You Really Find It Interesting or Not: A Talk with Director Nick Park at the 18th Tokyo International Film Festival

October 23, 2005, at the Academyhills Tower Hall, on the 49th floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower

He started making animation all by himself

—Miyazaki-san, we’ve heard that you, a fellow director, might have seen Nick Park’s latest work, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

MIYAZAKI: Yes. But the easiest and most obvious thing is for audiences to see it and form their own opinions. Instead, why don’t I mention why I became interested in Aardman studio, and then I’d like to hear what Mr. Nick Park has to say.

People often think that filmmaking requires investing a lot of money to create a studio, hiring the necessary staff, and then making the film. But Aardman is quite different. It began with just two people—Peter Lord and David Sproxton—who simply wanted to create animation. From what I’ve heard, they started working on their kitchen table. And then Nick Park joined them. And he had already been creating animation from childhood. That’s something I’d really like to hear about.

PARK: I was twelve years old, and I’d wanted to be a cartoonist since I was a small boy. And one day I discovered that my mother’s home movie camera, an 8mm home movie camera, could take animation frames, single frames. I hadn’t read any books or anything on animation, and I didn’t really know how to draw any cel animation, like Disney, because I didn’t know where to buy the materials. But there was always what we call Plasticine, or children’s modeling clay, around the house, so it was very available. I started experimenting by myself, and from the age of twelve until going to college, I made a handful of six or seven little films.

MIYAZAKI: From what I’ve heard, you began making “Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out” (1989) for your college graduation project. But despite getting the college to buy the equipment you needed, you didn’t complete the film in time for graduation. [laughs]

PARK: Yes, that’s true. I’d completely forgotten about that, but you’re right. [laughs] I was filming for about two to three years at college on this 35mm camera, and then I met Peter and David, who were running Aardman Animations in Bristol, and they invited me to come and work for them. I kept refusing them because I thought I’d never finish my own film. But eventually, they said why don’t you come work for us, and we’ll help you make your film part-time if you work on commercials and so forth part-time. And because I was part-time, my own film took another four years, seven years altogether, to make. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: I heard that you started out serving tea at Aardman … [laughs]

PARK: I don’t know if I was in charge of making tea or not, but I did make a lot of it. [laughs] I was so in awe of Peter Lord and David Sproxton and the characters they were creating that I would have done anything to work with them.

MIYAZAKI: I’m not sure if it’s because of their emotional grounding or their non-capitalistic approach, but I am personally so impressed by the fact that Peter and David could discover a talent like you, ask you to come to their studio, and then let you create your own works. Without that kind of generous spirit, I wonder if you would ever have completed “A Grand Day Out.”

PARK: Yes, I agree. And that’s very indicative of Peter and David, because they’ve taken on many different people with very different visions and styles, different directors who want to make different, mainly short films, or commercials, in different styles. Aardman is a very eclectic group because of that.

MIYAZAKI: In Japan, if you want to start making animation, you either join a studio with an already established system, or you’re one of many people who dabble on a small scale using computers and so forth. But unfortunately, if we look at the works that result, they don’t seem to have anywhere near the awesome persistence or impact of your films. I have to say, I’m so impressed by the way you and the two founders of Aardman took the most roundabout way, yet nonetheless managed to open doors for yourselves.

PARK: Well, thanks. It’s not easier, and it’s still difficult, but in a way, now that Aardman has become established as a studio, we perhaps find it easier to draw finance from various sources for various projects. The clay animation industry has always been a cottage industry from the beginning, and over the years it’s built up a sort of niche market. But yes, I do mean, thanks, that’s a quite a compliment.

—Perhaps this is a good time to ask you as a director, Miyazaki-san. What did you think when you saw Nick Park’s first work?

MIYAZAKI: Well, Nick’s work has a very British style of black humor to it. And I found it terribly refreshing to see that he spent nearly seven years creating a truly independent work, the result being not a fine art piece but pure entertainment. I was frankly astounded. Honest. [laughs] Once in a while, on a sporadic basis, wonderful animation comes out of the United Kingdom—there was Animal Farm (directed by John Halas, 1954), Yellow Submarine (directed by George Dunning, 1968), and so forth—but there’s no pattern to it. [laughs] There’s no consistency to anything between Animal Farm and Yellow Submarine. Then, almost out of nowhere, Wallace & Gromit appears, and it’s like suddenly running into Mr. Bean on the street. [laughs] It’s almost proof to me that there indeed are all sorts of people in the world.

Japan has a population of 120 million people. So we can get by somehow with our domestic market for animation. We can get by without selling our works overseas. Of course, it’s hard to live in such a crowded country, but in terms of being filmmakers, I must say, we’re extremely fortunate to have a domestic market. If you look at neighboring South Korea, they don’t have a large domestic market, and as a result it’s very difficult for them to create theatrical animation just for their domestic market.

Similarly, I think part of Wallace & Gromit’s appeal comes from its being extremely British. Had the creators aimed for an international market, the film would have lost its appeal. And you can say the same thing about what we do. In other words, Nick was himself fully aware of both the risks and the possibilities that joining hands with an American company would present. But I have to say that, personally, Nick, you’re probably better off making the films just in Britain. [laughs] Of course, it’s none of my business, really.

PARK: Yes. Well, I mean, in a way, I come from a tradition that does value individual feelings, an individual style, and that’s what I’ve always tried to create—an individual style and way of seeing things. And I have to say that, just sharing this stage with Mr. Miyazaki in this way, I feel so awestruck that it’s hard for me to concentrate. Because Mr. Miyazaki is so revered in Europe, Britain, and in America. And I think, in the same way, that we idolize someone who is able to keep a very individual vision and—from a Western point of view—a very alternative point of view, and treads a solitary path. That’s so great and admired. As far as working with an American studio goes, I mean to be fair, they knew what they were buying into with Wallace & Gromit, and they were most times very helpful. I think there is a difference in how we see things, and there were sometimes tensions, but we were just stubbornly British about it the whole time.

MIYAZAKI: I’m sure everyone watching Nick-san can tell what an unassuming and gentle person he is. But I’m also sure that he can also be a very stubborn person. As part of the publicity campaign for his film, he’s been traveling around the world ever since the beginning of September, and he hasn’t gone home to the UK at all. Of course, it’s important to publicize his work, but I feel a bit sorry for him. Usually, after a director finally finishes a film, there’s a little time to do nothing and to just space out for a while. And here Nick-san is, forced to spend four months going around the world, and wherever he goes he gets asked the same questions. [laughs] I’d frankly like them to give him a little more time off. [laughs]

PARK: Why, thank you. I’ll tell the studio that—that Mr. Miyazaki says I should take a rest.

MIYAZAKI: Yes, please do.

There’s no escape until you start work on the next film

—Have you ever experienced the same sort of thing, Miyazaki-san?

MIYAZAKI: Well, I just limit myself to Japan, but I’ve found that if I spend a week going here and there, I feel like I’m going out of my mind. Wherever I go, people ask me things like “Why is the hero a pig?” and I get increasingly disgusted, and I start responding that “Well, better a pig than having the hero be a camel, isn’t it?” [laughs] It’s even worse in America. John Lasseter (the director of Toy Story and other animated works) is an incredibly optimistic person. He’s the kind who’s willing to do anything, who will accept anything thrown at him and do sixty interviews in one day. He looks straight at the interviewer in front of him and without so much as a blink launches into a long response. Then, after it’s all over, he … [pantomimes leaning back in exhaustion] Yet when the next interviewer comes in the room he [suddenly straightens up] and his eyes come alive. That’s the business system that the American film world has created, and something I always feel we in Japan shouldn’t try to emulate. [laughs]

—With that kind of life, how is it that such interesting and amazing films are made?

PARK: I wanted to ask Mr. Miyazaki the same question, actually.

MIYAZAKI: I think it’s important to run away. To run away from all the commotion. To not accept interviews. [laughs] I came out today for Nick-san, but after this I won’t meet with anyone for another six months. For the next half year, Nick-san, if you just spend your time dropping in at your studio once in a while, you’ll be able to concentrate on your next film with no problem. I practically have a nervous breakdown after I complete a film, and in my experience it takes at least six months to recover. [laughs]

PARK: That’s great advice, actually. I will tell the people at the studio. Because I’m just amazed by how many movies Mr. Miyazaki has made, each one so individual and so different from the last. And so prolific with ideas, and so detailed and with such quality. I can’t imagine that. Do you have breaks between them? How do you keep staying inspired?

MIYAZAKI: Making films is all about—as soon as you’re finished—continually regretting what you’ve done. When we look at films we’ve made, all we can see are the flaws; we can’t even watch them in a normal way. [laughs] I never feel like watching my own films again. So unless I start working on a new one, I’ll never be free from the curse of the last one. I’m serious. Unless I start working on the next film, the last one will be a drag on me for another two or three years.

—So then you come up with an idea for your next work?

MIYAZAKI: If I’m lucky, I come up with an idea. [laughs] And I run into things that trigger ideas in all sorts of places. For example, when I visited the Aardman studios, I went for a morning walk on the streets of Bristol—without any intention of using the experience in a film—but I suddenly found myself doing some location scouting. I don’t consciously think I have to put a particular experience to use. I normally don’t go location scouting after we’ve decided to make a film; I just wind up observing things as I encounter them. It’s partly because it’s something that doesn’t cost any money. But now I have no intention of making a film set in Britain. Because there’s someone perfectly capable of doing that right here. [laughs]

PARK: Well, a compliment indeed.

—When you put together the plan for a film, what is the most important thing for you?

MIYAZAKI: Nothing gets done unless I personally think it’s interesting and fun to do. It’s all about whether I can encounter, or come up with, something I find really interesting. I’ve never gone about planning a film, thinking, “There’s a demand for this or that, so I’ll put something together to satisfy it.” I’m sure Nick is the same. I’m sure he’s the sort who has to make things he personally believes will be wonderful.

PARK: Yes, I feel very lucky, in a position probably similar to Mr. Miyazaki, in that I can think of an idea and put it to the studio, or nowadays I can call up Jeffrey Katzenberg (film producer and CEO of Dreamworks SKG studios) and say I have an idea and he will arrange a meeting. But it’s very much my own thing, and my own idea and humor, and I just feel very lucky in that it happens to appeal to other people.

MIYAZAKI: When I first visited Aardman, one thing Steve Box (co-director on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) told me, that really impressed me, is that they “wanted to return to the garage.” [laughs] He said, “We want to go back to the garage because it’s too hard to work with so many people.”

PARK: I was wondering, actually, if you feel this way sometimes about feature films, Mr. Miyazaki. On this film, because Steve and I started writing it about five years ago, and then it took about a year and a half to shoot, I found myself often dreaming about the days of working on short films, and how you could then have an idea and see it on the screen within a year.

MIYAZAKI: Well, over thirty years ago, when Isao Takahata and I worked as directors on a TV series for the first time, we really felt like we wanted to change the course of our lives. I remember that we worked as hard as we could, not because we wanted to become rich, but because we saw it as an opportunity—to be able to create more interesting works in the future. Now, whether it really opened up a new avenue for us or not is debatable, but there was nonetheless something unforgettable about that time. And around the same time, about thirty years ago, Peter and David also started making animation in Bristol, in England.

Creating both entertainment and art

—Which do you both come up with first for your films—characters or stories?

PARK: Well, in the case of this film, it was both at the same time. But I’ve heard that, Mr. Miyazaki, you don’t even have a script, whereas we have a script, even though we throw it out, and most of it we are constantly rewriting. I’ve heard that you just work visually. Is that right?

MIYAZAKI: No, that’s not true. I think we probably operate the same way that you do, Nick. By the time we show our work to people, we have continuity sketches and storyboards, so it probably looks like we’re just basing everything off storyboards, but in reality on many days we spend all our time writing.

—Both of you create films with very appealing characters. At what point do you come up with the idea for the characters?

PARK: Do you doodle, Mr. Miyazaki? Because I spend a lot of time doodling. I wonder what your doodles look like.

MIYAZAKI: I definitely doodle, but I spend more time drawing tanks and things like that. [laughs]

PARK: In the case of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Steve Fox and I started writing the story, and were sketching and making rough clay characters at the same time, so that helped inform the writing, because then we could imagine the characters.

MIYAZAKI: In my case, I just work with what I come up with. After all, I can only draw what I can draw. [laughs] So for several of our characters we don’t even have character designs for people to work off. It’s not a method I’d recommend very highly. [laughs]

I think it’s probably the same with Nick-san, but there are so many things that I want to create. I want to create them, but the moment I become obligated to invest money in the production, and then recoup the money, I wind up having to shelve most of what I had originally been thinking about. Obviously, we can’t make a film if it’s deemed to “never make money.” We have to make films where we can say, “There’s no ironclad guarantee that this will make money, but there is a possibility that it will.” And I think that’s probably the fate of all studios. I’m not complaining about it, because we just have to do our best within those limits. I’m sure that Nick-san probably struggles with the same thing.

PARK: I think it is true, and I’m sure this is true for Mr. Miyazaki too. It’s not as though you have to think consciously about how you will entertain. But the way your own vision forms has to be somehow naturally entertaining itself. And yet, how does Mr. Miyazaki keep the individual artistic integrity at the same time? For me there isn’t really a dynamic between being commercial and having artistic integrity. And I learn a lot from watching Mr. Miyazaki’s films. I learn that those two can exist together.

—I think we’re running out of time here, but is there anything you’d both like to say in conclusion?

MIYAZAKI: At the Ghibli Museum we’ve long wanted to host an exhibit on the legend, or story, of Aardman, and preparations for an exhibit are already under way. But we don’t want to just show clay figure characters in the exhibit. We want it to be something that shows how these works emerged from the lives of the creators. Unfortunately, as you may know, there was a fire in the Aardman warehouse recently. So we’re left hanging on tenterhooks right now, wondering if it’ll really be possible to hold the exhibit next year. Still, I’m willing to wait a year or two, or even longer, just to make it happen.1

PARK: I’m actually not sure exactly what got destroyed in the fire. I’m still waiting to hear the exact outcome of it. I know a lot has been destroyed, but some things haven’t. And all the sets from the The Curse of the Were-Rabbit are fortunately safe in a separate exhibition. And there are even the odd things, like the rocket that I built in college for “A Grand Day Out,” that are safe. Some stuff can be rebuilt, some stuff can’t. But I think we will work really hard to sort something out. Because it means a lot for us as a studio to be able to exhibit at the Ghibli Museum.

Nick Park Born 1958 in Preston, Lancashire, England. After attending Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), he entered the National Film and Television School, where he began working on “A Grand Day Out”(1989), which became the first film in the Wallace & Gromit series. Subsequently, he joined Aardman Animations and was able to complete the film. After his second work, “Creature Comforts” (1993), and his third, “Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave” (1995), his first feature-length work in the series, titled Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), won the ASIFA’s 33rd Annie Award and also an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year at the 78th Academy Awards. Other well-known works include Chicken Run (2000).

An Attempt at a Short Film:
Remarks on Accepting the Japan Foundation Award for 2005

October 4, 2005, at the Okura Hotel Tokyo
From Ochikochi (Here and There), vol. 8, published by the Japan Foundation, December 1, 2005

After watching the clip just screened from our film, I have to say that we did make a rather all-round boisterous work. The music blares, people yell, things rattle and creak, all at an amazing volume. And here we are, always making these sorts of films, as though it is our destiny.

Actually, from some time back I had wondered what this story would look like in animation, and now we’re in the process of creating it. For the theater in the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, we only make films that will be screened there, and you have just seen a sample of one of them (“House Hunting”).

I find Japanese to be a truly mysterious language. We have so many onomatopoeic or mimetic words that represent sounds or situations. For example, here I am right now, very dokidoki, or nervous. My heart is dokidoki, pounding, my knees are gatagata, knocking, I’m taratara, dripping perspiration, and my throat is karakara, or parched. There are many such words used in manga, but manga readers just read the text for sound effects as an image; they aren’t really reading the words. The idea for this film was to see what would happen if those words were used in animation.

In the story, a young girl who lives in a noisy, bustling part of the city goes off on a walk with all sorts of things stuffed in her backpack, looking for a new home. When she walks along an old, now-unused path, she comes to a creek, where a spirit, the master of the creek, lives. She gives him an apple to trick him and crosses the creek while he is distracted. The creek is babbling, or making the sound of sarasara, as we might say in Japanese, so the audience actually sees the characters for sarasara on the screen, and the characters flowing down the creek on the water.

It was my first attempt at something like this. Although sarasara is an onomatopoeic term, no matter how hard I thought about it, I wasn’t sure exactly what sort of sound it represents. But if you tell Japanese people that the creek was flowing sarasara, everyone feels as though they understand.

Normally, a film’s sound is made of a mixture of music and sound effects and dialogue. For example, one might have music playing somewhat mournfully, then see a bomb explode and hear a heroine scream. But with this film we took a different approach. We asked the voice talent to add the sounds with almost no rehearsal, in a live format, while looking at the film being shown on the screen.

For example, when lots of cars were passing by, we might have had the voice talent add a variety of sounds in Japanese: gouu, or gaaa, or uwaaa, or gyuun, or dorororo; but no one can say these all at once, so in this case they’re just saying uooo or gouuu. But if you use these sounds and then look at the animation imagery, you would find yourself overwhelmed by lots of busy text or Japanese characters. So you’re left with just the effect of an extraordinary racket.

This was quite a new discovery for us. We were very nervous when adding in the voices, so we actually recorded a variety of them, thinking that if we overlaid them for depth, that it would really convey the sound of the city. To our surprise, all we needed was someone saying uooo or gouuu. There was no need to add any other special sound effects to stimulate the viewers’ ears. As a result, we started actively removing many of the voices that we had originally added, and we turned our film into one filled with gaps. Unlike our past films, where the music would be playing at a high volume, and you would suddenly expect a particularly moving scene, in this one you just see drawings accompanied by silence. But in this case, it worked surprisingly well.

I’m eager to see how small children react to this technique. And these days we also have many visitors from overseas who come to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, so I’m also eager to see how they will receive our strange film, especially since they cannot read Japanese phonetic scripts such as hiragana and katakana. And, of course, they may say they don’t understand anything. [laughs]

So today, in talking about my work related to the Japan Foundation, I’ve refrained from giving you a normal speech and expressions of thanks, and taken the liberty of telling you about the odd film that we are making right now. Thank you very much.

What’s Important for the Spirit:
Text of a Speech to Be Given on the Occasion of Receiving the Japan Foundation Award for 2005

During the actual award ceremony, Miyazaki gave the previously printed “acceptance speech,” so this became the text of what amounts to a “phantom speech.”

I was told to give a three-minute-long speech. And since there would be simultaneous interpreting, I was told to hand over the text in advance. I have no confidence in my ability to speak naturally while adhering to a prepared speech, so I beg your forgiveness while I read from the text.

When people say that our work has contributed to international exchange and communication, I find myself hesitating. Because we never took that into consideration at all. From the outset, our animation has never been representative of what is being made in Japan. On the contrary, we were outliers, and we worked against the currents of the time.

I’m always extremely skeptical of things said to be fads or said to be new. Our way of working has been to defy the expectations of fans of our films who have supported us and to betray them with our next film.

We’ve never sought to take the safe way, to merely become a piece of the mosaic that makes up this society. That’s because, at the core, we are extremely skeptical about the state of our modern civilization.

Just as I’m irritated by the fact that my stomach doesn’t get any smaller, I’m also irritated by the way our mass consumption culture keeps growing fatter and fatter. Of course, our animation is part of the mass consumption culture, and this is a great contradiction that weighs heavily on us, as part of our destiny, threatening our very existence.

And there’s no change in this situation, even now.

Today, when civilization seems to be heading toward catastrophe at ever increasing speed, the world seems to praise our work more than ever.

Perhaps it is because the bite has gone out of our work.

Or perhaps there is more bite in the world, and it has caught up to us.

We have always worked in obscurity—in the sense that we are usually nameless—and we have always done this work fully aware and not caring that we might end up in obscurity.

Our dream has just been to do some work we can be proud of.

We have been influenced by all sorts of genres, whether it be history, literature, art, music, film, television, or manga, but we have been left to work in freedom. Our “art” has consisted of being passionate about bringing the light of the sun to the screen, portraying space, and expressing the beauty of the world. Even when tragedy unfolds before us, we always feel we have had an obligation to show the beauty of the world in which it takes place.

To us, the history of modern art, the differences between East and West, or tradition versus the avant-garde, have always been irrelevant. What is far more important is that this world continues to exist, far, far behind the screen, in a place invisible to the eye, way beyond the left and right edges of the screen, where the sun is shining, and animals, plants, and humans are alive.

The only constraint on us has been our lack of talent.

By working ever more stubbornly in an off-the-beaten-path area called a “subculture,” we have been free. We have been free from all the chatter about “Japanimation,” the “content industry,” and “cultural exchange.”

So standing here before you at this podium, I believe I should not simply rejoice in the honor that you have bestowed on me. I must be careful so that we do not lose our freedom through either delusion or excessive self-confidence. I must continue to recognize that we exist in a fragile place. But with that awareness, I accept this honor today, realizing that we must endeavor to go even further.

“What is important for the spirit?”

“What is the spirit?”

These are the immutable themes that we must always pursue and the questions we have been given to answer. We are charged with creating and expressing our vision in the most unaffected way, not just by being blunt or speaking in a shrill voice, but with both laughter and serenity.

Thank you very, very much.

And my sincere appreciation to the simultaneous interpreter.

With that, I conclude my talk.

Robert Westall’s Blackham’s Wimpey: Proposal for a Book with a Supplementary Guide of Random Thoughts

Editorial note: On October 5, 2006, Iwanami Shoten published Burakkamu no bakugekiki, Chasu Maggiru no yūrei, and Boku wo tsukutta mono (Blackham’s Wimpey, The Haunting of Chas McGill, and The Making of Me) by Robert Westall, edited by Hayao Miyazaki, and translated by Mizuhito Kanehara, with an original work by Hayao Miyazaki, titled Tainmasu e no tabi (A Trip to Tynemouth)

Statement of intent

In the Japanese translation of the title, the word “bomber” appears, so I feared that even readers who love Westall—who is known for his hard-boiled approach in children’s literature—would not buy the book. And sure enough, it appears that the first edition put out in Japan, by Fukutake Shoten, is about to go out of print. Moreover, it also appears that Tokuma Shoten does not intend to include either Westall’s Blackham’s Wimpey or The Haunting of Chas McGill in the collection they currently plan. But both books definitely should not be overlooked and are worthy of being read much more widely.

So I came up with the radical idea of publishing the following kind of boundary-blurring publication. If it were to be a simple commentary on the book, consisting of explanatory notes, it should be a supplement—and ideally it should be a separate, independent book. But my intention here is to see the original issued along with a “guide.” While I know that some people may frown upon this as a ridiculous idea, I believe it would be much better than having the book be forgotten. What I would therefore like to see is some sort of innovation that would allow a limited print run, and toward that end I will spare no effort. I am a fan of the book, and I am willing to put up money of my own and do “location scouting” for the production of the book as well.

I want to create a book that is not just deluxe and “cool,” but something that people might casually pick up in a bookstore, flip through the pages, and then be motivated to buy. I don’t like the obi banners or the special jackets we put on books in Japan, but for this project I’m willing to put up with them; I just want to show as many people as possible what Westall was trying to write about, with his stories of men in battle and deserters from battle.

I Like Westall

Recommendation printed on the box of the eight-volume box set of The Westall Collection (published by Tokuma Shoten, 2006)

This is what I always think when I look at photographs of Robert Westall: He is like a wild yak, standing, hunkered down in the midst of a fierce blizzard in the Tibetan highlands. His body is twice the size of a domesticated yak, with a visage that commands respect, and he is staring out at the fate of the cruel world.

While enduring many great hardships, Westall continued to write about bravery. He reached beyond the normal heights of children’s literature and, while remaining within reason, did not hesitate to depict the dark side of both humans and society. He was supported by so many young fans because they sensed that he was writing about real things.

Westall was brave, unfortunate, and passionate, and I like him.

A Man Who Lived Bravely, Confronting a Tough Reality

Interview conducted by Takashi Yamashita, editor of Neppū, published by Studio Ghibli, October 2006

Robert Westall, who tried to be “a teacher who spoke of hope”

—Tell me, how did you encounter Robert Westall’s work?

MIYAZAKI: For an adult, I have probably read a lot of juvenile literature, and I especially read a lot in my twenties and thirties. I ran into Westall’s books in my thirties.

Until around the 1960s, British juvenile literature seemed filled with hope. In his novel Colonel Sheperton’s Clock (Japanese translation by Teruo Jingū, published by Iwanami Shoten), Philip Turner wrote something to the effect that “The world is becoming increasingly complicated, but it’s still possible to think up a problem that can be solved and create stories where children do something about it.” And he went on to write two more novels of the trilogy beginning with Colonel Sheperton’s Clock, set in the town of Darnley Mills. I really liked these stories. Even now, I still like them a great deal.

But in the 1970s these sorts of stories stopped appearing. It was probably because the reality of life in Britain was too harsh—children, once they finished their compulsory education, even after becoming laborers and independent at age fifteen, couldn’t find work. After graduation, many young people were living on the dole, going to pick up unemployment checks at the local post office, that sort of thing. With the reality of so many such young people, the question was what to write.

—So hope had gone out of juvenile literature?

MIYAZAKI: I certainly don’t claim to have read all juvenile literature, but several works that I did read around that time made me feel quite gloomy. Even the pen-rendered illustrations that I used to love in British books disappeared, and I started seeing nothing but works with strained illustrations and themes emphasizing how life was so cruel and not going well. And I started to think that was the way all British juvenile literature had become. Of course, there were some exceptionally literate authors, such as Philippa Pearce, who wrote Tom’s Midnight Garden (Japanese translation by Ichirō Takasugi, published by Iwanami Shoten), but I started to feel that there were no longer any works that related to children on a fresh and vivid level. And that’s just when Westall appeared.

—Was his debut novel, The Machine Gunners, the first work of his that you read?

MIYAZAKI: Well, at the time, I didn’t even know it was his debut novel. I hadn’t been searching specifically for something by Westall. When I read it, I felt that he was different. I was very busy at the time, so I wasn’t in a position to get interested in anything beyond that. Then, I eventually encountered The Scarecrows and started reading all sorts of books by him. But I have a bad habit, and if you were to ask me if I read them thoroughly, I’d have to say that I only understand Westall on the level at which I’ve personally interpreted him. [laughs]

My impression of Westall’s books is that in them he always confronts a tough reality head-on. He’s certainly not depicting your normal happy endings, but he keeps writing about how being brave means something. And to me, that’s very impressive. In Britain of that period, to write about the need to “live bravely,” seems very significant to me.

Westall was an art teacher, but for years he was also a career counselor. And in that era—when the whole society was filled with such despair, I’m sure that being a high school career counselor was not easy on him. Still, even in the works that he created then, you can sense his resolve to be a teacher who always spoke of hope.

In Blackham’s Wimpey, for example, you can sense this in the character of Flight Lieutenant Townsend. Townsend’s dealing with something extremely complex, but he still does everything he can so that his crew doesn’t die in vain. And that same theme is present in all of Westall’s works. Even in The Scarecrows, which has ghosts appear and almost seems like a horror story, Westall is still writing about bravery. It’s true of The Promise and The Haunting of Chas McGill too, but by writing about a world in which there are things like ghosts, which he has to depict in the story, it seems to me that he breathed some fresh air into juvenile literature.

What’s included in Falling into Glory and The Promise

—Miyazaki-san, in the color-illustrated essay that you created for Iwanami Shoten’s new edition of Blackham’s Wimpey, you write that you were “a late-bloomer, wartime boy.” It seems to me that “war” is probably a keyword that both you and Westall have in common.

MIYAZAKI: Well, I started reading lots and lots of war stories as a boy. It was of course because I was curious about the war, but the more I read, the more I also became able to see. I could tell when the authors were lying, when they were bragging, or when they were trying to simply defend their actions. Almost all Japanese writers of war stories fall into these categories. Maybe there are about two who are an exception. But if you read in this way, you realize that there are hardly any good war stories in Britain either. Now, of course I’ve only read the British works in Japanese translation, so I can only speak about what I’ve read, but I think that British writers are even more nationalistic than Americans. They’re all just dying to tell us how good they were. Westall was drafted into the military, but he didn’t have to go off to war, so I think that means the war stories he wrote are mostly based on his experiences in the military, his experiences as a boy, and then his own imagination. I say imagination, but from my experience, as he showed with Blackham’s Wimpey, he is the only person in the whole world who can write realistically about what it was like to be inside a bomber.

It’s true of the The Haunting of Chas McGill as well, for Westall is completely going against the grain of what is assumed to be common sense in Britain. He’s going against it, but doing so in a way that makes his young readers really support him. Westall writes stories that are particularly persuasive to boys who think that what most adults have written about war and peace and life are all lies. And that’s the amazing aspect of Westall.

—What do you think gives him such powers of persuasion?

MIYAZAKI: Not too long ago I had the opportunity of visiting North Shields, the town where Westall was born, and it really is a town with a lot of impoverished-looking homes. He grew up there, got a scholarship, and when he graduated from college he did his military service, and then he became a schoolteacher. And in the class-oriented society of Britain, being a teacher is something with very high status. It’s way above being a businessman and ranks right below being a clergyman in the degree of respect you get from society. There are not many people like Westall, who could grow up in such a town, navigate their way past all the issues in a class society, and rise to his level. And not only that, he was a career counselor.

As I read Westall’s work, I kept thinking that there was something different about him. It was not until later that I learned that his son had died, his wife had become mentally unstable, and he had faced all sorts of awful personal experiences. In other words, the more I learned about Westall, the more amazing I found him to be. And after a while, even more than his work, I came to like Westall the person. In terms of literature, I frankly think that Philippa Pearce is a far superior writer. But if there had never been anyone like Westall in juvenile literature, something would truly seem wrong.

—What’s the difference between Pearce and Westall?

MIYAZAKI: Philippa Pearce’s work is really easy to read for people who go around thinking, “Ah, I love children’s literature!” But it’s really not easy for people to say “I like Westall the best!” [laughs] His books are more hardcore. It’s true of The Kingdom by the Sea, as well as Blitzcat. And the most amazing thing of all is that he wrote Falling into Glory just before he passed away. That doesn’t seem to have any relationship to juvenile literature or anything else. It seems like something that he wrote, tossing everything to the wind, in an amazingly honest fashion.

—Falling into Glory does seem like a novel that’s written as he reflects on his own life.

MIYAZAKI: But I don’t think that Westall was clearly conscious of that. When Michael Ende2 died, one of the people at the hospital reportedly said that they “had never seen anyone who tried less hard to live.” He refused all medical help. I think Westall had similar traits. I always assumed that Westall’s doctor had told him to stop smoking, but he apparently kept at it, not worrying about it at all. In fact, he wasn’t even under a physician’s care. When he became ill, he just kept on smoking and ruining his health. That’s apparently the type of person he was. He obviously didn’t think it would be a problem if he himself died. And then all of a sudden he wrote Falling into Glory and died of pneumonia at sixty-three. I think he lived a full life.

—I confess I was surprised to see how, in what seemed to be really crossing a certain line to me, the seventeen-year-old teenage hero of the story falls in love with his female teacher.

MIYAZAKI: If you were in a position like Westall, you would probably want to write about what really happens in life, and you would therefore wind up crossing a line in juvenile literature. In other words, Westall was writing about what it’s like to live in this world. Yet he portrays the teenage boy in the story not only with sweetness, but also in an extremely realistic fashion. The boy is of sound body and mind, and he has both an irresponsible and oddly serious-to-a-fault side. I have always felt that the teenager represents Westall himself, but it seems to me that Westall has also incorporated a personal hope, almost a prayer, into the story. I think it’s something Westall always had inside him; it’s something that he often turned over, tried to look at from opposing perspectives, and regularly wrote about in a variety of ways—while always essentially writing about the same thing.

—What do you think Westall hoped for?

MIYAZAKI: One motif that appears over and over again in his work is a woman teacher or instructor. Perhaps there was a real person somewhat like the woman instructor in the The Haunting of Chas McGill, who, when she lost her lover in the war, had the light go out of her. I’m sure that it made the young Westall wonder how people could change so tragically.

It doesn’t matter whether or not Westall really had a love affair with a woman teacher, as in Falling into Glory. One consistently big theme for him seems to be how someone, who had once sparkled so brightly, could become so downcast. Moreover, I think Westall always wondered why he couldn’t make her happy.

The same idea is in The Promise as well. It’s beautifully projected there. I see the father of Valerie, the heroine, and the young boy protagonist as both being Westall. Westall made the person dying in this case not his son, but a girl, but he made the girl’s mother, who appears somewhat unbalanced, resemble his wife. And on top of that, in the last scene, the line that the girl’s father says to the boy, to the effect that “You’re too good-natured a person for this world,” seems almost too abrupt. It’s almost as though Westall was saying that to himself. Saying that there’s no point in mourning too much for what has been lost.

—The father’s lines in that scene are powerful and also very cool, aren’t they?

MIYAZAKI: Rather than cool, I’d say they’re awfully abrupt. [laughs] It’s almost as though Westall himself, transcending the story, is screaming, just as the girl’s father is. If you just casually read The Promise you might think it’s a ghost story, but if you read it seriously it shows both the joy and suffering we experience in life. I read it over and over again. I also think Westall’s works became better and better in his later years.

—Why do you think that was?

MIYAZAKI: It probably has to do with the fact that Westall’s wife had died. I’m just imagining, of course, but even before she passed away, she may have just been a shell of a person. Something must have happened, and from what little I know, it must have been tragic. And that’s true whether you’re talking about Westall’s son’s death, or his wife’s losing her sanity.

—So when his wife died, it was as though he was freed from a curse?

MIYAZAKI: I don’t know about that, but I am certain that after she passed away something made it possible for him to write. That reality probably weighed too heavily on him. The reality of what he had to bear.

Westall acknowledged the loyalty of boys

MIYAZAKI: When I read Westall, one thing that I feel he is acknowledging is the intrinsic “loyalty of boys.” In democratic Japan, after the defeat in World War II, this loyalty syndrome was downplayed. And no wonder. Because the loyalty of boys gives birth to tragedy. The group seppuku suicide of the Aizu domain’s young Byakkotai, or “White Tiger Force,” is an example, for it never would have happened if there had been even one adult member with them.3 I know I’m not expressing this well, but similar things have happened all over the world. And are still happening. Right now, right this instant, somewhere, I’m sure some teenage boy is strapping explosives to his body. Young males in a group are always unstable, they want to exercise some power, they want to be useful, and they are quick to cause all sorts of troubles. The tragedy is that this teenage-boy-loyalty syndrome continues to be exploited by adults, by nation-states, by gangs and groups. In World War II their loyalty was betrayed by the speed with which the nation’s adults and the state itself changed. And after World War II, in the hard core of democracy, their fear of being betrayed again was only strengthened. But boys do have a strong sense of loyalty. That’s what being a teenage boy is all about. They can’t live just for the love of their families or just to spend their future making economic profit and loss calculations. They want to be useful. Westall really understood that. He wrote about adults who try to guide boys in the right direction. He wrote about adults who can act as persuasive guidance counselors. And he always wrote about the need for adults to be teachers. It’s tragic, of course, but he couldn’t give up on those kids who were hopeless. At the same time, as a fan of Westall, one conclusion I have reached is that this same aspect has also made it difficult to call his literature truly first rate. [laughs]

—Westall worked as a teacher in Britain during the 1970s, when the country was in such a mess, and interacted with children as a guidance counselor, and he may have thought along lines very similar to you.

MIYAZAKI: Britain’s even more conservative than Japan. And somewhere, I think, its citizens have this feeling that the entire world is theirs. I firmly believe that the British are a very gentle people, but while gentle they can also be extremely cruel. The nighttime bombing depicted in Blackham’s Wimpey is a good example. When Westall wrote Gulf, he was resisting that sort of thinking as much as he could.

—Gulf is the kind of work that doesn’t exist in Japanese juvenile literature, isn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: That’s because juvenile literature in Japan is still in the minor leagues. [laughs] The range of activity of Japanese children today, and their perspective, has really narrowed. And at the same time, the world depicted for children by adults has relentlessly been narrowed to fit that downsized child’s perspective. People writing the stories say they are doing it for the sake of the children, but that really irritates me. It’s no use for me to tell adults this, but I really believe, for example, that telling children that they should be antiwar and so forth is an absolute mistake. In terms of Japanese juvenile literature, two writers who I think are really top class are Rieko Nakagawa, who wrote Iyaiya en (The No-No Day Care Center), and Momoko Ishii, who authored Non-chan kumo ni noru (Non-chan Rides on a Cloud).

—In that context, it would be great if Westall’s works were more widely read in Japan.

MIYAZAKI: I can certainly see why his works were so supported by children. Still, Westall’s stories are not something that everyone reads. For me, since Blackham’s Wimpey is now out of print, I thought it would be a terrible shame if it disappeared entirely. It’s because I have a strong interest in airplanes. [laughs] Or, I should say, rather than airplanes, it’s because I’m interested in the subject of nighttime bombing. To go even further, it’s also because I’m fascinated by how the understanding of the war by Japanese of my generation, as told to us by our parents, seems so different from that of the British and Europeans. You can sense this difference even when reading Roald Dahl’s Going Solo (Japanese translation by Jun Nagai, published by Hayakawa Shobō). In these stories, individual humans are consciously participating. They criticize their own military, and while criticizing their own leaders, they volunteer and go off to war, not just because they feel it is their duty. They go off because it is a course of action they have chosen to take. Compared to that, the Japanese image of war, which weighs heavily upon us, is one where a person seems “destined for doom.” I’m not saying that one view is better than the other. I’m just talking about recognizing the fact that we live in a world of both views.

—It’s truly amazing that something like that could be so well conveyed in the context of juvenile literature.

Plot Synopses

The Machine Gunners: During the war, the young Chas, a bright and lively boy, happens upon a Nazi bomber that has crashed in the woods. He takes the machine gun and ammunition out of the wreckage and with his friends starts building a fort. And then, through a quirk of fate, the boys wind up taking prisoner a Nazi pilot who has survived a dogfight in the skies above them. A new conflict starts, between the boys and the Nazi pilot. (Japanese translation by Michio Ochi, published by Hyōronsha.)

The Scarecrows: Thirteen-year-old Simon is spending the summer at the house of his stepfather, but he can’t forget his late father and can’t forgive his mother and her new husband for marrying. The hatred that Simon feels invokes evil spirits that secretly dwell in an old water mill, where a terrible murder once occurred. His isolation and despair grow to the point where the spirits manifest as scarecrows that start coming closer and closer. Simon has to figure out how to confront the scarecrows. (Japanese translation by Mizuto Kanehara, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

Blackham’s Wimpey: This is the story about the fear experienced by Gary and other crewmembers of a Royal Air Force Wellington bomber in World War II. Some young Germans who have been shot down are still devoted to Hitler, and their spirits attack the British air force. Flight lieutenant Townsend, the captain of the Wellington, tries to protect Gary and other young crewmembers from this spell. In Townsend, who tries to give hope to the crew in the midst of war, we can see the character of Westall himself. (Japanese translation by Mizuto Kanehara, compiled by Hayao Miyazaki, published by Iwanami Shoten.)

The Promise: Fourteen-year-old Bob is very fond of his classmate Valerie. The feelings that both of them have for each other transcend class and family barriers, and while taking walks in the hills and on the pier of the port town in which they live, they grow closer and closer. But Valerie is ill and knows her time is limited. “Promise me that if I ever get lost, you’ll come and find me,” she says, and Bob promises to do so. But it is a promise that should never have been made. (Japanese translation by Kaori Nozawa, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

The Haunting of Chas McGill: In 1939, Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany. The young Chas, evacuated to a house in the country, has a mysterious experience. A young woman once taught school in the house, and Chas meets a soldier from the First World War there. (Contained in the Japanese title Burakkamu no bakugekiki, Chasu Maggiru no yūrei, Boku o tsukutta mono.[Blackham’s Wimpey The Ghost of Chas McGill, and The Making of Me.])

The Kingdom by the Sea: Twelve-year-old Harry loses his family in an air raid and suddenly finds himself all alone in the world. Before he explodes from the grief he harbors, he starts walking along the seacoast, trying to avoid anyone who knows him. In the process of meeting a variety of people and getting over parting with them, Harry comes into contact with a man who has lost his son and regains the time that has stopped for him. But the kingdom by the sea he arrives at is not a good place to be. (Japanese translation by Asako Sakazaki, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

Blitzcat: In the spring of 1940, Lord Gort, a female cat, relying on her mysterious sixth sense, tries to find her master, Geoffrey—an RAF pilot who has gone off to war. Lord Gort is taken in first by a young widow and then an old man who has figured out a way to live in his hometown despite it having been burned out in an air raid. Lord Gort eventually finds her true owner. Shows ordinary people, living through war, as seen through the eyes of a cat. (Japanese translation by Asako Sakazaki, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

Falling into Glory: Seventeen-year-old Robbie Atkinson meets up with Ms. Emma Harris, who taught him when he was ten. The sensitive and emotional Robbie and Ms. Harris, who lost her fiancé during the war, fall in love despite their age difference. And their relationship, like the rugby balls that Atkinson loves so much, begins to bounce about erratically. This book, a semiautobiographical novel that depicts a painful and intense love affair, was published in 1993, the same year that Robert Westall passed away. (Japanese translation by Takeshi Onodera, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

Gulf: In the summer when the Persian Gulf War begins, the spirit of a teenage Iraqi soldier seems to possess fifteen-year-old Tom Higgins’ younger brother. (Japanese translation by Masaru Harada, published by Tokuma Shoten.)

(Notes by the Neppū editorial staff)

Robert Atkinson Westall Born in North Shields, Northumberland, England, in 1929. Majored in Fine Art at Durham University, graduating in 1953. Also studied at the Slade School of Art in London. After graduation, while working as an art teacher, wrote a book for his son, Christopher, which was published in 1975 as The Machine Gunners and won the Carnegie Medal for that year. Thereafter, until retiring from teaching at age fifty-five, he continued writing and teaching. In 1981 he won the Carnegie Medal once more for The Scarecrows. In 1978 his son died in a motorcycle accident, causing his wife Jean Underhill to have a nervous breakdown and, among other things, attempt suicide, so that Westall’s life can hardly be said to have been easy. But in 1987, he began a new life with Lindy McKinnel and concentrated on his writing. In 1990, his book The Promise won the Sheffield Children’s Book Award, and The Kingdom by the Sea won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. He is considered one of the more representative authors of modern British juvenile literature and leaves behind many acclaimed works. He passed away in 1993 of pneumonia.

Proposal for an Original Animated Short Titled “Mon Mon the Water Spider,” for the Saturn Theater in the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka

Original story. Ten minutes long, using 100 shots and less than 10 percent CGI.
August 24, 2004

What is a “water spider”?

The water spider is the only species of spider known to live in the water. Water spiders are said to exist in Europe, but they can also be found in ponds on the northern island of Hokkaidō, in Aomori Prefecture, and other regions. Water spiders breathe through a hole in the tip of their tails, and after coming to the surface, they attach an air bubble around their rear ends, allowing them to walk around in the water. They make nests in air bubbles created in water grasses. They spin threads to support the bubbles.

Actual size of Mon Mon.

An Underwater World

I’ve always wondered what the world seems like to such a tiny water-dwelling spider.

Gravity would have almost no meaning, and he would only have a vague sense of what is up or down, and if he were careless and relaxed too much, the air bubble around his rear might make him float to the surface. The shiny water surface would be a borderline with a strange, different world, and he would pluck a little sticky oxygen from the air and transport it to where water grasses tower above him like skyscrapers. He wouldn’t swim, but walk! The water grasses would provide important cover for him, but at the same time they would also be favorite hunting grounds for insect predators. The larva of a dragonfly or a diving beetle would seem to be a bigger, more vicious, and faster predator than a Tyrannosaurus, and the crayfish crawling along the bottom of the pond would be chomping at the water grasses whenever it felt like it. And the giant carp, which swallows everything and anything, would seem far bigger than the huge fishes of legend (the whales), and more like a typhoon.

In this sort of world, the water spider lives rather out of place, fearfully and earnestly. He is not even aware of being alone and spends his time catching creatures smaller and weaker than himself and devouring them, while they are still alive, without compassion.

In other words, the water spider is a fearful, earnest, and shameless creature (just like us).

And the world he lives in is beautiful and filled with life.

I want to create a story starring the much despised water spider, not to stridently beg for its protection and the conservation of nature, but as part of a humorous, and a little bittersweet-but-still-sweet love story.

My hope is that children who come to see the film will leave with no hatred of insects or arachnids and at least be open to the idea of coexisting with them.

The Story

Mon Mon, the water spider, falls in love with a young female water strider he spots gliding freely across the surface of the water one day. But he lives below the surface, and she lives above, and she is ferocious. If he is not careful, she will stab him with her proboscis and suck all the fluid out of his body. Will Mon Mon be able to convey his feelings to her?

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “Mon Mon the Water Spider”

From the “Mon Mon the Water Spider” pamphlet. The Tokuma Memorial Cultural Foundation for Animation, January 1, 2006

My elementary school teacher used to tell us how spiders have eight eyes and how beautiful it was to look through a microscope at the eight red eyeballs in a jumping spider’s jet-black hairy head. Around the same time, I also read a manga story that showed a spider living in the water. It would stick an air bubble onto the back of the leaves of water grasses and live there. I found it fascinating, but unfortunately I had no talents that would have led me to become an entomologist, so that was the end of that.

In the Totoro pyonpyon, or Bouncing Totoro, room of the Ghibli Museum, when we created our panorama box I really wanted one spot showing the underwater world. I’ve always enjoyed looking underwater. When I look down at a clear stream or a pond, it always seems like I’m peering from the top of a tall building onto a world far below. And when I see tiny living things, it’s even more exciting. I marvel at leeches wiggling about or transparent little shrimp drifting like spaceships in a weightless environment, or even the amazing design of crayfish. I still remember the breathtaking thrill of seeing so many limbs, all with pincers or claws, moving about. And I’ve always wondered what the world looks like to these tiny creatures that live in the water. Air bubbles must seem far more elastic to them than they do to us, and in their environment, things must feel almost as weightless as they would to us in outer space.

With that in mind, I decided to create a panorama showing a water spider in a bubble, and on the spot I came up with a title for it—“Mon Mon the Water Spider.” Our staff kindly drew some crayfish and frogs, and in the back of the panorama some killifish and so forth, and as a result our “Mon Mon the Water Spider” exhibit is a big hit among children, even today. Whenever I see children staring breathlessly at it, I still find myself grinning with satisfaction.

But the panorama turned out to be different from the real environment in which the water spider lives. One of my bad habits is to draw things from a vague memory, so after the drawings were done, we found all sorts of reference materials, and people started sending us entire books of information—all after the fact.

In reality, the water spider has a breathing hole underneath its rear end, so it attaches a sack of air there and uses it like an aqualung to breathe underwater. Once the air bubble is affixed to its rear, it can’t be easily dislodged. The spider binds the air sac with thread to the back of a water grass leaf, and it goes up to the surface again to attach an air bubble to its rear, and gradually makes it bigger. When the bubble is big enough to hold the entire body of the spider, the spider creates a nest. In the nest, it eats its prey and—with just its rear end in the bubble and its head poking out into the water—tries to catch other prey that pass by.

Children who visited the museum seemed to like the panorama box illustration, so it seemed a shame to change it. One thing led to another, and eventually I started thinking about making a film about Mon Mon. But that didn’t mean that I could start making the film right away. I would occasionally remember my idea, mull it over a bit, and then file it away in my mind for another day—basically, completely forgetting about it.

Yet in the process, quite mysteriously, I began to notice all sorts of things. I started getting inspiration from images I saw on television. While out walking, I found myself observing plants growing beside the water, noting the borderline that exists between plants and the air and wondering all sorts of things, such as how, when grasshoppers fall into the water, they are able to hop out and avoid sinking.

In the file cabinet of my mind, I slowly started building up all sorts of shapes and images.

There are fewer and fewer insects surrounding us in our lives today. And at the same time there are ever more children who hate insects. It’s even true, I should add, of adults. And when children’s parents hate bugs, their children hate them too. So please learn to like bugs. You don’t need to touch them, just don’t hate them.

I feel very happy to be able to make a film about water spiders. I would like to express my appreciation to our staff who worked so hard on it and also to the children I see breathlessly staring at our panorama box, because they are the ones who made this film possible.

Proposal for “The Day I Bought a Star”

Ten minutes long, using under 100 shots and less than 10 percent CGI.

Original story by Naohisa Inoue. Adaptation by Studio Ghibli.
August 30, 2004

Plot summary

On the way to the market to sell some vegetables he has grown, a boy named Nona meets two strange men traveling together. They are next to a train that seems to have suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere (there are no tracks). The men open some cases they are carrying and announce that they are selling planets. The cases contain a few pieces of what look like samples of clods of earth or rocks.

The boy exchanges some vegetables for a seed of the smallest planet, takes it home, and begins to raise it by the window in a shed. He puts some soil in a pot, plants the seed in it, and sprays some water on it with a spray bottle.

The boy lives in a house in the middle of nowhere that belongs to Niinya, a witch. Niinya usually leaves her house at dusk and returns in the morning, and never bothers Nona. He gets up early in the morning, goes to his garden, and spends most of the day there. Nona may have parents and go to school, but we are never given any information on this. We can only assume that, in order to be able to return home, Nona has to uncover some sort of personal secret.

When the light of the moon shines through the window, the planet starts to float out of the pot and to revolve. It is growing. And it reveals a type of genesis. The water vapor from Nona’s spray bottle eventually generates clouds, and rain starts to fall on the little planet. Lightning flashes in the clouds, and the rain that falls eventually covers half the planet with oceans. We see the birth of primitive seas on Earth recreated. The planet absorbs the soil in the pot and gradually gets bigger and bigger. Grass seeds in the soil put down roots on the continents, and a single pill bug starts crawling about, like the ancestor of all living things. The boy takes a blanket into the shed and watches the planet develop, almost like the Creator, watching over the world He has created.

Eventually, things around the boy become too chaotic, and he has to say goodbye to the planet.

NOTE: Naohisa Inoue originally intended to make his story “The Day I Bought a Star” into an illustrated children’s book. While talking with Miyazaki, it was proposed that the story be made into an animated short, but for a variety of reasons the idea had to be postponed. Because of the time that has elapsed between the initial concept and the current proposal, some elements have changed considerably from the original design.

When turning the story into an animated film, after finishing the continuity sketches, it will be necessary to clear the project with Inoue-san again.

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “The Day I Bought a Star”

From the pamphlet for the film, “The Day I Bought a Star,” published by The Tokuma Memorial Cultural Foundation for Animation, January 1, 2006

Naohisa Inoue, the author of “The Day I Bought a Star,” and I have known each other for over ten years. We worked together during the production of the animated film Whisper of the Heart. Inoue-san has also been drawing illustrations of a fantasy world called Iblard.

Iblard has highly original light, color, and stories behind it; it’s a sparkling and glowing world where what appear to be clouds and rocks and plants are all vaguely mixed together, where even planets and time meld together. It’s rather like the mantel Alice finds in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. There are all sorts of unusual things, and when you look at any number of them and try to ascertain their shape or color, they become blurred, and you find yourself looking out of the corner of your eye at other things that seem even prettier.

Inoue-san has created both a children’s illustrated book and a manga set in the world of Iblard. Quite a while ago, I received a copy of the manga and read it over and over, occasionally wondering to myself if it also could be made into a film.

It was probably when Inoue-san was doing a mural for the Ghibli Museum hall that, in the course of a conversation, he told me about his plan to create an illustrated children’s book. That was when he first happily told me the story for “The Day I Bought a Star.”

The hero has harvested a lot of turnips and goes to the market to sell them, but along the way he encounters some dwarfs selling planets. With only turnips, he doesn’t really have enough money to buy a planet, but one of the dwarfs agrees to sell him one, if he “raises the planet properly, and a year later invites them to a party on it.” And with that the hero raises the planet, and when it becomes big, he takes off for a variety of adventures on it.

When Inoue-san told me this, he was as excited as a small child.

“With this,” it occurred to me, “we can pull it off. We can make a film about Iblard.” The more we talked, the more we decided we wanted to make a film. But Inoue-san wanted the protagonist to be a girl, and the moment he had told me his story I had already decided that it was about a boy. And neither of us would yield. After that, we both became busy, and with one thing or another, time just kept slipping by. Inoue-san kept on, not drawing his children’s illustrated book, and I kept on, only occasionally recalling what we had talked about.

Two years later, the moment I finished work on Howl’s Moving Castle, we had an opening in the studio’s schedule. It was a real chance for us to make a short film for the Ghibli Museum. As quickly as possible—which means, nonetheless, that quite a bit of time went by—I went ahead and created some continuity sketches for the story, without telling Inoue-san. And of course I made the hero of the story a boy.

After that, I had Toshio Suzuki, the producer of our films, take the sketches to Inoue-san. And I was lucky, because Inoue-san was delighted with them—even though I had violated the basic rules we were operating under a bit. Inoue-san’s own idea for his manga and illustrated children’s book took seed and, as time went by, sprouted and on its own sent forth more leaves than I could ever have dealt with. And that is how the film “The Day I Bought a Star” came to be.

In this film, Iblard is another world, but we don’t know where it is, and we don’t know if it exists right next to the real world, or whether it is only in our own minds. If Nona were to always remain in Niinya’s garden, I think that he would eventually fade away and disappear. But I also think that Nona wouldn’t be interested in forsaking the world of Iblard and living only in our world.

To quote American author Raymond Chandler from his novel Playback, “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

To me, that is Iblard.

Welcome to the Ghibli Forest Short Film “House Hunting”

From the “House Hunting” pamphlet. The Tokuma Memorial Cultural Foundation for Animation, January 1, 2006.

The Japanese that we speak every day has many words that represent the movement or the form of things.

Such as fuwafuwa, pukupuku, yurayura, nurunuru, gunyogunyo, and guzuguzu.

There are also many words that represent sounds.

Gohn, dokaan, boki, zabun, pisha, and poton.

Words like these are said to be a hallmark of the Japanese language.

Long ago, I made a film called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. On the storyboards, to indicate where the larvae of the giant insect creatures called ohmu were supposed to be shown moving about, I would write sound effect words such as pikipiki or sawasawa. And of course, among the Ghibli staff this created a big problem when we got to the point that we needed to talk about the actual sound effects that were to be used.

In my mind, for example, if we were depicting a baby ohmu with lots of legs moving about, mixed in among the sounds of the legs moving, such as shakashaka or zawazawa, there would also be some sounds like pikkipikki that could be interpreted as either the cry of the insect or the sound of hard insect shells smacking against each other.

I tried to explain things to the person in charge of creating the sound effects, but shakashaka and zawazawa are words that indicate the state of something more than actual sounds, so that even if I had a clear idea of what the sounds should be it was hard to connect that idea to real sounds.

The more I tried to explain things—to describe a mixture of the sound of dried wood being rubbed together with the sound of small twigs and bones and shrimp shells cracking and snapping—the more I, too, became confused. So I wished that I could just write the words for the sounds, in a pikipiki fashion, right into the film itself.

Now, of course, there’s always the danger that audiences might become confused and turned off on seeing Japanese characters appear on the screen as images. So that’s how I came up with the idea of using text instead of actual sound effects throughout a film. Of course, if we did so, when the words appear on the screen, people who don’t understand Japanese might have a problem. But from my experience with manga, I’ve always thought that Japanese characters or text can be just like drawings, and that they can be one of the biggest determinants in creating one’s overall impression of what’s on the page.

When children draw, they all (or nearly all) vocalize sounds, and create all the music and sound effects and dialogue. So it seemed to me there was no reason we couldn’t do the same thing in a movie, using voices. We could use voices for the music and even the sound effects. And that suddenly seemed to settle the matter for me. So that’s how “Yadosagashi” began.

“Yadosagashi” has text, or characters, on the screen. And all the dialogue and music and sound effects are vocalized by Tamori4 and Akiko Yano.5

I came up with the story at a completely different time. If one of the hallmarks of the Japanese language is that it has so many words that indicate sounds, then one of the hallmarks of the Japanese people is surely that they feel as though the rivers and mountains and forests are alive, even that their own houses are alive. Or perhaps I should say that in the past tense. Because, today, even Japanese seem to have lost most of this ability to sense these things. But if you go back far enough in human civilization, I think all peoples probably felt that spirits dwelled in the sky, the clouds, the earth, and the stars—even in rocks, grasses, and trees.

At some point in time, characters and alphabets were invented, and then sutras, the Bible, the Koran, and so forth, appeared and started to form the basis of people’s lives. After that, some say, the idea that spirits inhabit nearly everything disappeared. But Japanese people seem to be an exception, an example of an ethnic group that has long continued to keep this more primitive sensibility or way of thinking. Even I, when I started looking into this way of thinking and sensibility, realized that something ancient still runs strong in my veins.

I am much more attracted to the idea of preserving the forests and keeping rivers clean, not for the sake of humans, but because they themselves are alive. And I believe that young children intuitively understand this better than adults. My own children are a case in point, because when it came time to replace our old, leaky ofuro bathtub, both of them said that they “felt sorry for the ofuro.” And it’s probably because they felt that the old ofuro had some sort of personality, something like a spirit. I tried to mollify the kids by putting them in the empty old ofuro and taking a souvenir snapshot of them, and it was a poignant experience for me.

Based on this ancient sensibility and way of thinking, I decided that I wanted to make a film about a very spunky girl who goes off to search for a new home. The river and the fields and the old Shinto shrine have been forgotten about and probably feel forlorn. So when the girl appears, their spirits all reveal their forms. The girl isn’t afraid at all and keeps walking along, saying hello and thanking them. With this sort of approach, I hoped to make a film where everyone would feel more and more alive.

Of course, I didn’t know what sort of voice the river or the shrine spirits would use to speak to us. I felt, however, that we really needed something like the Japanese sound words of nuraa, or zowaa, or sawasawa.

So, with this idea that life exists in everything, and after finding wonderful voice talents like Tamori and Akiko Yano, we were able to create the film you are about to see, “Yadosagashi” or “House Hunting.”

I hope that you will all enjoy it.

Remarks to the Staff of the Ghibli Museum at the Screening of “Mon Mon the Water Spider,” “The Day I Bought a Star,” and “House Hunting”

In the Saturn Theater of the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, on December 26, 2005

We want to create a “film experience”

With the addition of these three films, we now have a total of six original films made for the Ghibli Museum. My initial intent was to make twelve, so until we reach that number I intend not to release them on videotape or DVD, and though we have invitations from a variety of film festivals, not to enter any of them, so that these films never leave the museum, to ensure that they can only be seen here.

The reason is because DVDs can be viewed over and over again, so if you missed seeing something, you can always stop the DVD, go back, and watch the parts you want to repeatedly. But watching films this way makes it impossible to enjoy them the way they were meant to be enjoyed; it’s a way to consume, or devour, them.

A true “film experience,” in other words, comes from watching something that can only be seen in the moment. It is something that happens when you may forget the entire story but be left with a strong impression, or when you find you don’t understand the film but continue to wonder, “What was that all about?” And when this experience is planted in the minds of children, they become the ones who decide to make the next films for us. I believe this is the way most filmmakers got their start.

But nowadays with DVDs you can go back and rewatch things over and over again, so it’s nearly impossible to have a true film experience. When you first watch a film, you do so because you’re really curious about it. That’s the way it is for everyone, and I think there’s great meaning in creating an opportunity for us to experience seeing something just once. That thought is one of the pillars behind the operation of this Ghibli Museum.

There are visual images displayed throughout the museum, but we don’t use video. In the Saturn Theater, where we are now, we have a projection room designed to look like a train, so that you can even see the projectionist inside operating the equipment. With this, we hope that out of a thousand children, at least two will think, “Hmm, what’s that machine?” or “Wow, film projectors are really interesting.”

In other words, in this museum, we don’t want to tell visitors what the highlights are; we just want them to be interested in something, anything, and it can even be the bathrooms if they like them.

When we stage exhibits, we don’t want to hold back on displays, but to go all out. When you go to art museums these days they often have exhibits isolated so they can be easily appreciated, but here we don’t mind if the exhibit space is crowded and messy, and even hard to understand. And we want children who come to visit to be able to interact with the exhibits as much as possible. In doing so, we want them to experience things throughout the museum as they would in a true “film experience,” as something they will only encounter once and once only.

People who make short films often struggle to find a place to show their work. At the Ghibli Museum, we’re fortunate to have our own theater, so I’m not about to let this opportunity go by; I intend to make films for it whenever I have the chance. Studio Ghibli makes films on a commercial basis, and we support ourselves from the earnings they make, but in between films, before the next production starts, we sometimes have an opening in our schedule. I therefore hope to take advantage of this opportunity and continue to make shorts.

A museum that comes alive

When we launched the Ghibli Museum, I gave a variety of interviews. A long one about the opening of the museum is contained in Mitaka no Mori Jiburi Bijutsukan Zuroku (Catalogue of the Mitaka Ghibli Museum). As I once mentioned, on rainy day afternoons when hardly anyone is around, I used to casually drop into art and other museums, and I always enjoyed myself a great deal. But from the perspective of the people running the museums, a lack of visitors obviously implies a decidedly difficult state of affairs.

In the past, I’ve often visited small, local history museums run by local governments. Sometimes they even have the lights turned out, but they turn them on especially for me. [laughs] Such museums usually have very small budgets, so they tend to keep the same exhibits up a long time as they can’t afford to change them, and the exhibits are apt to become very dusty. The museum staff wipes the outside of the glass cases clean, but not the inside, so the glass becomes hard to look through. And there’s a real danger that we could have the same thing happen here, at the Ghibli Museum.

The point is that unless we keep making concerted efforts, our visitors won’t stay happy. Right after the museum’s opening we may have many visitors, but if we don’t endeavor to keep changing, the visitors will gradually decrease in number. We must be aware of that and prepared for it.

When everything seems wonderful about a museum at first, but six months later dust is starting to accumulate, it means that visitors have seen everything offered and are getting tired of it. It means that the museum’s just become a good scenic spot—one where, after you see it over and over, it diminishes in impact and loses its appeal. So it becomes important to make a few adjustments, to change the layout, and to bring things back to life once more.

It’s like cleaning. If you look at the same spots every day, you stop noticing what’s happening. Think of how much gunk builds up in those Chinese restaurants that have been in operation for thirty years. [laughs] That stuff doesn’t accumulate overnight; it happens while you’re thinking everything’s exactly the same as it was the day before. It’s the same with soba noodle shops where everything gradually starts tasting worse. Just when you’re thinking that everything’s the same as it was the previous day, it’s actually getting worn out and worse.

When the number of visitors to a museum gradually starts to drop, we can’t afford to just think it’s something unavoidable, or that it might be because of a particularly cold winter. It’s much better to suffer the fate of having too many visitors than to have none. [laughs]

We call ourselves a museum, but we’re different from the Louvre Museum in Paris because we really don’t have anything. We do have all sorts of things here from the films that we’ve made, but none of these things are trendy or fancy enough to run a business based solely on them. [laughs]

Even the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York have to make enormous efforts to keep attracting visitors. So we, too, have to work hard, to think about “how to get people to come to our particular type of museum.” Even the films we screen in this theater here should not be made just because we want to make them. We have to make films that will contribute to keeping the museum going, and doing all sorts of things. What this museum needs is a special type of energy.

Watching children enjoy themselves makes adults happy

I’m an adult, but when I see a child next to me whom I’ve never seen before enjoying him or herself, I’m happy. Now, I’m sure that after sitting awhile most adults like yourselves find your backs are starting to hurt, but that’s because this theater was built for children. We’re not trying to be mean to you. I’m sure you all remember going to the movies as children and how you couldn’t see the movie because the adults in front were blocking your view. Also, when children first go to movie theaters, they often find them very oppressive, even “scary.” In this theater, we went out of our way to create windows that could be opened, as a way of saying, “Don’t be afraid.” [laughs]

From what I have seen, there aren’t many examples around the world of theaters like this one, which is dedicated to little children. In reality, of course, the ratio of little children among our visitors is actually not that high, and even if it’s only the same as that of the adults, I’m not thinking we need to deliberately increase the number of young visitors or to bring in special groups of them.

After visiting the museum, I hope some children will go home and say not only that they found it “interesting,” but also that they were “frightened” or found it “a bit scary,” or even “hurt themselves.” I say this because injuring yourself can be an important experience. Of course, the people working here don’t want me to say that. And even though I thought that no one could possibly fall out of the Catbus, it turns out that today’s kids fall out all the time. [laughs] The point is that when adults, who visit the museum on their own, happen to see kids having these sorts of experiences (including falling out of the Catbus), they tend to feel happy. And that is the sort of place that I have always hoped that both this theater and museum could become.

We’re in the business of creating entertainment, or films on a commercial level, to make money, but in truth nothing gives us more pleasure, and nothing motivates us more, than seeing people enjoy themselves. I’m not making films to get my own point of view or opinions across. When people are happy and enjoying my films, I’m happy too. And by discovering that I am happy this way, I am able to continue this work. And I think it’s the same for the museum.

As for the future of the museum shop, we don’t want it to just ride on the popularity of the films. We also hope to get ideas for products to offer from the reaction of visitors who have seen the exhibits, and be able to create things that they would like. And I hope that we can operate the films, the exhibits, and the shop, not as separate unconnected entities, but as a combined whole.

Thank you very much.

Worlds of Insects, Trees, and Humans: A Dialogue with Takeshi Yōrō

Neppū, published by Studio Ghibli, April 2006

“House Hunting” and mirror-neurons

YŌRŌ: In talks I’ve given recently, I’ve often said that “words are not content, but sound,” and referred to the concept of mirror-neurons. When you see someone doing something and then do the same thing, specific neurons work particularly hard. In terms of language, this means that when you hear what another person is saying, the same neurons that would be working if you were uttering the same sounds go to work in the same way. And if you repeatedly parrot the sounds, they work even harder. These neurons have been identified in tests done with monkeys.

MIYAZAKI: Is that the same thing as when I’m having a conversation with someone through an interpreter and—even though I don’t understand at all what the other party is actually saying—feel like I understand, and therefore start talking without waiting for the interpreter?

YŌRŌ: It’s fairly close.

MIYAZAKI: That’s one of my personality defects. I tend not to listen to what the other person is saying. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: And that’s the story of “House Hunting,” right?

MIYAZAKI: Well, I’ve thought for a long time that short animated films probably don’t need much dialogue or detailed sound effects. Nowadays, the production process for animation is pretty much established. When we have discussions about sound effects, for example, we spend all our time discussing whether we should go with sounds from nature or artificial sounds, or a combination of the two, or where to start the music, or whether the dialogue is in sync or not, and as a result we get more and more neurotic about it all. I’ve always thought the whole process could be a lot looser. So for “House Hunting” we only spent about five minutes talking face to face about how to handle the sound recording, and then just jumped in and did it. I had no idea what sort of sounds Akiko Yano and Tamori would create for us. But the unrehearsed “live” aspect of this was really a lot of fun. There’s no way to plan for it, and it’s far easier. [laughs]

With both Yano-san and Tamori-san, since we were dubbing after the film had been shot, the sound was never in perfect sync with the drawings. It’s out of sync, but the really mysterious part is that if it gets twelve frames out of sync, the ending part is also twelve frames out of sync. Plenty of people can make the dialogue match up perfectly with the drawings if they rehearse over and over again. People who are really good at this can instantly match up the sound the moment they see the drawings. Some who are not quite so skilled will often get eight frames behind. But Yano-san and Tamori-san didn’t fit into any of these categories, and they didn’t try to make things match up at all. They started out out of sync and ended up out of sync. I thought it was really amazing.

YŌRŌ: So maybe it was just like a freestyle jazz jam session.

MIYAZAKI: That’s exactly the way it was.

“Mon Mon the Water Spider” and the world of aquatic insects

MIYAZAKI: The recording we did for “Mon Mon the Water Spider” was even more amazing. Yano-san asked me what sort of sound we wanted her to provide, and since I had been thinking that we might not even need any voices at all, I told her to “just do anything.” Then, as the water strider she was in charge of voicing appeared, singing, I had a revelation, and for the first time realized that this was the sort of film we really should be making. So we went with it. As a result, the film has a real live sensibility. If the water spider hadn’t been played by Akiko Yano, I think the result would have been something completely different.

YŌRŌ: At its core, “Mon Mon the Water Spider” really doesn’t need any sound, does it? Other than some music, I think it’d be fine without anything at all.

MIYAZAKI: I thought about that possibility too. But then when I heard the voice of the water spider Yano-san created, it was so convincing I felt it was the only way to go. I’d always wanted to be able to depict the world on the same time scale as insects. It had always been my dream, but I gave up on it the moment we started working on the project. It’d never work, I thought. [laughs] It might be different if we were making a documentary, but you really can’t draw something that so transcends normal human physiology and sense of time. And all real water spiders, even Mon Mon, of course eat prey other than water fleas, but to start with, no one in the studio even knew how to draw water fleas. So I just told them to do the best they could. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: Well, they do look like water fleas. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: It’s a relief to hear you say that, but of course in reality water fleas have only one eye. There’s just a black orb in the midst of something transparent that detects light, but I only figured this out mid-production. When Taiyō7 started selling their model of the water flea I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s only got one eye!” [laughs]

YŌRŌ: But don’t you think everyone did a great job drawing a water spider’s eyes?

MIYAZAKI: Ah, but in reality we modeled them after a jumping spider’s eyes. The water spider’s eyes are actually a bit smaller. We also agonized over whether we should depict the eyes with a white sclera or not. In truth, there are multiple little eyes in the middle of the face, but if we drew them that way the water spider would have looked like an evil emperor. But of course the instant we put a ribbon on the water strider, then anything was possible. [laughs] From that point on, if someone said, “But entomologically speaking, that doesn’t make sense, does it?” we could reply that, well, this is a world where water striders wear ribbons. [laughs] Real water striders also have large joints where their legs join their crotch, but we drew those as bloomers. And that made it an incredibly easy character for us to handle.

YŌRŌ: But when the water spider is pulled along by Ms. Water Strider we see the bottom of his body, so I was really interested to see how you drew his crotch, and I noticed that you did show how the legs are attached. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Hah hah … We had a variety of opinions about that, and whether it looked like a Martian or a crab. Spider legs are difficult. I think the staff did a wonderful job not to get too confused on this issue. There are usually lots of illustrations of insects even in standard photo reference books for children, but they never show the details. The staff just has to try to draw them. It’s easy to understand something that’s first been rendered once through human eyes in a drawing; color photographs look too much like the real thing and are hard to grasp.

YŌRŌ: I agree. Photographs appear to look just like the real thing, but they don’t, do they?

MIYAZAKI: And that’s a big problem for someone like me. Perhaps it’s a case of total ignorance, but what can you say when someone who has never really closely observed the real thing suddenly collects a bunch of photographs of insects the way we did, and says okay, let’s make these our main characters? When you look at a photograph of a Japanese diving beetle larva, it’s hard even to tell where the eyes are. [laughs] There are lots of black dots, but from the photographs I never did figure it out.

YŌRŌ: But the water in the film was expressed beautifully. I was really impressed by the way you could depict the surface tension when the air bubbles in the water spider’s nest combined in the water.

MIYAZAKI: I’m delighted to hear that. It’s because the animation, the art, and the photography people all worked really hard at it. We had talked a lot before about how it might not be possible to properly depict air bubbles or water droplets. One thing about water is that it’s more fun to draw it with a modelistic understanding of it, rather than drawing it the way we actually see it. Drawing it with volume gives it a greater sense of reality. It’s like trying to draw gelatin.

YŌRŌ: The Phreatodytes elongatus beetle lives in water underground and covers itself in an air bubble filled with oxygen, which it uses to live on. And when it consumes the oxygen in the bubble, the partial pressure of the oxygen inside the bubble becomes less than that of the oxygen in the water around it, so it’s automatically supplied with oxygen. So it can live as long as there is some oxygen in the water around it.

MIYAZAKI: Ah, so that’s it. I had always wondered how the water spider’s nest could stay filled with fresh oxygen if it was never replaced.

YŌRŌ: The world of water insects is really amazing. For example, ever since I was really small, I’ve been fascinated by Macroplea japana leaf beetles. They’re about seven millimeters in size, about the same size as the water spider, and yellow. In the decade between 1955 and 1965 there were about twenty caught in ponds in Takarazuka in Hyōgo Prefecture, and a long time ago they apparently could even be found in Tokyo, but now they are an extinct species. Recently, a similar species was found in the wetlands around Kushiro, in Hokkaidō. It apparently eats underwater vegetation.

Insect adventures—endless battles between pill bugs, grasshoppers, and gardeners

MIYAZAKI: As a boy, I enjoyed collecting insects as much as everyone else, but then when I was in the third grade I caught a Japanese rhinoceros beetle and mounted it inside a display case with a pin, and it stayed alive. Worse yet, after a while it started to walk around inside the display case, the pin sticking out of it. After that, I couldn’t collect insects anymore. I collected other insects too, though. The white cicada, when it’s just broken through its shell, is amazingly beautiful, right? So I would excitedly yell, “Yay! I got one,” when I captured one, and then when I stabbed it with a pin in my collection box it would immediately turn brown. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: I have to say, I really was taken aback when that rhinoceros beetle kept walking around. Up until then, I’d done all sorts of horrible things to insects. I’d cut a dragonfly’s tail, attach a leaf to it, and fly it; the sort of thing you start doing when you run out of ideas for play and get more and more degenerate. When I really got bored, I’d take all the legs off a crab, that sort of thing; in my childhood I did the usual awful things that children do.

YŌRŌ: Well, I’m still doing awful things. [laughs] And on that subject, I should mention that there’s a really interesting magazine. [Takes out of briefcase]

MIYAZAKI: Hm. Gekkan Mushi, “The Monthly Insect” …

YŌRŌ: And check out the publisher. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Ah, yes, it’s Mushisha, “The Insect Co.”

YŌRŌ: Not very clever, is it? [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Amazing. A magazine that specializes in bugs?

YŌRŌ: It is amazing, isn’t it? On top of that, it’s also a commercial magazine published every month. So to be a reader of this magazine means you’re a total bug otaku. Each month the magazine completely takes apart insects and illustrates each body part with close-up photographs. I do the same thing, of course, because when you want to compare two bugs of the same species, you ultimately have to dissect them.

MIYAZAKI: [Flipping through the pages] No kidding. They really do take them apart, don’t they …

YŌRŌ: In my case, I put double-sided clear tape on paper and put the insects on it. If I don’t, they fly off while I’m taking a breath. [laughs] But if you use tape that’s too sticky, you can’t get the insects off it later, so I always choose the least sticky of four grades of sticky tape. [laughs] It’s a technique I finally arrived at after buying eight different kinds of double-sided clear tape at Tōkyū Hands and trying them out.8 Today, I also brought some interesting equipment that I use to catch insects. [Takes out of bag]

MIYAZAKI: Hm. So you suck in the insect with this?

YŌRŌ: That’s right. You whack it with a stick, and after you’ve knocked it down you suck it up with this thing to capture it. The problem of course is that if you’re smoking a cigarette you get confused about which to suck on. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: So what do you call this thing?

YŌRŌ: It’s a kyūchūkan, or “insect-sucking-pipe.” [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: No doubt about it at all. [laughs] But I can’t imagine anyone trying to catch caterpillars with something like this.

YŌRŌ: Early spring last year there were some praying mantises born in a room in my house, and this came in handy. My wife screamed, so I rushed in and sucked them all up with this gadget and then released them outside. It only took a second. It would have been cruel to suck them up with a vacuum cleaner. But with this, they were unhurt.

MIYAZAKI: My wife loves to garden, so for her the pill bugs are what she hates. To garden is to engage in slaughter. Of course, I love pill bugs. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: There were pill bugs in the short (“The Day I Bought a Star”) that we just saw, weren’t there. At home, my wife likes to plant Chinese clematis, but the grasshoppers eat it. She wanted to use insecticide, and we got into a fight when I suggested the solution was to just plant so much clematis that the grasshoppers wouldn’t be able to eat it all. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: I completely understand. Sometimes poisonous tussock moth caterpillars, Artaxasublava, appear all over the place. And then my wife asks me what we should do. And of course when she asks me what Nausicaä would do, I completely lose it.

YŌRŌ: That does sound scary. [laughs] So what do you do?

MIYAZAKI: Well, it can’t be helped, so I burn them. And of course I chant the Buddhist phrase namu amida butsu and pray for their souls, while telling them that they came to the wrong house. [laughs] But even so, they never go extinct.

YŌRŌ: Well, one of the problems is that the garden plants you grow are particularly delicious. Wild plants tend to emit certain kinds of insect repellents on their own. You can see this if you go into the forest, because if one tree’s being eaten by insects, the trees around it are usually not. When the one tree is attacked, it gives off a message, in effect announcing, “Hey, I’m done for, so watch out!” and then the other trees around it start to create and emit something that the attacking insects don’t like, that keeps them away.

MIYAZAKI: I’ve heard that leaves do something similar among themselves. So it happens on a tree level too?

YŌRŌ: Yes, so usually just one tree is horribly eaten. This process isn’t a one-way street, of course. If the predator insects eat everything, there would be too many insects, and all of a sudden there would be no more trees—or food—for them to eat. They’re not so stupid as to do that. It’s the same as with parasitic insects.

If you look at the eggs of the parasite filaria, you can see the same thing. There are usually about four thousand eggs in 0.1cc. They’re swimming around. Of course, when they become parents, they instantly die, but the only ones who become parents are the ones who are eaten by mosquitoes and transferred to another host. All the others die a dog’s death.

MIYAZAKI: I’ve got an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long time. It’s about how these very tiny, hairy caterpillars, who are the protagonists, keep decreasing in number until only one survives. I thought I might be able to make it into a short for the Ghibli Theater, but I haven’t gotten any further with it.

Adventures with trees—restoring the land with greenbelts

MIYAZAKI: One thing I’ve always wondered about is, for example, if you took a field and had grass grow all over the place on it, how many square meters would you need to restore the insect populations to their original levels?

YŌRŌ: It wouldn’t work.

MIYAZAKI: You mean we’re talking about more than a few square meters?

YŌRŌ: The way I see it, all the greenery has to be connected. It’s easy to see from up in an airplane, but the city of Kamakura, which still has a lot of greenery, looks like a complete island in a sea of construction. In the old days, the greenery was all connected, from the hills of Tama to Tanzawa, and even to Hakone. But now this continuum of greenery has been cut up every which way. So if you’re going to restore the greenery to its original condition, expressways have to be built underground, the surface has to be restored to its green state, and the greenery all over Japan has to be in some way all connected.

MIYAZAKI: So you’re talking about greenbelts, right? And saying that they all have to be connected?

YŌRŌ: I’d love to somehow help this idea take root. People are doing all sorts of things now, but there’s no real agreement on what should be done, and it’s difficult given that people have little sense of urgency or certainty. It’s also important to remember that in Japan forests still cover nearly 70 percent of the landmass. In Britain it’s only 7 percent.

MIYAZAKI: I get angry every time I go to Britain. I always feel like they make such a big deal about how much greenery they have.

YŌRŌ: In Japan it’s actually 68 percent, so we have to care for it.

MIYAZAKI: We’re actually going to build a new office soon on what amounts to a tiny parcel of land, so we’ll be planting some trees. In thinking of what variety to plant, we realized that in Tokyo zelkova trees don’t work. Because of global warming, they become weak and are then infested by insects. I had a talk with a gardener and was told that I should avoid zelkova. I had been thinking about maybe planting some sort of urajirogashi, or “quercus salicina”—the evergreen trees we used to have in the old days in guardian groves around shrines—but if we planted those around our offices it might be too dark. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: It definitely would be darker. [laughs] In the Jōmon period, everything south of the Kantō area was probably so dark that it was almost unusable. That’s probably why areas like Tōhoku, in the northeast, flourished.

MIYAZAKI: You mean the forests were so dark that people probably couldn’t live in them.

YŌRŌ: In those forests, people probably would have been reduced to eating chestnuts or hunting wild boar. So that’s why they chose to live on the coast and to catch fish. There are also lots of leeches in the forests. You can see this in the forests of Bhutan. They’ve got leeches all over the place. If you go insect collecting there the leeches will get you before you know it.

MIYAZAKI: For me, when I go into the groves of ancient guardian trees around Shinto shrines, I feel the presence of something, and I like that. But I wouldn’t want to live there.

YŌRŌ: You couldn’t live there. I think it was a disciple of Akira Miyawaki—the forestry expert and professor from Yokohama National University—who was responsible for planting in the area beside the Tokyo Wangan Expressway. As a result, everything south of the Yashio condos has been turned into beautiful forests. So basically what it means is that if you plant trees that used to grow in an area, it reverts to being a forest. Then you can just leave it alone, and it will sustain itself.

MIYAZAKI: If it were up to me, personally, I’d really like to plant more zelkova trees on our property. All we’d need is about three or four zelkova planted in the middle of the place, and it would amaze people. But Studio Ghibli’s existing zelkova are already infested with insects. You can really see how damaged they are.

YŌRŌ: That means the ground where the trees grow probably isn’t any good either. The groundwater level’s been sinking, and zelkova need lots of water.

MIYAZAKI: Of course, I do have to think about what it would be like to work at noon in a grove of trees like you might find in an ancient shrine, and how dark it would be. In the worst case, we might have leeches falling out of the trees. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: No need to worry about that. Even leeches need food in order to reproduce. In Japan, you’ll find the most leeches on the Kii Peninsula. Deer populations have really been increasing there because they eat the vegetation in protected areas, and then the leech populations increase too.

MIYAZAKI: It’s interesting these days to see how deer and monkeys are no longer afraid to show themselves to humans in the summer. There are deer in the cornfields and monkeys moving about in small armies. The monkeys are scary, and it seems there’s nothing you can do about them.

YŌRŌ: To confront a monkey, dogs are best. I always suggest releasing dogs on them. It’s also because in Japan we don’t have any rabid dogs.

MIYAZAKI: It would be great if we could set dogs free in Japan, but then we might have a lot more traffic accidents.

YŌRŌ: But it might be safer for children if the dogs were free. Because then the drivers would be more cautious. I spent a week touring rural Vietnam in a microbus, and I think the only victims were one dog and three chickens. [laughs] Of course, I wasn’t driving.

MIYAZAKI: When I was traveling once in Ireland, the driving was incredibly dangerous because so many crows were landing on the highways. We had to keep yelling, “Out of the way!” Irish crows are smaller than Japanese crows, but it was interesting because they all build nests on top of the trees along the highways. After I was there, Ireland developed a bit of an economic bubble, so I’m sure everything’s different now. I recently had an occasion to go to London for work, and there were so many construction sites all over the place that the calm atmosphere of the old days was completely gone. Britain’s apparently at the peak of its bubble right now, and that’s what bubbles tend to produce. Some people say that in prior days in London, they didn’t change the city’s ambience not from any wise insight, but simply because they didn’t have the money to do so.

YŌRŌ: One good example is the Shimanto River in Kōchi Prefecture. There’s only one dam on the river, as you know. And it was built during the war. A mayor from a town in Hiroshima Prefecture went there once just for fun and told his local counterpart, “Good for you for hanging in there and not building a dam on your river,” whereupon he was reportedly told, “Actually, in Kōchi Prefecture, the real reason we didn’t build any is because we didn’t have any money.” [laughs]

People don’t talk about it much, but one of the reasons sandy beaches are decreasing in Japan is that all the rivers have dams and barriers built along their course, and the rivers therefore no longer carry sand down to the sea. It’s crazy, but we’ve really got to restore the entire natural environment that we’ve destroyed with all of our construction. We’ve got to restore Japan.

MIYAZAKI: You’re absolutely right.

The true nature of the vague sense of unease that pervades Japan

MIYAZAKI: I’m sixty-five years old. I’m at the age where I’m not sure whether I really should be commenting on the state of the world. But in the newspapers, in the letter to the editor columns, I see seventy-four-year-olds worrying about the decrease in Japan’s birthrate and criticizing the younger generation, but that sort of thing seems unseemly to me. I feel like telling them, “Hey, if you want to criticize, you should have acted the way you’re suggesting now when you were younger.” Don’t you agree?

YŌRŌ: Of course. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: Even if we discount the fact that older people by nature tend to grumble, I still think it’s important for people to try to do what they can to improve things, little by little, even if they don’t talk about it. I don’t think it’s useful to just complain—and while so saying I personally of course find myself constantly getting hot under the collar about all sorts of things. And I’m sure it’s not just me. I’m sure lots of other guys out there are getting hot under the collar too. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: I’m probably one of them. [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: In the last decade or so, it seems to me that we’ve been talking way too much about politics or economics in Japan. I’m frankly sick of it.

YŌRŌ: What’s really funny is that when a bunch of academics got together at a prominent conference on “The State of the Japanese Economy,” the head of the Social Economic Research Institute in the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry spent about an hour talking. After that, a certain economist did his best to ask all sorts of questions, and the two of them debated matters, whereupon the two-hour-long conference was at last about to end. Finally, someone from the University of Kita Kyūshū’s engineering department said, “You’re really just talking about money, right? It’s all about money. And if all we ever do is debate about money, it’ll be the ruin of Japan!” [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: I totally understand what you are talking about!

YŌRŌ: I felt good when I heard that story. Especially the part where he said, “You’re really just talking about money.” [laughs]

MIYAZAKI: It’s unseemly to talk about money all the time, isn’t it? I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, just that it’s unseemly. I know there are all sorts of things that have to be done, but at least no one in Japan’s starving to death yet.

YŌRŌ: Right. And that’s exactly why all this talk doesn’t amount to much.

MIYAZAKI: The reality that there “might not be any more rice in the rice bin” is something that I can’t imagine no matter how hard I try. We won’t know what the psychological state of people would be when they’ve eaten through the stock of food they have at home and really have nothing left.

YŌRŌ: Right. Rather than going through all these clumsy and silly disaster drills all the time, what they ought to do is to stop all distribution in Tokyo, including that of food, for a month. Then we’d really know how people would react. We’d know what to do in a real disaster.

MIYAZAKI: You wouldn’t even have to shut things down for a month. Chaos would erupt in three days.

YŌRŌ: One thing that really amazes me recently is how people are getting so hysterical about the declining birthrate in Japan, but no one seems to be willing to calculate what an appropriate population level might be. I know there may be no perfect answer, but there should be some answer. I recently read a book by the biologist Jared Diamond, and in it he wrote that when considering the natural environment in Australia, an appropriate population level would probably be around eight million. When I went to Australia in 1970, that’s exactly what the population was. But now the population has more than doubled. It’s no wonder that the natural environment is being destroyed.

MIYAZAKI: Japan’s population exceeded 100 million when I was still a student, so it has really soared since then. And I think we’ll peak soon. But as you yourself often say, Yōrō-san, humans are probably destined to live in increasingly urban environments. With urbanization, we have these big cities; there may be those who choose to live outside them, but doing so will be predicated on the existence of cities.

YŌRŌ: That’s already true now, isn’t it?

MIYAZAKI: There’s something about all this that I frankly just don’t get. We know that by accepting the status quo we’ll run into problems, but everyone seems to be trying to cover up the fundamental insecurities they have and then discovering the seeds of more insecurity elsewhere. They’re worrying their pensions aren’t growing because of the decline in the birthrate, for example. But I don’t think that’s right. The insecurity is really coming from a deeper, fundamental, and almost impossible-to-deal-with place, and they’re just swapping that for something more visible and immediate. So then when people question what should be done, all you can do is say there’s no solution.

YŌRŌ: Yes, but it’ll probably all work out fine. After all, living things tend to naturally make adjustments to survive.

MIYAZAKI: But the problem’s probably with the adjustment process. Because in this case the adjustment may require, first of all, taking ourselves out of the picture.

YŌRŌ: In the long run, populations resolve to a sustainable level. For example, I don’t think that oil will last much longer. You can even calculate that it won’t. And if that’s the case, the declining birthrate may be a result of an awareness of this fact. People may subconsciously know.

MIYAZAKI: You may be right. In fact, this may be the source of the vague but huge insecurity that envelopes Japan right now. On a global level the human species is going into decline, and perhaps everyone senses this reality, and it therefore gets connected with a more generalized uneasiness about the future.

YŌRŌ: Japan’s still probably better off than most countries.

MIYAZAKI: I’d have to agree with that; we are better off.

YŌRŌ: The cost of our overall society is low. For places like Iraq and the United States, on the other hand, it’s out of control. They’re spending a huge amount of money on completely wasteful things. I always think of those metal detectors at the airports. Every ordinary person goes through them and has to take their shoes off, but despite all the trouble they’ve gone through it seems like no one ever catches any terrorists. So I secretly subscribe to the theory that Bin Laden owns stock in the companies making the metal detectors. [laughs] Everyone talks about how they’re absolutely against terrorism, but the fact that they’re wasting so much money being against terrorism actually means they are permitting it.

One thing so interesting about Egypt is that they have metal detectors in shopping malls, department stores, and even in hotels. And everyone walks right through them. And no matter who goes through or how they’re dressed or what they look like, the detectors go off. Everyone sets off the alarms and goes right through, and there’s no one there to inspect them. [laughs] In other words, terrorism has already been embedded in their economic system.

MIYAZAKI: When people take trains from suburban areas like Higashi Koganei, where Ghibli is, or from Mitaka to downtown Tokyo, I think nearly everyone who looks out at the scenery feels that things are out of control. But compared to before, Tokorozawa, where I live, is much better off. Almost without realizing it, we have more parks, with lots of people walking in them. And the people there don’t seem to be walking around with guarded looks on their faces; on the contrary, they look completely relaxed. They’re out walking their puppy dogs. And I don’t know how to describe this sight other than to say that it seems totally peaceful.

Thirty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. In other words, now we’ve got old folks who may feel insecure but are living on their pensions, doing things like taking walks for their health and playing dress-up with their dogs, and there are social clubs centered on dogs all over the place. It’s a type of peace that we’ve finally arrived at, decades after the war ended. [laughs] But at the same time, it seems to me, it’s not the type of peace that people strived to achieve. It’s not necessarily such an intelligent scene, really. Still, when I look at all those people, I feel like I sort of understand and sort of don’t at the same time. Sometimes, I feel that everything the mass media’s concerned about isn’t really that big a problem after all.

The end of a mass consumption civilization—surviving amid a dwindling birthrate and an economic recession

YŌRŌ: If I were younger today, I’d be smiling ear to ear.

MIYAZAKI: Me too. [laughs]

YŌRŌ: For one, a declining birthrate means there’ll be more land available.

MIYAZAKI: And on top of that, we already have lots of inexpensive secondhand condos coming on the market. If you want to go live in the countryside today, there’s lots of available land. I don’t have the aptitude for it, but I’ve long dreamed of forming a publicly traded agricultural corporation.

YŌRŌ: I always suggest to folks that they might want to think about being both a salaryman and a farmer at the same time. In nearly all prefectures throughout Japan now, the percentage of farm families engaged in other occupations is over 85 percent. People holding down salaried jobs are also farming. So it wouldn’t be too strange if everyone in the entire country did some farming.

I recently went to Fukui Prefecture and noticed that rice fields near cities use the most insecticides. The farmers claim it’s because they don’t have enough people to work the fields by hand, but they’re basically just cutting corners. It would be great to get some salarymen working the fields in those areas.

MIYAZAKI: Of course, the salarymen would have to want to try farming, or it wouldn’t work, so it would also be an education problem.

YŌRŌ: If it were up to me, I would force them to alternate between farming and salaried work, sort of like the old sankin kōtai alternate residence system for domain lords during Japan’s feudal days. [laughs] I’m suggesting that the Kasumigaseki bureaucrats actually put a plan into action. There’s a busy farming season, right? Well, when the busy time comes around, the bureaucrats could do some farming. They’d only have to send 10 percent of their people out to farm a year. It’d improve the employment situation too. And central to the idea is that they could eat what they grow.

MIYAZAKI: I’d personally at least like to see some bamboo brooms made in Japan. Nearly all the ones being sold now are made in China, and it honestly pains me to see how ugly our brooms have become. I know there’s a labor cost involved in making them in Japan, and I know they might wind up costing around four thousand yen, but I’d still personally prefer to have a good-looking Japanese-made broom. Actually, the animation industry’s in nearly the same state as the bamboo broom industry. For example, you can send the original drawings for a TV series to China and on the same day, or overnight, get them back. In other words, the drawings you send will come back the same day as in-between animation. Even more amazing, over there they colorize it and digitalize it and send it back as data. The staff in Japan just serve to correct a few excesses that come back from China, and that’s all. I think the same phenomenon probably exists in other industries too, and not just animation.

YŌRŌ: That’s what’s happening with food too. Some people are basically using a system of forced growing of food now, speeding up the whole process, but at the same time other people are also talking about “slow food.” A typical example of what happens is BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy), mad cow disease.

MIYAZAKI: If this is the inevitable course of civilization, we’ve got a really tough problem on our hands.

YŌRŌ: Human civilization is like a logarithmic curve. It goes quickly up to a certain point, and then, no matter how much effort is made, it just doesn’t go up much anymore. And once you enter that phase, if you try to improve things, you’re just wasting your energy.

MIYAZAKI: It would be great if all these problems peaked randomly, but to me the problem seems to be that a whole variety of problems are peaking globally in a concentrated fashion. People started saying quite a while ago that our consumption-based civilization would end in fifty years, and it seems to me that we’re finally starting to see signs of that now. I’d like to live another thirty years to see what’s going to happen, but I know that’s expecting way too much. [laughs]

Takeshi Yōrō Born 1937 in Kanagawa Prefecture. Anatomist. Professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. Director of the nonprofit organization on “The Relationship Between Humans and Animals.” Graduate of the University of Tokyo’s School of Medicine. Prior to current position, spent 1981–1995 as a professor at the University of Tokyo, and 1996–2003 as professor at Kitasato University. In 1989, his Karada no Mikata (Ways of Looking at the Body; published by Chikuma Bunko), won the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and the Humanities. In 2003, his book Baka no Kabe (Wall of Fools) became a best seller and went on to win the Ryūkōgo Taishō (Buzzword Award), as well as the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, Special Category. Has authored numerous other books, including Yuinōron (Absolute Brain Theory; published by Chikuma Gakugei Bunko), Kaibōgaku Kyōshitsu e Yōkoso (Welcome to the Anatomy Lab; published by Chikuma Shobō), and Yōrō-kun (Lessons from Yōrō; published by Shinchōsha). His collection of dialogues with Hayao Miyazaki includes Mushi Me to Ani-me (Insect Eyes and Anime Eyes; published by Shinchō Bunko).

Feeling Responsible for the Future of Children and Not Wanting to Make Halfhearted Films

Interviewer: Hironari Tamura of the Culture Department

Nihon Keizai Shimbun, May 1, 2006 evening edition; May 2, morning edition

Interacting with children at the Ghibli Museum

I find it important to interact with children and to observe their faces. It reinforces my awareness that children are the starting point of everything and makes me think. For example, when we decided to prohibit the taking of photos in the museum, the children started acting much more energetically and freer than before, even looking much happier. They were, in other words, liberated from the demands of adults, who always think they have to capture the good times with their cameras.

I’ve been telling everyone around me that they shouldn’t let their children watch television until they are three years old. It’s because television takes away the opportunity for children to think for themselves. I don’t mind them watching my films, of course, but once they’ve watched them, I’d prefer them to go into the hills and try to catch some rhinoceros beetles. I make my films hoping they’ll want to do that sort of thing. I say this because rather than having them spend their summer vacations watching television, I want them to have far more memorable experiences out of doors. These experiences will live on in them through to adulthood.

Taking issue with the educational system

Modern children have been born into a particularly difficult era. They’re saddled with parental over-expectations, with competition in school entrance examinations, with difficulty finding jobs, and on and on. Yet both the mass media and parents tend to fan the flames of insecurity. It’s probably a reflection of a larger trend that hangs over our society. You could even probably call our age—where everyone feels this insecurity—the era of “mass popularization of insecurity.” Of course, we also probably worry too much. It’s all right to worry about the state of our pensions, but we don’t even know if we’ll live long enough to enjoy our pensions. Children are sensitive to these things, and they quickly pick up on their parent’s insecurities.

On the feature-length animated version of Tales from Earthsea, directed by Miyazaki’s son, Gorō Miyazaki, to be released in July

Animation and live-action film directors usually dislike any films other than their own. It’s true of me as well. If I’m going to be involved in producing a film, I want to be involved in the smallest details. So I stayed away from getting involved at all in the production of Gorō’s Tales from Earthsea. Besides, I’ve also always been a workaholic—the type of father who only goes home to sleep—so I’m hardly in a position to give him any high-minded advice.

Animation’s power comes from the fact that it has always been a minor media genre

—We hear all sorts of praise for Japanese animation overseas, and we also hear how popular Hayao Miyazaki is. How do you feel about that?

It’s true that more people overseas say good things about Japanese animation than before, but there are also more people who frown at all the violence and sex scenes in it. Even I wound up depicting some very realistic combat scenes in Princess Mononoke, but I nonetheless have strong reservations about using violence to sell a film. When you consider the fans of Japanese animation overseas and realize how many of them are otaku types who really don’t fit into other cultures, it seems to me that we can’t really say Japanese animation has become a truly successful cultural export. Overseas, the local reaction in the mass media to Japanese animation is both positive and negative.

Overseas, even my own films have an audience that pales in comparison to that of major Hollywood movies. And I can also say with considerable confidence that any films I make in the future will never be big hits in the United States. Around the time of the war with Iraq, I even made a slightly conscious effort to create a film that wouldn’t be very successful in the United States. So even though people overseas may speak highly of Japanese animation now, this may be a very temporary phenomenon. It wouldn’t surprise me if Japanese animation is at a peak of popularity now and about to go into decline.

Serious doubts about the government’s optimistic view of Japanese animation as a contents industry that can be exported

The idea that exporting Japanese animation will increase domestic employment and help earn foreign exchange seems laughable to me. The power of animation comes from the fact that it has always been a minor media genre. So I don’t understand why the government would try to get so involved in it … It might turn out to be another short-lived fad like the 1990s craze for coconut milk desserts. It’s entirely possible that we’ll see a big boom in Japanese animation, and then—just when everyone piles on and starts businesses and starts investing in it—the bust will come, the whole thing will turn out to have been a miscalculation, and we’ll be left with nothing but wreckage. High expectations are dangerous. No matter how many modern animation videos or DVDs people try to sell, it is still a genre destined to disappear in a few hundred years.

Looking for markets overseas is all well and good, but Japan is actually a fairly rare advanced nation, because its population of over 100 million provides a large domestic market. With this sort of scale, what individual nations in Europe, or even Korea, cannot do, Japan can do on its own. And it’s surely one reason Japanese animation has become so popular. Similarly, it’s a reason we should not be fixated solely on the overseas popularity of Japanese animation and neglect the market at home.

Staying focused on hand-drawn animation, in the midst of a boom in 3D computer graphics

Most “classic” silent movies were created after “talkies” were developed. And looking back at history, we can see that there was a sudden boom in demand for sailing ships right after the invention of steamships. In other words, with technological innovation, if there is a broadening of the overall base, then the demand for old technologies increases. And even if it doesn’t, I like to draw by hand on paper, so I can’t imagine that the demand for everything hand-drawn will disappear. And that’s the approach I intend to continue to take.

Having so said, it is true that Ghibli films use lots of computer graphics, just as American animation productions do. There is no question that computer graphics are a promising tool for us. The issue is how this tool is used. When turning a three-dimensional real-world image into a flat, two-dimensional image, the result is an expression of an artist’s way of viewing the world, even of his or her way of thinking. If people become fixated on using computer graphics to pursue a greater sense of realism, I fear that it may help to cancel out a diversity of thoughts and ideas. As long as I continue to work as a creator, I cannot ever imagine relinquishing my own way of seeing the world.

Memories of Lost Landscapes: On Genzaburō Yoshino’s Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka (How Will You Young People Live?)

Neppū, Studio Ghibli, June issue, 2006

Memories of a landscape with a used bookstore

I first read part of Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka (How Will You Young People Live?, first printing 1937, from Shinchōsha; current editions include Iwanami Bunko, Popura Shuppan, etc.) when I was in elementary school. As I recall, it was excerpted in a textbook.

Later, an odd used bookstore opened near my house, and I encountered the work again there, this time—the first time—as a real book. My memories of almost all the books I read during this time overlap with my memory of going to this particular used bookstore. It was where I spent a lot of time during my elementary and junior high school days.

It was a very small and strange used bookstore, the kind of place that, even to my childish eyes, looked like it would never succeed as a business. It stood all alone along Inokashira-dōri road, where there was still a large thicketed area near the Keiō Teito Inokashira Line train yard. I hardly ever saw any customers there, and it was tended by a man who seemed more like an older brother to me.

I had recently returned to Tokyo from Utsunomiya, where our family was evacuated to during the war, and I was living in Eifukuchō. As a boy, I had a late-blooming obsession with the war and the military, and I pored over books about them—including books that were antiwar and photographs that showed the horror of it.

I can recall being in an air raid when I was four years old, but I had no way of really knowing about the war itself when I was a boy. The books I wound up reading were not published in a widely available form, much less normally on view where children could see them. There were wounded veterans in town, my parents spoke about the war, and there were also beggars with awful scars coming around. But in my world, at that age, these things didn’t connect to the reality of the war. Only around fifth grade did I see a magazine for adults on airplanes and realize that Japan had had so many airplanes during the war. This shows how little information I had.

But at that used bookstore, there were also prewar science fantasy books, with illustrations showing rockets going up slanted launching pads toward the moon, books on advances in scientific technology, and even a book about Edison inventing the “talkies.” I encountered all sorts of books there that I didn’t find anywhere else.

And it was among such books that I came across Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka. Yet when I squint and try to remember it accurately, my memory slips away from me. I do recall browsing through it at the bookstore, but I also remember reading it through entirely, so I must have bought it there. The volume I have now is the one revised and reissued by Shinchōsha in 1956, so it can’t be the one I bought then.

In any event, what was crucial for me at that age was the existence of this used bookstore. So when I try to discuss this book, rather than its content, what comes up in my memory is the bookstore.

Memory of a landscape of lost Tokyo

I still clearly recall holding this book and turning its pages, and the impression I got when I did so. There was an illustration of young Coper9 in the beginning, showing him riding home in the rain in a hired car with his uncle. And it inexplicably made me feel terribly nostalgic.

It may seem absurd for a young elementary school pupil to feel “nostalgic” about anything, but I really did. Of course, in the real memories I have of my own short life, there isn’t a trace of such a scene, and I therefore have no idea why it would seem so nostalgic. Had I previously seen a similar image in a film or had a similar experience? In the fog of my mind, I couldn’t tell.

I had actually had a similar experience when I was even younger, when I felt a sense of nostalgia on seeing a drawing of boys walking on a sidewalk. It was an illustration of some young boys who must have been on their way to elementary school, wearing uniforms with stand-up collars and short pants. But at the time that I saw that drawing, there were no such sidewalks around, and I had no experience that would have allowed me to feel nostalgic about such a landscape.

This made me dimly realize, even as a child, that we don’t just feel nostalgic because of something we remember seeing, but that there is something more at work. In a way, I may have learned about feeling nostalgic from seeing the illustration in this book.

The illustration in this particular book was memorable, but the content of the book was also very interesting. I don’t want to discuss too much about why, except to say that regarding the title of How Will You Young People Live? I am at an age where I have already lived my life in a certain way. [laughs] I am more inclined to be interested in the landscapes the author saw when he wrote the book.

The book was written around the time of the Manchurian Incident10 and published in 1937 as a volume in the Shinchōsha series Nihon Shōkokumin Bunko (Library of Books for Young People of Japan, compiled by Yūzō Yamamoto), but it was read most widely after the war.

When we read old books, we have to think about more than just their content; we need to also consider the times in which they were written. That’s why, when I read old books, I wind up imagining what the writer saw at the time and what sort of landscapes have been lost since then.

A while ago, in the conference room at Ghibli, I found a volume of photographs titled Ushinawareta Teito Tokyo: Taishō, Shōwa no machi to sumai (Lost Imperial Capital Tokyo: City and Residences of the Taisho and Showa periods, 1991, revised as Genkei no Tokyo: Taishō, Shōwa no machi to sumai, Kashiwa Shobō, 1998). I was drawn to the book by a sense of nostalgia for the cover photograph. It made me recall the illustration in Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka, in which the protagonist Coper and his uncle are shown looking out over the city of Tokyo from the rooftop of a department store. The photograph in the more recent book shows the terrace of the Shirokiya department store building. And that terrace lasted just three years, between 1928 and 1931, disappearing when the department store was renovated and expanded. But it looked to me exactly like the scene depicted in the drawing in Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka. This made me conclude that the person who edited the book of photographs—one of them is the architect Terunobu Fujimori—must also have seen the drawing in Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka. [laughs]

By the time Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka was published in 1937, taking photographs of the city from high buildings such as department stores was banned for military reasons. It was only the twelfth year of the Shōwa period, but in this very short time span there was already a trend toward ideological and academic oppression, and the fanning of racial nationalism to create young men ready to die for their country. With abnormal speed, the militaristic Shōwa era government plunged forward toward catastrophe. It shows us how, even now, the world can change almost overnight.

In other words, in an era when the views depicted in Ushinawareta Teito Tokyo were disappearing before his eyes, Genzaburō Yoshino looked at the city of Tokyo, thought seriously about what he could possibly say to others at the time, and wrote his book. That is why the question in his title—“How will you live?”—is so profound, and also why the uncle in the story talks so straight to young Coper, and with such urgency.

Memory of a landscape rusted red

The conditions we face in our lives today are not so different from those people faced when Yoshino wrote his book, but in some ways we may be facing a more fundamental crisis in our civilization.

By crisis in our civilization, I am not talking about what is happening with China or North Korea, or saying that some specific thing is wrong and that everything would be fine if it were simply eliminated. Rather, I’m saying that the epicenter of the problem is America, and the problem has affected the entire world, leading us to our current condition.

At this stage, would it even be possible for us to cast off our American style of life? With so many of us knowing nothing but an American lifestyle, it certainly wouldn’t be easy. Even so, I believe our present mass consumption civilization is so overstrained that we may have reached the point where we have to violently discard it, bracing ourselves for the possibility that we may lose everything in the process.

This is why the scenes we have today will also disappear in a flash. And in reality I think everyone intuitively knows that the time for this is drawing ever closer. That we are merely swapping this profound apprehension for the easier to deal with issues at hand.

I was born at a time when we had nothing, and I became aware of my surroundings with the end of the war when I was four years old. When I was old enough to run around and play here and there, I often played in the ruins of amusement parks and city parks.

In the depths of one park overgrown with grass, there was a moss-covered wooden bridge that crossed a pond to a little island. When I went over the bridge and pushed my way through the grasses, I found a rusty-red cage that likely once held an animal. Peering inside, I saw dead leaves piled deep in the concrete basin that must have been the watering place for the animal.

It was part of a “cultural” attraction built before the war—around 1935, on the western outskirts of Tokyo—by a railway company to attract buyers to a suburban residential development it had financed. In other words, what we now know in greater Tokyo as Inokashira Park, Shakujii Park, and Zenpukuji Park were made by filling in rice paddies in prewar times to sell country villas. And with the war, these attractions had turned into ruins. The scene I saw amid the grasses as a child, and took for granted, was the remains of the cultured life that prewar people had sought—in then-modern spiral slides and water fowl cages, now rusted, leaning, decayed, and full of holes.

So I first saw with my own eyes, as a child playing, that civilizations go into decline. What had once been something glamorous no longer existed. What remained was broken, in ruins. I am sure that I only experienced this sight a short time, but it took hold deep inside me.

Those a little older than I am—such as Paku-san, who is five years older—experienced a sense of scarcity after the war, a sense of lacking things they had once had. After the war, they also experienced the gradual regaining of those things. But for me there was nothing from the start. With that small difference, we see the world in totally different ways. If members of Paku-san’s generation saw the ruins of the same park, they would probably think, “This is the amusement park where we used to play.” For me, having no knowledge of what it used to be like, it was as if I were viewing the ruins of ancient Rome. And the experience stimulated my imagination.

Where did the sense of nostalgia I felt upon seeing the illustration in Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka come from? Recently, I think that my own childhood experiences somehow merged with the drawing and with its mid-1930s depiction of a city full of foreboding that it might soon be engulfed in flames from air raids. This then may have created, in addition to a type of profound sadness, a sense of nostalgia in me. In that small shop where I found the book, I was surely searching for something written when the rusted cages in the park had still been shiny and new.

Scenes of cracks in the era during which my father lived

As a boy, there was one big reason I was so interested in learning about lost landscapes of the prewar era, and about the war—it was because I couldn’t imagine how my mom and dad had actually lived through the grayness of the early Shōwa period depicted in Genzaburō Yoshino’s book.

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Great Depression, Japan’s entry into war, and the firebombing of Tokyo all took place in the short span of about twenty years. It was a time when the nation rushed like a typhoon, at an abnormal speed, toward destruction. Yoshino, the author of the book, nonetheless dealt with the sense of crisis in a truly profound way. Yet, as a child, when I would ask my dad about those days, he would only say in his easygoing manner, “Yeah, it was interesting,” or tell me stories about “If I had one yen …”

On the other hand, the official history that I learned was full of madness, like a storm headed through repression of thought and the Great Depression toward the Manchurian Incident. I couldn’t imagine how my parents could have found a niche to live through that time in such an easygoing manner. The gap I sensed grew into a massive doubt, which plagued me for years.

When I recently saw Yasujirō Ozu’s 1932 comedy, Where Are Now the Dreams of Youth, I finally felt as though I could understand how things must have been. In the film, despite it being a time of economic depression with jobs hard to come by, the irresponsible and anarchic main character—who in those days would have been called a “modern boy”—was the spitting image of my father. His hair was slicked back with pomade, he carried a book under his arm though he had no intention of reading it, [laughs] and he wore glasses for show.

Where Are Now the Dreams of Youth is an awfully trite story of students vying for the attention of a café waitress played by Kinuyo Tanaka, but my dad once told me the exact same story. On the morning of the day that he was to take an important exam, the waitress of a café he frequented told him that she was in love with him—and as a result he was so dumbfounded that he did terribly on the test. [laughs]

My dad was hopeless, always boasting about himself like that. He loved “motion pictures” and was always going off to Asakusa to the entertainment area. From the stories he told, I came to the conclusion that there are always all sorts of niches in any era. There are so many niches where you can live without being aware of what is going on in the world around you or, even if you are aware, to pretend that you are not.

I don’t know if my dad lived in his anarchic way intentionally, ignoring his era, or if he was just indifferent. I do think he lived this way because he had experienced the Great Kantō Earthquake, and it had made him understand viscerally, rather than philosophically, that if you die, it really is all over. And as a result, he never wavered in his day-to-day, carefree existence.

I was a latecomer, born during the war. Until I was about eighteen years old, though I hated war, I still had hopes for Japan as a country. So as a result, resentments I had toward my father, characterized by questions like “Why didn’t you oppose the war?” and “Why did you make things for the military industry?” built up in me like sludge. As his son, I simply couldn’t understand my own father. On the one hand, during the Utsunomiya air raid I experienced as a small boy, he had wandered aimlessly about, carrying us kids here and there; on the other hand, he also boasted that he was going to use the war to make money while he had the chance. With my youthful idealism, I rebelled against this nature of my father and clashed with him. But at my present age if I had the chance to hear my mom and dad talk about their lives again, I think I would be better able to understand how they had lived. I might be able to redo things and ask them in a more proper way. I have no regrets. I just feel that I let my parents’ issues be their issues. My parents were foolish, but so is their son. [laughs] My mom and dad were just ordinary townspeople, but it occurs to me now that the Shōwa and Taishō eras they lived through must have been filled with very different landscapes than the official histories show.

I was the kind of boy who thought that there must be something more important in life than my own happiness, and that I might even have to die for it, but I never connected that feeling to the rising sun flag. Even now, I still believe that there is something with greater meaning, beyond the individual. And I don’t intend to imply being left-wing or right-wing, in a political context.

That said, when it comes to resisting wars, I dislike the overly fanatic approach of groups like the White Rose society of German students who resisted the Nazis. I prefer the type of people that the British children’s author, Robert Westall, wrote about. Sent off to war, they try to live with as much humanity as they can and, even though they exhaust themselves, still attempt to live. I think I might be able to live like that. [laughs]

Yet I do know that there is a part of me that wants to act both bravely and fanatically. So, as I have always wondered how I might act if the storm of war were to come, years have passed, and my generation will now never face that danger. But that is also why I don’t want to make films that support killing and being killed—it is where I draw the line.

A landscape destroyed—and what it means to be an ordinary person

Some people say it’s like the prewar days now, but I don’t think so. The reason is that today’s young people are not aggressive. No matter how much the newspapers focus on them, and no matter how much the mass media fuss about them, in reality today’s youths commit very few crimes. Japan has become the country with the lowest murder rate in the world. This is the achievement of our postwar democracy.

At Ghibli, we’ve recently been thinking about creating a small nursery school for children of our staff members. We don’t intend it to foster great people. We just want to raise ordinary people. We know ordinary people can commit acts of great cruelty. After all, under abnormal conditions, this is surely one of the hallmarks of ordinary people.

This is what human beings are all about, so under the abnormal conditions in which he lived, I’m sure Genzaburō Yoshino realized that he alone was unable to stop Japan’s slide into a military dictatorship. He knew Japan would go to war, and that it would be defeated. And he probably thought that even more unspeakable things would occur after defeat.

So in Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka he did not write anything about how people should try to change the times in which they found themselves. His message to his readers was simply to “be human,” no matter how difficult, no matter how awful the times. Another way of looking at it is as a type of despair, a realization of the limits of what we can do. Of course, telling people to continue to be human even when they’re put into Auschwitz may just lead to an early death. Or it may imply that believing one’s family is “waiting” will support one at such times. As for myself, I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to endure such extreme conditions. [laughs] In fact, when I think about whether humans can really control themselves, I find myself resigned to the worst.

That is why I find myself thinking about how, in the story, young Coper’s uncle told him to live with decency as a human being. But I also find myself wondering how the uncle may have lived during the war that followed. He may well have gone on to die a completely pointless death.

In the early Shōwa years so many people died, not just from earthquake disasters and war, but also from the rampant spread of tuberculosis. Many people also died from ordinary poverty, and many children even committed suicide. And even more died at war. The Shōwa era started out as a truly awful era. That is also why, in the postwar period, our civilized society has developed as far as it has. They say the problem is that we’ve gone too far again, but that is the way humans inevitably behave.

The roads in Japan are always being repaired, so they say the only way to deal with it is to pave them with concrete. The north wind is so cold, so they say let’s replace all our window frames with aluminum sashes. Now that we have propane gas, we don’t need open-pit fires any more. Kerosene stoves can keep us warm. That’s the way our lifestyles are today. And the result is that all of our traditional landscapes are being destroyed.

Can we humans really control our egos? I’ve no faith in our ability to do so in a rational way. And I keep coming back to what Yoshie Hotta-san and Ryōtarō Shiba-san said over and over again—that human beings are irredeemable. We are truly irredeemable. And that is why we keep devouring this planet of ours.

When Yoshino poses the question of “How will you live?” he means we should go on living, despite all our problems. He isn’t saying that if we live in a specific way that the problems will disappear and everything will be fine. He is saying that we must think seriously about things and that, while enduring all sorts of difficulties, we must continue to live, even if ultimately to die in vain. Even if to die in vain. Yoshino was unable to write directly about the violence of his times, so all he could tell us to do when such times arrive is to keep living without giving up our humanity. Genzaburō Yoshino-san knew that was all he could do.

Recently, I try not to think about things too far removed from me or too far off in the future. Instead, I try to do my best in a radius of five meters around me, for I feel ever more certain that what I discover there is real. It is better to make three children happy than to create a film for five million. It may not be good business, but to me this seems to be the real truth. And in doing so, I can also make myself happier.

Words of Farewell

Eulogy for Hideo Ogata, the first editor-in-chief of Animage magazine, January 28, 2007

Hideo Ogata-san.

Our editor of legend …

When I met you last summer, you said that you had to make a final push to finish your work, smiled, and left with a “Well, got to go now …” You left then as you always did, somewhat impatiently, and this time, again, you’ve gone ahead of us, somewhat impatiently, without further ado.

I can still hear Ogata-san’s voice, saying “Well, got to go now …”

To us, Ogata-san was an editor-in-chief who paid no attention to pretense or to form—he was someone who insisted on telling the truth as it is.

He loved being called a Don Quixote, and charged into windmills and castle gates over and over. And he wound up fostering several people in his line of work, who learned by cleaning up the chaos that he created.

By following the holes Ogata-san created on his many impetuous charges and the footsteps he left behind, we actually were able to discover many unanticipated new openings and routes.

Ogata-san was always enamored of living in the countryside.

He would peer off in the distance and say that he wanted to live in the hills above his hometown of Kesennuma and raise cows. Once he got quite serious about buying a plot of land and building a cabin on it.

“You know what, Miya-san?” he said. “There’s a really big plot of land available next to the one I want. You should buy it. Cows are the way to go!”

And the moment he said that, a vivid image flashed through my brain of me waking up in the morning and seeing his cattle munching on the grass in my yard.

“No way,” I replied. “You talk about cows, but I know you really just want me to buy the land so you can graze your cows on it, right?”

Of course, Ogata-san never listened to what others said.

“I just love cows,” he would say, feeling satisfied, and of course he never bought any land in the hills.

Horses would have suited Ogata-san far better than cows, but ever since his youth, when he was obsessed with literature, he had been enamored of a line in the letter Sōseki Natsume11 sent Ryūnosuke Akutagawa12 to encourage him, saying, “Be like an ox, that always plods forward …”

So while always dreaming of cows, Ogata-san was forever charging forth on some emaciated nag. And indeed, horses did suit him better.

Ogata-san was the Man of La Mancha, from Kesennuma in northeastern Japan.

With dreams unobtainable
With enemies everywhere

I suppress the sorrow in my heart
And sally forth bravely.

On a path I cannot see clearly
With arms too weary

I summon my strength
And I march forward

For this is my quest …

Ogata-san, my editor-in-chief, thank you so much. And may you rest in peace.

The House of Three Bears

On the founding of the House of Three Bears, Studio Ghibli’s company nursery school; February 13, 2007

Let’s create a place that children will love.

A place where, even if they are dawdling a bit in the morning, once they enter its gate, they will become cheerful and lively.

A place where their bodies will start moving naturally: running, clambering, sliding. A place where they will want to touch, grab, and rub things. A place with secret crevices that make them want to peer inside and crawl into.

A place where they will learn to use needle and thread, tie and untie knots in ropes, cut and paste, and start and put out fires.

A place where, by doing these things, their bodies will grow in harmony with their minds.

A place in which passersby and neighbors alike will delight, where children will enjoy delicious snacks and meals, and everyone will want to visit.

A place where, after the children become adults, they will remember fondly and wish the children around them could experience the same thing. This is the sort of place that we dream of creating.

From the Anthill: An Introduction

Saint-Exupéry: Dessins: Aquarelles, pastels, plume et crayon (Japanese title: San-Tegujuperi: Dessan Shūsei), Misuzu Shobō, published April 25, 2007

This book (Saint-Exupéry: Dessins: Aquarelles, pastels, plume et crayon) is like a collection of the scales on the skin shed by a snake. It may be of use to people who want to study or collect snakeskin scales. But for those who would like to learn more about the snake that once inhabited the skin, it is frustrating.

Saint-Exupéry’s drawings in this book are not the type that invites us to see what he—the sketcher—viewed through his eyes. Nor do they represent a refining and polishing of his technique. Instead, they make us realize that the incomparable pictures in The Little Prince represent the miraculous instant that Saint-Exupéry’s spirit truly crystallized on paper in a visible form.

So, what is the significance of this book?

It is a sign of “remembrance.”

It was created in “remembrance” of that rarest of persons. It was created as a sign of unceasing respect and adulation, to be gently placed on an old shelf by a window in an old mansion, overlooking the sunny garden of his childhood. It is not something to be consumed through analysis, dissection, or sifting through the details of his life.

Those who love Saint-Exupéry’s writings will understand the depth of the sacrilege I felt when I first saw a drawing from Le Petit Prince in the show window of a Japanese bank or insurance company. They will also understand the abhorrence I felt when—after people had churned up the Mediterranean Sea to salvage the aircraft from his last flight—I saw the photograph of a fat man boastfully showing off his bracelet.

For me, Saint-Exupéry’s life belongs to an inviolable domain.

Saint-Exupéry is a still-rough diamond that vanished into the sea. He is a gemstone never cut to fit fashion nor buffeted by the waves of the times that never becomes outdated. This is evident in the fact that his book Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand, and Stars), which describes the dawn of airmail flights and the nobility of man, has lost none of its brilliance.

Saint-Exupéry was an aviator who crash-landed on this planet and did not die. He survived to write Terre des Hommes and The Little Prince, and after that, there was no reason for him to continue living. He tried to fly off from our planet, foundered, and was wounded many times, and finally fulfilled his wish in the Mediterranean Sea.

There is a difference between a diamond and a shard of brick. Saint-Exupéry was a gemstone that refused to be polished, and as a result it was never easy for him to live in the normal world. Some say he was a second-rate aviator, that he ran up debts, that he had lovers, that his last flight was a pointless mission, or that it was really suicide …

That kind of gossip means nothing to me. Such things are the prerogatives of poets. Of course, Saint-Exupéry was not a poet in the usual sense. But the spirit of poetry appears in unexpected places in various forms and in various human occupations. He left us so many valuable phrases.

Three orange trees

Human bonds, human relations

Man’s truth

Mozart murdered

The meaning of life …

And, the anthill

If we swallow these phrases whole and look for some cheap sort of human nobility, we who are mere shards of brick could easily become ethnic nationalists, totalitarians, or terrorists.

Saint-Exupéry also wrote that it is easier to create people who are proud of Beethoven than to give birth to one. He was also well aware of the difficulty of seeking meaning in one’s life by substituting something else for it.

But I love the episode of the three hundred rifle shots. I thrill to the pride of the force that would not submit and fired three hundred shots for the visiting enemy captain, and the pride of the captain who returned three hundred shots before the battle. Even if their nobility yielded a brutal result …

The world has, indeed, become an anthill.

In the twenty-first century, the mail air carriers that Mermoz and Guillaumet flew are no longer. Everything is now calculated in terms of cost-benefit, the world is overflowing with things, and we can no longer distinguish between what is important and what is not. The deluge of quantity changes the quality of everything.

Still, we must continue to walk toward man’s truth. We may find ourselves in the midst of inexorable torrents of historical hatred, but as long as we try to keep our humanity we will never lose all of our nobility. Yet while I believe this to be true, as one of several billion ants in the anthill, I carry with me those who have been murdered, though they may not have as much genius as Mozart. And I, also, undoubtedly continue to murder Mozart.

Saint-Exupéry wrote that the murdered Mozart will eventually come to love the putrid music of the cabaret. And more and more, I fear that I am already part of that ragged cabaret.

Even so, in the anthill,

Children are born.

In order to be hurt and pressed into a mold …

Even as we bear our open wounds, how can we not rejoice at the sight of newborn children? The newborn child has within it every possibility. The child is proof that the world is beautiful … Even if this world no longer amounts to the anthill, and if the human race becomes the cancer cells that destroy our planet, the ant can only write about the beauty of the world in the words of the ant.

There may come a day when, as Ursula K. Le Guin suggests in her work, humans will be able to decipher what the ant has written on a hazelnut. And a time may also come when humans will be able to listen to the murmurs of cancer cells.

When I think about Saint-Exupéry, all manner of images well up inside me, almost as if I had experienced them myself.

The Canal du Midi shines as it crosses the view below me. We were flying low, alongside each other. His Breguet-14 was just ahead of our aircraft’s wood, cloth, and wire-constructed wing. He sent us a casual greeting from his pilot’s seat. Skirting the snow-covered Pyrenees, he was heading out to sea toward Alicante, his next transfer point.

We watched silently as his light yellow aircraft slowly flew away from us. Little by little it grew smaller in the space between the green earth and the gradually widening sea and sky beyond. Then it disappeared in the glittering of the Mediterranean Sea.

As we descended earthward to our world, we felt his presence much more clearly than before.

I plan to place this volume on my bookshelf next to the books he wrote.

January 25, 2006

Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen): A Film That Made Me Think Animation Was Worthy Work

Neppū, Studio Ghibli, November 2007 issue

—When you once did an interview-dialogue with the Russian director Yuriy Norshteyn, you touched upon the subject of Snezhnaya Koroleva (The Snow Queen, 1957, directed by Lev Atamanov), and mentioned that it “depicted the heart,” so that’s what I’d like to start by asking you about.

MIYAZAKI: To be more precise, I’ve always thought of it as being more about dreams rather than the heart. In other words, it’s all about Gerda’s single-minded dream of getting back Kai, whom she loves—it’s a film filled with the idea of using that emotion as a force. And from a young age I had always thought that the medium of animation was particularly suited to depicting that dream. It was exactly the sort of thing that I wished I could have done. So while Hakujaden (Tale of the White Serpent, 1958, directed by Taiji Yabushita) inspired me to become an animator, it was seeing Snezhnaya Koroleva that later really made me feel glad I had become one. Up until that point I had just been punching a time card at work every day, wondering if I should do something more with my life. [laughs]

—Where did you first see the film?

MIYAZAKI: I saw it around the time I started working at Toei Animation, in the Nerima Ward community center, in Tokyo. I was involved in the company union, and I think they had a special screening of it. I saw a dubbed version, but after that, when the original was screened at Toei Animation, a friend recorded it on a big tape recorder. The tape had the original Russian language soundtrack on it, so I borrowed it and listened to it over and over again at work. I kept rewinding it over and over until the tape stretched to the limit, and I eventually erased my memory of the dubbed version. Listening to the original voices made me realize how wonderful the Russian language is.

—Did it have a big influence on your later filmmaking?

MIYAZAKI: Well, it’s not just limited to Snezhnaya Koroleva, of course, but when we encountered animation made in the 1950s, it was like being hit over the head, because we realized that the work we were doing was still at too low a level, and that it wasn’t ambitious enough. We felt that we had to do something, even if only to reach the same level of ambition, and to at least raise our low technical ability to something more respectable—it was a sentiment that not only I, but Paku-san, and several other people who then worked with us, shared. When referring to the films I create, I should mention that I still tend to say “our films,” and when I make them, I firmly believe it’s not just me—that I’m working with a gang of friends. So it wasn’t just my films that I wanted to make this way, it was all of our films. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if we could someday make something at the same high level as Snezhnaya Koroleva. Animation has the potential to be far more than just about business, or merchandising, or selling character goods; it can have its own ambitions. We were working on such a crude level that we just wanted to get our pride back.

—Was Japanese animation really so horrible back in those days?

MIYAZAKI: We were working on things like Wanwan Chūshingura (Woof Woof Chushingura, 1963), and Gulliver’s Space Travels (1965), but when they showed episodes from the animated TV series and the theatrical feature in theaters at the same time, the children in the audience would all cheer for the TV series. Then, when the feature came on they would get so bored they would run around in the aisles. We couldn’t grab their imagination. It was therefore inevitable that Toei-style feature animation would eventually disappear. As to why I decided to create a feature-length animated work rather than a TV series, it was probably because I was thinking of creating a single world, due to the influence of works like Snezhnaya Koroleva, and also Osamu Tezuka’s story manga. But I hated the idea of surrendering completely to Tezuka [laughs] and had absolutely no intention of creating anything like his. So that’s also why I never wanted to join his studio, Mushi Productions.

—Can you name any specific scenes that impressed you in Snezhnaya Koroleva?

MIYAZAKI: Well, for example, when the daughter cries, she lifts up her skirt a bit, giving us a glimpse of her thigh. She’s a robber girl, but she really wants to be a gentle person. And the way she’s drawn shows that she is in fact an honest girl. I was floored by that. I realized that in animation you can depict human emotions with amazing conciseness. This is despite the fact that Snezhnaya Koroleva has lots of poorly rendered animated sequences. There are lots of them, but the creators were willing to take risks and aim high. There’s a scene where a horse ascends into the sky in a spiral fashion, and it isn’t well done. But they nonetheless tried to depict it. I think the kind of ambition they had is wonderful.

—What did you think of the girl, Gerda?

MIYAZAKI: I loved the intensity of her thought. Gerda’s like Kiyohime in the Anchin Kiyohime legend who turns into a fire-breathing giant serpent and goes after the man she loves. Without regard to the consequences, Gerda tosses off her shoes and goes into the wilderness barefoot, ready to go as far north as she has to, to bring back the boy, Kai. She goes off to save Kai, whose heart has been frozen. And her bravery inspires the women she meets who help her. It’s beautifully done.

When Spirited Away was released there was no explanation of why Chihiro, when she looked at the group of pigs in the end, knew that her mother and father weren’t among them. Some people might find this illogical and want an explanation. But I don’t think it’s necessary. With all the experiences Chihiro has been through, she just knows her parents aren’t there. And the reason she knows is because living is all about knowing. That’s all there is to it. If people are going to complain about things being left out here and there, well, the audiences can fill in the gaps by themselves. I don’t want to waste time doing so. I think this is the easiest way to explain it, but even if you do understand it, that isn’t the same thing as actually watching the film. That’s why I hate films that are made based just on logic. If you were to focus just on logic, you’d never be able to depict Gerda’s power.

—So what you’re saying is the appeal of Gerda’s single-mindedness wouldn’t come across, right? It’s true that many scenes in Snezhnaya Koroleva don’t make logical sense. For example, it’s never clear why so many people are helping Gerda without expecting anything in return.

MIYAZAKI: Gerda’s feelings are driven by the way she always keeps saying “Kai,” so there’s no need to use emotional and visual depictions of this, having the camera always track up on her face. After Gerda drops her shoes into the river, she’s already decided what direction she’s going to go in. We just see some ripples expanding out from the shoes as they sink. And that’s enough.

—The scenes where she meets the old witch at the beginning of her journey are also very mysterious, aren’t they? The witch tries to erase Gerda’s memory of Kai in order to stop her from going on, but on seeing a red rose, Gerda recalls him anyway. So what her mind has forgotten, her heart has not.

MIYAZAKI: It’s a mysterious scene, isn’t it?

There’s also the scene where some soldiers are drumming, and with the old granny holding her hand, Gerda walks a bit fearfully to the side. That’s really a classical ballet movement. When I saw that, I could tell that the director was using a real human child, trained in classical ballet, to act out the motion, to use live action as a reference. And there was no particular logical basis for that. When Gerda was about to take off on her journey, since she’s going to have to walk, why did she decide to go barefoot? Because it was necessary for her to be barefoot. It wouldn’t work for the protagonist to be protected by something. She had to be barefoot. She loses more and more things. She loses them but arrives in new places, and gains things too.

—Now that you mention it, despite the fact that someone presents Gerda with some shoes along the way, she was ultimately still barefoot.

MIYAZAKI: I think the people who made the film really knew the story well. I like that aspect of the film. I find Snezhnaya Koroleva to be an example of a work where, in the process of rearranging the mythological elements within the story to make a film, there was a happy meeting of both emotional and spiritual elements.

—What do you mean by “mythological elements”?

MIYAZAKI: For example, at the beginning of Gerda’s journey—when she puts her shoes in the river and the river swallows them, the boat’s mooring rope comes undone, and it starts drifting—the animation seems to have been created in the mythical spirit of animism. Now, I know that the word animation probably comes from animism, but I was amazed by the way the story unfolds in the scene where the river swallows up the shoes and in return transports the girl in her boat, and by the way Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale incorporates such a mythlike progression.

—What did you think of the Snow Queen character, which is also a translation of Snezhnaya Koroleva? People have interpreted her in all sorts of ways, making analogies to Stalin’s administration and calling her a symbol of human rationality, and so forth.

MIYAZAKI: If you read the original The Silence of the Lambs novel, there’s a scene in which, when Hannibal Lecter hands Clarice Starling some documents, their fingers touch. It’s a section where I really felt like I was reading good literature. It’s really the climax of the story. You don’t care about how the case will be solved or how Dr. Lecter killed his victims. In the same way, we don’t really need to have anyone explain to us in words who the Snow Queen really is.

What’s more important is the climax of the movie—when the daughter of the robber frees all the animals she has been raising, saying, “Go where you want!” and lets them loose. With that, everything is purified. We don’t know if the old woman is the robber girl’s foster mother or her real mother, but this violent girl—who bit her mother’s ear while being carried on her back, who captured reindeer and foxes and rabbits and lorded it over them—well, when she hears Gerda’s story she realizes that, unlike Gerda, she has no one to love. She tried to lord it over all sorts of things, but she realizes that what she really wants is not to keep animals in cages and tied up in ropes, but to love someone. That’s why she says, “Get out of here!” to her animals when she frees them. She’s a robber girl, and it’s the only way she knows how to show her love. But she also realizes that true love is more than that. Gerda, who has caused this transformation in the robber girl, actually says nothing, but the robber girl expresses everything for her. And that’s why the film’s climax comes at this point. With the climax, the film reaches the point where it’s almost as though we no longer care about what came before or what is to come after.

—So Gerda frees the heart of the robber girl?

MIYAZAKI: A once-frozen heart melts. And it’s Gerda who has the power to make it happen. We don’t need to know why she has this power. She just does. It’s something that definitely exists in everyone and is probably one of the most important things in the world, but we don’t know whether it’s in ourselves or others, or existing in ourselves with no outlet.

There is a plot here, since the film has to have one, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not really something in Andersen’s original story; it’s just wonderful that the film happens to arrive at this point, including all sorts of things such as the people, the acting, and the color effects. Usually films don’t. But it appealed to young people like us who happened to enter the animation industry later. It showed us what’s possible. It made us think that animation is work worthy of doing. When we were wondering what sort of possibilities animation has, and what it is all about, it was this sequence that showed us. That’s what it meant to me.

—Encountering Snezhnaya Koroleva had a really big effect on you, didn’t it … ?

MIYAZAKI: I’m the kind of person who by nature always thought he wanted to create a lot of adventure and slapstick works, but at my core I know that the works have to have something like the sort of impact I described. Without that, the works would just be silly hijinks. Of course we have to take into account the economic interests of the studio. But we can’t justify what we’re doing just by listing economic reasons for doing so; we must at least try to create works about which people are not going to later say, “Why did you bother to make this thing?” The problem is not that people might ask something like that; it’s that we just have to avoid asking ourselves that after the fact. And when I say this, I don’t mean myself now. I mean all of us who decided at that instant that we had to have that sort of higher ambition. That’s all there is. We always have to go back to that point.

—Don’t some people see Gerda as being selfish?

MIYAZAKI: Paku-san was apparently surprised to hear that some people feel that way, but I wasn’t. It’s just because some people are frankly always uninteresting. They delude themselves into thinking films are all about identifying with something and finding momentary relief in a virtual world. But in the old days, people went to see films to learn about life. Nowadays when you go into a supermarket, you’re presented with a dizzying array of choices, and, similarly, people think of the audiences for films as consumers who just grumble, or complain about things being too expensive or not tasting good. But I’m not creating something just to be consumed. I’m creating and watching films that will make me a slightly better person than I was before.

ENDNOTES

9 The Aardman Exhibit was held in the Mitaka Ghibli Museum from May 20, 2006 to May 6, 2007.

10 Michael Ende (1929–1995) is the German author of children’s fantasy, best known for The Neverending Story.

11 The Byakkotai, or White Tiger Force, was a military unit of teens largely drawn from the samurai class, active during the Boshin civil war (1868–1869) between the imperial court and the Tokugawa shogunate. Twenty members of the unit were separated from the fighting during the Battle of Toba-Fushimi. Mistaking fires in the castle town for total defeat in battle, the teen soldiers committed ritual suicide, with nineteen succeeding, and only one surviving due to the intervention of a local peasant.

12 Tamori (1945– ) is the performance name of Kazuyoshi Morita, a famed television comedian. His variety show Waratte Iitomo! (It’s Okay to Laugh!) has aired on weekdays since 1982. Tamori is known for speaking in nonsense words and is rarely if ever seen without his sunglasses.

13 Akiko Yano (1955– ) is an innovative Japanese pop and jazz vocalist. She performed the voices of Ponyo’s innumerable sisters in the Miyazaki film Ponyo and did vocal effects for “Mon Mon, The Water Spider” as well as “House Hunting.” Her 2008 album akiko was produced by T Bone Burnett.

14 A Japanese firm that sells plastic model kits.

15 A department store chain with an emphasis on arts and crafts supplies.

16 A popular do-it-yourself chain store.

17 Coper is the character’s nickname—it is short for Copernicus and represents the child’s hard-won understanding that he is not the center of the universe.

18 A 1931 false flag operation in which a small explosion near a Japan-leased railroad in northeast China was engineered by members of the Japanese military, who then declared the explosion a terrorist attack by Chinese dissidents and launched the invasion of Manchuria.

19 Sōseki Natsume (1867–1916) is widely considered the greatest writer in modern Japanese history. He was the author of I Am A Cat, Kokoro, and many other works. Natsume lived in England for two years in the early twentieth century and became a scholar of British literature. Between 1984 and 2004, his image was featured on the thousand-yen note.

20 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) is the famed author of “Rashōmon,” “In a Grove” (which actually forms much of the basis of Akira Kurasawa’s film Rashōmon), and over one hundred other short stories. He committed suicide after a struggle with mental illness.

▶ PONYO

On Ponyo

June 5, 2006

•Theatrical feature: aim for 90 minutes, 1,000 shots

•Target audience: preschool children and all ages

•Content: an enjoyable, entertaining film of incomparably rich fantasy

•Hidden intent: a declaration to be the successor to 2D animation

Project Intent

This is the story of Ponyo, a little fish from the sea who struggles to realize her dream of living with a boy named Sosuke. It also tells of how five-year-old Sosuke manages to keep a most solemn promise.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea places Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” in a contemporary Japanese setting. It is a tale of childhood love and adventure.

A little seaside town and a house at the top of a cliff. A small cast of characters. The ocean as a living presence. A world where magic and alchemy are accepted as part of the ordinary. The sea below, like our subconscious mind, intersects with the wave-tossed surface above. By distorting normal space and contorting normal shapes, the sea is animated not as a backdrop to the story but as one of its principal characters.

A little boy and a little girl, love and responsibility, the ocean and life—these things, and that which is most elemental to them, are depicted in the most basic way in Ponyo. This is my response to the afflictions and uncertainty of our times.

Main Characters

Sosuke: 5 years old. A relaxed, principled boy. Lives in the house on the cliff. Main character.

Lisa: 25 years old. Sosuke’s mother. An employee at the Sunflower Senior Day Care Center. A young woman with a brisk manner. A beauty.

Kōichi: 30 years old. Lisa’s husband, Sosuke’s father. Captain of a coastal freight ship. Hardly appears on-screen.

Ponyo: Mermaid. Turns into a half fish, half human by licking Sosuke’s blood; wanting to become human, she steals her father’s magic potion. A cute troublemaker. Heroine of the story.

Fujimoto: Ponyo’s father. Previously was a land-based man, but has become an aquatic human. Busy using his command of magic to regain the balance among living creatures in the ocean.

Ponyo’s younger sisters: Mass of fingerlings who don’t yet have human faces. Being raised inside the water sphere aboard Fujimoto’s work ship, Ubazame-gō, or Basking Shark.

Water fish: Water waves that turn into magical fish. They freely shift shapes from small to enormous fish. Many shapes including basking sharks that Fujimoto deploys. They seem to have some will of their own.

Gran Mamare: Great mother of the ocean. She is the ocean and a character, an enormous presence without a definite shape. Fujimoto is just one of her many husbands.

Others: Seniors at Sunflower Senior Day Care Center; children and staff at preschool.

Plot Summary

Having run away from home riding on a jellyfish, Ponyo is caught in a trawler’s net, and her head gets stuck in a glass bottle. Sosuke, a five-year-old boy who lives atop a cliff, saves Ponyo after she is washed ashore. When he breaks the glass bottle with a rock to save Ponyo, Sosuke cuts his finger. As Ponyo is carried in Sosuke’s hand to his house, she licks his cut. When the blood of a human enters the body of a human-faced fish, the dormant human genes begin to act up.

Sosuke puts Ponyo in a bucket of water and hides her at his preschool, but Ponyo gets taken back by Fujimoto’s water fish.

Sosuke worries about Ponyo’s safety, and Ponyo has become smitten with Sosuke. With the help of her younger sisters, Ponyo tries to steal her father’s magic potion to become human and go to Sosuke. The life potion with a dangerous power is released, and an enormous calamity ensues. The water in the sea expands, a storm rises, the younger sisters turn into huge water fish, and Ponyo rushes toward the cliff where Sosuke lives.

Problems when animating the story

1. While decreasing the lines in the character designs, I want to increase the number of drawings for movement. Discard the idea that action is drawn in three frames. Unless Ponyo and Sosuke move, they will not be attractive.

2. Caution for character design. Give a spherical surface to the eyes. This is in order to show the physicality of young children bursting with energy.

3. Create movement in waves and water through solid lines. Of course we will use colored lines as well, but the outlines will be drawn in solid lines.

4. Wind should blow through the trees. On top of the cliff the wind should always be shaking the branches. We have used cel animation to show strong wind in the past but have not tried to show gentle breezes. I want to realize this.

5. Get rid of straight lines. Use gently warped lines that allow the possibility of magic to exist, liberating us from the curse of perspective drawing. A world where even the horizon swells, dips, and sways.

6. Idealize present-day Japan to make it seem a bit more livable. Raise the cultural standard of the people and get rid of overcrowded conditions.

7. Simple drawings feel warm and liberate the viewer. I want to steer the rudder toward simplicity and away from overly mature precision.

About Voices

Have the children voiced by same-aged children. It may be hard to find them, but do so, please!

About Music

Reading the plot summary, it may seem like an epic poem of blood and fate, but this is just the skeletal structure. It is actually happy and fun, a great “manga.” I want some songs.

For example, Ponyo’s song.

Hands are nice

Holding and pulling

Digging and squeezing tight

Having two, hands are nice

Feet are nice

Running fast and climbing

Jumping down and touching

Having two, what fun.

Songs like this …

Memo on Music for Joe Hisaishi

September 5, 2007

The setting is a place where the sea and land meet, and the scenes go back and forth between land and under the sea.

When I say under the sea, I do not require the grandeur or expanse of the ocean. It is to be treated as the underworld next door. The setting on land is also restricted, mostly at the house on the cliff and the Sunflower Senior Day Care Center and preschool.

The story’s structure is concise.

The sea represents the feminine principle, and the land represents the masculine principle. Due to this, the small port town is waning.

The ships and fishing vessels of the men go busily back and forth on the sea, but in this world they are no longer respected. The women are also weakening. The old women who are waiting for their end on the coastline, and Sosuke’s mother, although lively, waits for her shipboard husband to return, feeling an anger she has no way of venting.

Even so, this is a seemingly peaceful and stable world, which is stirred up by Ponyo’s arrival.

Ponyo is the pure manifestation of the feminine principle. She resists all things that restrain her, acts with no thought of consequences, and charges ahead to get what she wants. She has no doubts or concerns about eating, hugging, or chasing. Although she is a character who is fertile and vulgar, who will ultimately have many love affairs, in this film she is still a youngster whose maturity into womanhood will depend on the men she encounters. At this point, Ponyo is still a pure representation of femininity. This is why her sisters love their older sister.

Ponyo’s mother Gran Mamare is the figure of what Ponyo will become after she reaches splendid maturity in the sea. She is on the side of all life, is fertile, polyandrous, and has countless children. Being at the center of the demarcation of life and death, she supports Ponyo’s gamble on her desire to become human, even though Ponyo risks turning into sea foam.

Fujimoto, though a man, has forsaken the land and lives in the sea. He is perpetually in a state of estrangement. He represents weak fathers, and neither his beliefs nor his actions enrich him. The more he goes after his ideal, the more he becomes isolated, and he is burdened with the fate that he will be betrayed. It is unavoidable that Fujimoto is a caricature of the present-day father figure. However, he is the one who most understands the heavy burden carried by Sosuke. Sosuke’s father Kōichi is a good-natured man. But as a man who, in the twenty-first century, is still chasing after the illusion of the age of navigation, he is a symbol of the masculine principle whose very existence is vanishing. Were he to end up on land, Lisa would soon tire of him.

It is five-year-old Sosuke who accepts Ponyo, the symbol of the feminine principle. Age five is the final age when a boy still belongs to the gods and hasn’t become a man of this world. As he is at the convergence of the two worlds, Sosuke faces the greatest challenge.

What is the burden Sosuke must bear? It is to accept Ponyo unconditionally, to love her, and to fulfill the promise that he will protect her. As people in this modern age are well aware of the fickleness of people’s hearts, many in the audience may see Sosuke’s promise as a momentary thing that will soon be forgotten. But for Sosuke it is a critically decisive promise. Sosuke’s future will be determined by whether he will fulfill this promise or casually toss it out. The uncomplicated life of men these days could lead him to become like Fujimoto, an intellectual, or like Kōichi, who runs away.

Sosuke is different. He is truly brilliant. He is a five-year-old child prodigy who sticks to his beliefs without wavering. Although he has not shown any speck of talent at this stage, he accepts Ponyo, understands Lisa’s heart, and shows concern for Fujimoto. Without becoming traumatized or psychologically unbalanced, he accepts all of Ponyo, as a cute human-faced fish, as a half fish, half human, and as a willful little girl. This is what makes Sosuke so brilliant. This is what qualifies him to be the main character. Due to the power of Sosuke’s heart, a new balance is attained, and the world calms down. Neither the feminine principle nor the masculine principle is victorious. The film ends with instability and concern for the future. But that is the fate of the human race beyond the twenty-first century, a topic that can’t be settled in one film.

With this in mind, the music required for this film must be different from past scores. This is the reason my thoughts are a jumble and I am stumped. Of course we also need background music. I hope to discuss with you the overall conceptualization for this project.

What I have written here are ideas from my inconclusive thoughts. They are just to give you some hints about my thinking.

Ponyo Comes

A huge storm, the multitude of waves are all monsters

They are all, all my little sisters

I run ahead, they churn and swim

Bursting with laughter, my chest swells

Eyes open wide, I breathe in deeply

I shout out, my sisters shout out

My hair whips around me

Blow harder wind, roar and roar wind

Spray, turn into fish

And splish, splash

My legs that just grew

My feet that kick the waves

I can feel each one bouncing below

I take in the islands and the ships

I am happy

I am the storm

I am the swelling waves

Lullaby

The swaying sea, my blue home

My countless sisters and I

We spoke in bubble words

Do you remember, a long time ago

You lived in the sea

Whales and sea urchins, fish and crabs

And sea stars, they were all family

Do you remember, a long time ago

Your countless sisters

This was based on Wakako Kaku’s poem “Sakana” (Fish) in Umi no yō na otona ni naru (I’m Going to Grow Up to Be Like the Sea), Rironsha.

Note: This became the song “Umi no okāsan” (Mother of the Sea), lyrics: Wakako Kaku, Hayao Miyazaki; from “Sakana” (Fish).

Coral Tower

The sole Asian crewmember on Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, the youth Fujimori met a woman of the sea and fell in love. For a hundred years since then, Fujimoto has stayed half human and has lived as half-man of the sea.

Fujimoto took a stand to save the sea from marine pollution, overfishing, and prowling submarines.

Coral Tower is a marine farm, the realization of Fujimoto’s ideals. Here seawater is purified, and living things are propagated.

Bubbles rise from underwater volcanoes, and soft green coral sway among the waves. Inside the crimson Coral Tower the power of magic is gathered and the water of life extracted.

Fujimoto’s fate is absolute solitude. His partner, the woman of the sea, is not his alone. He does not know whether he will ever see her again, if that day will come.

But he has numerous daughters who are fish. It is his obligation to raise them to become women of the sea.

Plop, plop, slowly the golden water of life fills the bottle one drop at a time. The intervals are mind-bogglingly long.

Outside the magic bubble is the blue sea where light glimmers. Gawker fish peek inside. Crabs, sea slugs, octopus, squid, all sniff out the water of life in the Coral Tower, waiting to seize the chance when Fujimoto may be off-guard.

As he works on completing his encyclopedia of marine creatures, Fujimoto dreams of the world becoming as peaceful as the sea and yearns for a calm reconciliation with the ageless, beautiful woman of the sea.

Bubbles foam upward

A hundred million eggs of crab

A billion of sea urchin, ten billion of squid

Five thousand gawker fish

The water of life drips a drop at a time

The swaying field of coral

A million eggs of octopus, ten million of sea slugs

Countless eggs of shrimp

Light dapples the sea

Rondo of the Sunflower House

If I could walk freely once again

I would clean the house to my heart’s content, I would do the laundry, I would cook meals

I would prune the trees in the garden, I would sow flower seeds, and then I would go for a walk

How bright it is on a fair day

I like rainy days too, when I’ll walk with a fashionable umbrella and raincoat

I’m not being called yet

Until then, let me walk a bit,

If I could only wash the windows

It would feel so refreshing

Round and round, we hold hands

Mean Toki, forgetful Noriko

Kazuko who can’t speak

They all smile as they dance

Straighten up the spine, smooth away the wrinkles

Straighten out the knees

Kick up our heels high

Even if our skirts billow up

And our undies show, just laugh, laugh

As light as a breeze

If only we could dance once more

And then, when we are called to go, we can go smiling. …

Water Fish

These are gelatinous creatures of physical variability, made of the sea, jelly, and agar

They stretch, shrink, can look like waves, or like sharks, they can become big or small

Useful creatures with thresher shark eyes

Always laughing, following Fujimoto’s orders

They stop ships’ engines, listen for secrets

Exploited in all sorts of ways, and washed away in the water when their use is done

Pathetic and comical, used for seeming a bit scary

They pretend to be wiggly waves even today

Wiggle wiggle, jiggle jiggle

Drum drum, ga-boom

Night Signals

The night sea is so busy

Ships with white, orange, red, and green lamps come and go

Hardscrabble ship crews rub their sleepy eyes and steer forward

The light on top of the cliff is the house where the wife and kid live

I love you, I can’t stop by because of work, but I’m always thinking about you

I send my love by old-fashioned Morse code

If I call or email, the wife’s complaints come through too strong

With a flash signal I have no trouble saying I love you

Hey, a return signal

It’s slow, dash-dash-dot, dash-dot-dash

That’s my son, my five-year-old kid

Thanks, your dad’s fine and working hard

He’s saying have a safe journey, it makes me tear up

Thanks, good night, son

Good night, my dear, scary wife

Signaling over

The line of ships in the night sea, I’ll steer my rudder into the row to make a hard living

Thanks, guys, you all work so hard without losing heart

At sunrise, we’ll be at the next port

We’ll take a bath and have a beer

Ponyo’s Sisters

We love big sister

Big sister is strong

We’ll follow big sister

Look at big sister’s hands, her arms

Look at big sister’s feet, her legs

We’re together with big sister

We want to be like big sister

▶ BIOGRAPHICAL
CHRONOLOGY

1941–1962
Birth, wartime evacuation, schooling

1941

January 5, Hayao Miyazaki born in Bunkyō Ward, Tokyo. The second of four sons.

1944–1946

Evacuated with the rest of his family to Utsunomiya City and Kanuma City in Tochigi Prefecture. Miyazaki Airplane Corporation, run by Hayao’s uncle, was in Kanuma City, and his father was an officer of the company.

1947–1952

Entered elementary school in Utsunomiya City. Studied there through third grade. Returned to Tokyo and transferred to Ōmiya Elementary School in Suginami Ward. In fifth grade started at Eifuku Elementary School, which was newly established after splitting off from Ōmiya Elementary. Was a rabid fan of Tetsuji Fukushima’s science fiction manga Sabaku no maō (Devil of the Desert).

1953–1955

Graduated elementary school in Eifuku Elementary School’s first graduating class. Entered Ōmiya Middle School, Suginami Ward. Often went to see movies with his movie-loving father or with the family help. Memorable films include Meshi (Repast, 1951, directed by Mikio Naruse) and Tasogare sakaba (Twilight Saloon, 1955, directed by Tomu Uchida).

1956–1958

Graduated from Ōmiya Middle School. Entered Toyotama High School. Wished to become a manga artist, and began to actively pursue drawing studies. In final year of high school, saw Hakujaden (Tale of the White Serpent, 1958, directed by Taiji Yabushita), Japan’s first color feature-length animation film, and became interested in animation.

1959–1962

Graduated from Toyotama High School. Entered Gakushūin University in the department of political economy. Declared Japanese Industrial Theory seminar as his major.

Upon entering university, discovered there was no manga study club, so joined children’s literature study club, the closest thing. At times Hayao Miyazaki was its sole member.

As a budding manga professional, drew many manga and approached publishers of manga for the kashihon’ya, or rental-library market. No completed works, but accumulated several thousand pages of beginnings of long stories.

The only course that interested him at university was one taught by Osamu Kuno. Read many works by Yoshie Hotta. At a time when ATG (Actors Theater Guild) had just been founded, saw films such as the Polish Mother Joan of the Angels (1961, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz).

Was a bystander during the 1960 demonstrations held by the anti–US-Japan Security Treaty renewal movement. Started to show interest after seeing photographs published in Asahi Graph magazine. By then it was too late to participate in demonstrations as a non-ideologically partisan student.

1963–1970
Period at Toei Animation

1963

Graduated from Gakushūin University. Entered Toei Animation in the last year of regular hires.

After joining the company, rented a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat apartment in Nerima Ward, Tokyo. (Rent was 6,000 yen.) Starting monthly salary was 19,500 yen (18,000 yen during the three-month training period).

First film worked on as an in-between artist was Wanwan chūshingura (Woof Woof Chushingura, 1963, directed by Daisaku Shirakawa). After this, worked as in-between artist on TV series Ōkami shōnen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken).

1964

Worked as in-between artist on theatrical film Gulliver’s Space Travels (1965, directed by Yoshio Kuroda). Assisted as key animator on TV series Shōnen ninja kaze no fujimaru (Boy Ninja Fujimaru of the Wind). Was union general secretary (Isao Takahata was vice chairman at the same time).

1965

Key animator for TV series Hustle Punch. In autumn voluntarily participated in preproduction work for feature-length theatrical film Little Norse Prince Valiant. Other members of the project included director Isao Takahata and key animators Yasuo Ōtsuka and Seiichi Hayashi.

October: Married colleague Akemi Ōta. Established new residence in Higashimurayama City, Tokyo.

Started participation in Little Norse Prince Valiant by drawing the character Iwaotoko while recovering in the hospital from an appendectomy. Key influences on the production were a sense of crisis regarding the possibility that it might no longer be possible to make feature-length films and also the solidarity among the main staff that had built up during their union activism.

1966

Participated in making Little Norse Prince Valiant. Worked on scene design and key animation. Production began in April, but due to postponements was suspended in October. Spent this time as key animator for TV series Rainbow Sentai Robin.

1967

January: Resumption of production on Little Norse Prince Valiant. Birth of first son.

Worked on Little Norse Prince Valiant for the entire year. Purchased 1954 model Citroen 2cv.

1968

March: Screening of first version of Little Norse Prince Valiant.

July: Released as Little Norse Prince Valiant: Hols’ Great Adventure. Key animator for several episodes of Sally the Witch. Later, started work as key animator on feature-length theatrical film Puss ’n Boots (1969, directed by Kimio Yabuki).

1969

April: Birth of second son. Moved residence to Ōizumigakuen, Nerima Ward, Tokyo. Key animator for Flying Phantom Ship (1969, directed by Hiroshi Ikeda) and for several episodes of TV series Himitsu no Akko-chan (The Secrets of Akko-chan).

September until March 1970: Wrote original manga serialization Sabaku no tami (People in the Desert) in Shōnen shōjo shimbun (Boys and Girls Newspaper), under pen name “Saburō Akitsu.”

1970

Key animator for Himitsu no Akko-chan. Participated in preproduction group for feature-length theatrical film Animal Treasure Island (1971, directed by Hiroshi Ikeda), working on scene design and key animation. Moved residence to current location in Tokorozawa City, Saitama Prefecture.

1971–1978:
To Nippon Animation

1971

Finished work as key animator for feature-length theatrical film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1971, directed by Hiroshi Shidara), then left Toei Animation. Moved to A Production with Isao Takahata and Yōichi Kotabe. Worked on preproduction for new project Pippi Longstocking as part of the main staff.

August: Went to Sweden with Yutaka Fujioka, President of Tokyo Movie corporation, on first trip abroad. Purpose was to meet Pippi creator Astrid Lindgren, and do location scouting on Gotland Island, the setting of Pippi, and where the live-action film had been shot. Was greatly impressed by castle town Visby and its medieval-style buildings, but was unable to meet with original author. Visited Skansen Outdoor Museum on the outskirts of Stockholm. Ultimately, Pippi never made it beyond preparation stage.

Later, participated partway through in Lupin III (the first TV series). Directed along with Takahata. Research for Pippi later utilized in Panda! Go Panda! and Heidi, Girl of the Alps. Images of Visby and Stockholm appear in later work as scene setting for Kiki’s Delivery Service.

1972

After completion of Lupin III, made pilot film of Yuki no taiyō (Yuki’s Sun) from original work by Tetsuya Chiba, but film not realized. Drew several storyboard images for TV series Akadō Suzunosuke. Also drew storyboard images for TV series Dokonjō gaeru (The Gutsy Frog), but not utilized.

Participated in mid-length theatrical film Panda! Go Panda! (1972, directed by Isao Takahata, key animation directors Yasuo Ōtsuka and Yōichi Kotabe). Taking a topical idea and turning it on its head, this work featuring the appearance of a father-and-child panda family in a girl’s daily life was fun and thrilling, and seems to be a precursor to My Neighbor Totoro.

1973

With the success of the first film, a sequel was made with more of Hayao Miyazaki’s touch. Worked as screenwriter, scene designer, layout artist, key animator for mid-length theatrical film Panda! Go Panda! Rainy-Day Circus (1973, main staff same as first film). Later, key animator for several episodes of TV series Kōya no shōnen Isamu (The Rough and Ready Cowboy/Isamu of the Plains) and Samurai Giants.

June: Moved to Zuiyō Eizō along with Takahata and Kotabe; started preproduction on Heidi, Girl of the Alps.

July: Traveled to Switzerland for location scouting.

1974

Worked as scene designer and layout artist on Heidi TV series. This series established the popularity of classics of literature as animated series on television, and was well-received not only in Japan but around the world. Miyazaki worked as part of a powerful trio, with Takahata (director), and Kotabe (animation director). Role was mainly to handle what is called the “layout” work, which links the direction with the animation and art work. Involved not only in determining the composition of the overall screen, but what is called the “screen design”—taking into account movement, similar to the work done by camera operators in live-action films. In effect became the arms, legs, and eyes of Takahata (“the director who doesn’t draw”) and handled the layout for the shots in all fifty-two episodes of the show.

1975

After helping out as key animator on the TV series A Dog of Flanders, began preparing for the TV series From the Apennines to the Andes scheduled for the following year.

July: Went location scouting in Italy and Argentina. Moved to Nippon Animation, which was newly formed from the studio and staff of Zuiyō Eizō.

1976

Worked as scene designer and layout artist on From the Apennines to the Andes, with the trio of Takahata, Kotabe, and Miyazaki forming its primary staff.

1977

After working as key animator on the TV series Araiguma rasukaru (Rascal Racoon), in June began preparing for the Future Boy Conan TV series. First work directed by Miyazaki. Asked Yasuo Ōtsuka, who was working for A Pro, to help out.

1978

Directed the Future Boy Conan TV series, NHK’s first animated series with thirty-minute episodes.

1979–1982:
Until beginning the manga serialization of
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

1979

Handled both scene and screen design and layout for episodes 1–15 of TV series Anne of Green Gables (1979, directed by Isao Takahata). Joined Telecom Animation Film Co., in order to make new Lupin film.

December 15: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro opened in theaters. This was Miyazaki’s first time directing an animated feature film; he was also in charge of storyboards and screenplay. Although not a box office success, the film was noticed and acclaimed by both anime fans and people in the film world. Yasuo Ōtsuka, who directed the animation, had created the first Lupin TV series. Among the core animators were young artists like Kazuhide Tomonaga, who helped create a new image of Lupin with well-timed movements.

1980:

Helped train second wave of new employees entering Telecom Animation. Telecom essentially functioned as the animation studio for Tokyo Movie Shinsha; starting in 1979 it had begun hiring new people on a regular basis. Many of these young animators participated in the production of The Castle of Cagliostro; working with them, Miyazaki handled both direction and script writing for episodes 145 and 155 of Lupin III (the second Lupin TV series). Used pen name of Tsutomu Teruki, written with the characters 照樹務, a pun on the company name. During this time, also began drawing image boards, including some for the work that later became Princess Mononoke. Also created several image boards for what he called Tokorozawa no obake (The Goblin of Tokorozawa) which later became My Neighbor Totoro (although the original idea for the story actually came to him during the production of the Heidi series).

1981

Involved in planning film projects such as Little Nemo and Rowlf, and preparing for the joint production with Italy’s R.A.I. of the Sherlock Hound the Detective TV series. As part of his involvement, traveled to both America and Italy.

Little Nemo was eventually released in July 1989 as a theatrical feature titled Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. A film project long nurtured by Yutaka Fujioka—the president of Tokyo Movie Shinsha—Miyazaki and Yoshifumi Kondō were both involved in preparing for the film. (Later, Takahata would take over from Miyazaki and briefly work as director, but then would also leave the production.)

In its August issue Animage magazine published its first issue devoted to Miyazaki. This helped forge a tight link between Miyazaki and Tokuma Shoten, the publisher.

1982

Began serializing the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga in the February issue of Animage magazine. At nearly the same time, also began directing Sherlock Hound the Detective TV series. The Nausicaä manga was conceived of by Miyazaki as an attempt “to do something that can only be done with manga.” Many people, both in the industry and outside it, were shocked and amazed by the manga’s unique style, its detailed drawings, and the depth of the fictional world depicted. Unfortunately, the demands of other work and the time-consuming, detailed nature of the drawings meant that the serialization proceeded very slowly.

Worked with Telecom animators and directing staff to create four episodes of Sherlock Hound the Detective. Miyazaki was involved in six episodes as co-production.

November: Resigned from Telecom Animation Film.

From 1983 to the present:
Up until Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, released in the US as Ponyo)

1983

Began work on the animated Nausicaä theatrical feature. With Takahata acting as producer, the decision was made to have the production done at Top Craft, where Tōru Hara was serving as president. These were people that Miyazaki had worked with on Little Norse Prince Valiant back in his days at Toei Animation. After establishing a planning office at Asagaya, in Tokyo’s Suginami ward, in August key animation work commenced. Miyazaki was in charge of direction, screenplay, and storyboards.

Serialization of the Nausicaä manga was temporarily put on hold at Animage magazine with its June issue, but that same month Animage bunko published an illustrated story by Miyazaki titled Shuna no tabi (Shuna’s Journey) in paperback form.

1984

March: Completed work on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind theatrical feature. (Released for screening by distributor, Toei, on March 11, along with two episodes of the Sherlock Hound the Detective TV series—“Treasure Under the Sea” and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”)

April: Miyazaki opened own office in Suginami Ward, calling it “Nibariki” [meaning two-horsepower—deux chevaux—the nickname for the Citroen 2cv].

While trying to think of what to make next, came up with the idea of creating a documentary set in Yanagawa City, in Fukuoka Prefecture, and began production on it with Takahata as director. (In April 1987, this would be screened as The Story of Yanagawa Waterways.)

August: Once more began serializing the Nausicaä manga in Animage magazine.

1985

Started preproduction of Castle in the Sky. Stopped drawing the Nausicaä manga again after the May issue of Animage and established Studio Ghibli in Kichijōji, Musashino City, Tokyo.

May: Went location scouting in England and Wales.

1986

August 2: Toei released the animated theatrical feature, Castle in the Sky, with Miyazaki credited for direction, screenplay, and storyboards. Along with the film, two episodes of Sherlock Hound the Detective—“Mrs. Hudson Is Taken Hostage” and “The White Cliffs of Dover”—were shown.

Resumed serialization of the Nausicaä manga again in December issue of Animage magazine.

1987

Stopped serialization of Nausicaä with June issue of Animage. Started preparing for production of My Neighbor Totoro feature. (Produced by Studio Ghibli at the same time as Grave of the Fireflies.)

1988

April 16: My Neighbor Totoro released, with distribution by Tōhō, and Miyazaki credited for original story, screenplay, and direction. Film acclaimed by Kinema junpō magazine and others as “best last film of the Shōwa era.” Released in theaters simultaneously with Grave of the Fireflies (screenplay and direction by Isao Takahata).

1989

July 29: Kiki’s Delivery Service released by Toei. Miyazaki credited as producer, screenplay writer, and director.

1990

Resumed serialization of Nausicaä manga in April issue of Animage magazine.

1991

Produced animated theatrical feature, Only Yesterday, with Isao Takahata directing. Stopped serialization of Nausicaä manga in Animage with May issue. Began preparation for Porco Rosso feature.

December: Issued an illustrated collection of essays published by Asahi Shimbunsha, titled Totoro no sumu ie (The House Where Totoro Lives), focusing on folk houses in modern Japan.

1992

July 18: Porco Rosso theatrical feature released, distributed by Tōhō. Original story, screenplay, and direction by Miyazaki.

August: Construction of new studio for Studio Ghibli completed in Koganei City, Tokyo, based on basic architectural plans drawn by Miyazaki.

Directed short film titled “Sora iro no tane” (A Sky-Blue Seed) for Nippon Network Television Corporation (NTV). Also in charge of direction and key animation for NTV spot titled Nandarō (What Is This?). Both produced by Studio Ghibli.

November: Three-way discussion among Miyazaki, Ryōtaro Shiba, and Yoshie Hotta published as a book titled Jidai no kazaoto (The Sound of the Winds of These Times) by U.P.U.

1993

Began serializing Nausicaä manga again in March issue of Animage.

August: Tokuma Shoten published a collection of Miyazaki’s conversations with Akira Kurosawa, titled Nani ga eigaka: “Shichinin no samurai” to “Mada da yo!” wo meggutte (What Is a Film?: Seven Samurai and Not Yet).

1994

Worked on planning for Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko (Pom Poko), to be directed by Isao Takahata. Final episode of Nausicaä manga ran in March issue of Animage.

August: Began preparing alone for production of Princess Mononoke.

1995

April: Finalized plans and proposals for Princess Mononoke, and began drawing storyboards in May. Traveled with staff to Yakushima Island for location scouting.

July 15: Whisper of the Heart (directed by Yoshifumi Kondō) released, with Miyazaki credited as screenwriter, storyboard artist, and general producer.

Also worked as director, screenwriter, and original story creator for the short film “On Your Mark,” released at the same time.

1996

June: Studio Ghibli merged with parent company Tokuma Shoten, becoming the Studio Ghibli Company/Tokuma Shoten Co., Ltd.

July: Tokuma Shoten published a collection of Miyazaki’s essays, interviews, and conversations under the title of Shuppatsuten 1979–1996 (Starting Point: 1979–1996).

1997

July 12: Princess Mononoke released, with distribution by Tōhō, and Miyazaki credited for original story, screenplay, and as director. Established new box office record for Japanese films.

1998

February: Traveled to Germany to attend Berlin Film Festival.

March: Traveled to Sahara Desert via France, as part of a TV production tracing the footsteps of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

June: Created office and own studio space called “Nibariki” in Koganei City.

Starting in September and continuing for the next six months, formed and headed the Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II (Higashi Koganei Workshop II), where he taught budding animation directors. Plans for construction of an art museum in Tokyo’s Inokashira Onshi Park rapidly started to take shape around the same time.

1999

July: Began production of a short for the museum.

September: Traveled to the United States for the release of Princess Mononoke.

November: Finished proposal and project planning for Spirited Away and began preparing for production.

2000

March: Groundbreaking ceremony for Ghibli Museum in Mitaka in Inokashira Onshi Park.

September: Death of Yasuyoshi Tokuma, President of Tokuma Shoten. Miyazaki served as head of the funeral committee.

2001

July 20: Spirited Away opened in theaters in Japan, distributed by Tōhō, with direction, original story, and screenplay by Miyazaki. Set new box office records for both domestic and foreign films in Japan.

End of July: Miyazaki traveled to South Korea to screen Spirited Away for the Korean staff that had assisted with both in-between animation and finishing work. Simultaneously worked on a mini-promotional campaign for Totoro in conjunction with its South Korean release.

October 1: Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, officially opened, with Miyazaki serving as executive director of the museum, and credited for original concept, planning, and as producer. At the same time, began preparing for a special Spirited Away exhibit. A Ghibli Museum special short, Kujira tori (The Whale Hunt), began screening, with script and direction by Miyazaki.

December: Traveled to France for a Spirited Away promotional campaign.

2002

January: Screening original short film “Koro no Ōsanpo” (Koro’s Big Day Out). Miyazaki credited with original story, and as screenwriter and director.

February: Spirited Away awarded Golden Bear (top award) at 52nd Berlin International Film Festival.

July: The Cat Returns (directed by Hiroyuki Morita), which Miyazaki had proposed, released. Mushime to Anime (Insect Eye and Animation Eye; published by Tokuma Shoten) collection of dialogues with Takeshi Yōrō, and Kaze no Kaeru Basho: Nausicaä kara Chihiro made no Kiseki (The Place Where the Wind Returns: The Path from Nausicaä to Chihiro; published by Rockin’on Inc.), an interview collection, issued.

September: To the US for release publicity campaign for Spirited Away. When in San Francisco, visited Pixar Animation Studios.

October: Opening of special exhibition at Ghibli Museum, “Castle in the Sky and Imaginary Science and Its Machinery.” Planning, original idea, and supervision. Short film “Kūsō no sora tobu kikaitachi” (Imaginary Flying Machinery) screened at exhibit. Narrator, original author, script writer, director. Original short film “Mei to koneko basu” (Mei and the Baby Cat Bus) screened. Original author, script writer, director. Around this time started preparations for Howl’s Moving Castle.

2003

March: Spirited Away awarded best animated feature film at 75th Academy Awards.

2004

September: Howl’s Moving Castle awarded Osella Award at 61st Venice International Film Festival. Miyazaki credited as screenwriter and director.

November 20: Howl’s Moving Castle released through Tōhō Film Company.

Production work began on three original short films for Ghibli Museum.

November–December: Visited France and Britain. Publicity campaign for release of Howl’s Moving Castle in France. In Britain visited Aardman Animations in Bristol. Screened Howl’s Moving Castle for original author Diana Wynne Jones and Aardman staff.

2005

As of March 31, Studio Ghibli became independent from Tokuma Shoten and established as Studio Ghibli Inc. Became corporate director. Listed among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in its April 18 issue.

May: Opening of special exhibit “Heidi, Girl of the Alps” at Ghibli Museum. Supervised and wrote most of the explanatory notes.

June: Visited US on publicity campaign for Howl’s Moving Castle. Met with Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Earthsea series of novels.

September: Attended the 62nd Venice International Film Festival. Awarded Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

October: Awarded Japan Foundation Award.

2006

January: Began to screen three original short films: “Yadosagashi” (“House Hunting”) and “Mizugumo Mon Mon” (“Mon Mon the Water Spider”) (original author, screenwriter, director), and “Hoshi wo katta hi” (“The Day I Bought a Star”) (screenwriter, director).

February: Visited Britain to research illustrated essay to be included in Robert Westall’s Blackham’s Wimpey (Burakkamu no Bakugeki Ki; published by Iwanami Shoten). Book published in October.

April: Began preproduction work for Ponyo.

June: Production memorandum completed.

2007

May: Opening of special exhibit “The Three Bears” at Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning and design.

2008

April: Founded House of the Three Bears, the Ghibli company preschool for children of employees. Proposed idea and worked on basic architectural plans.

July 19: Release of Ponyo by Tōhō Film Company. Miyazaki credited as original author, screenwriter, director.

July: Orikaeshiten: 1997–2008 (Turning Point: 1997–2008), sequel to Shuppatsuten: 1979–1996 (Starting Point: 1979–1996), published by Iwanami Shoten.

October: Presented a lecture called “Hōjōki Shiki and I” at the Yoshie Hotta Exhibition held at the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature.

2009

February: Began serialization of The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) manga from the April issue of Gekkan Model Graphics (Dai Nippon Kaiga). Serialization continued for nine segments, through the January 2010 issue.

April: Opened Ghibli West at the Toyota Motor Corporation headquarters in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture. The studio trained twenty-some new hires. Miyazaki traveled to Ghibli West regularly to give lectures. Ghibli West closed in August 2010.

May: Opening of special exhibit Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea—Making a Film with Pencils at the Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning and original concept.

July: Visited the US for publicity campaign for Ponyo.

2010

January: Began screening of the original short film “Chūzumō” (A Sumo Wrestler’s Tail) (directed by Akihiko Yamashita) at the Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning and screenplay.

May: Opening of special exhibit The Ghibli Forest Short Films—Welcome to the Saturn Theater at Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning and original concept.

July 17: Release of The Secret World of Arrietty (Karigurashi no Arietti) (directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi) by Tōhō Film Company. Miyazaki credited as planner, co-screenwriter.

November: Began screening of original short film “Pan-dane to Tamago-hime” (Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess) at the Ghibli Museum. Worked on original story, screenplay, direction.

2011

January: Presented planning proposal for The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu). Start of preproduction.

June: Opening of special exhibit The View from the Catbus at the Ghibli Museum. Supervised exhibit. Began screening of original short film “Treasure Hunting” (“Takara Sagashi”) at Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning.

July 16: Release of From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokurikozaka Kara) (directed by Gorō Miyazaki) by Toho Film Company. Miyazaki credited as planner, co-screenwriter.

October: Publication of Hon e no Tobira—Iwanami Shōnen Bunko o Kataru (The Doorway to Books: On Iwanami Young Readers’ Collection) (Iwanami Shoten).

2012

June: Opening of special exhibit The Gift of Illustrations—A Source of Popular Culture at the Ghibli Museum. Worked on planning and original concept.

November: Selected as a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government.

2013

July 20: Release of The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) by Tōhō Film Company. Credited with original story, screenplay, direction.

▶ AS AN AFTERWORD

“It’s been over ten years already since Princess Mononoke.”

That was my thought as I reread the manuscript for this book. But, actually, I don’t have the sense that so much time has passed.

It takes two to three years to make one film, and the world changes drastically during that time. I spend those two or three years feeling the pressure that I don’t have enough time, and then I realize that two years have already passed. So I don’t have the awareness that so much time has passed. Whether I spend two years or three years, when it turns into a two-hour film, it means I’ve only lived through two hours. Only two hours’ worth remains in my memory. Yet, I’m definitely growing older. It makes me feel like a Rip Van Winkle.

With Ponyo, I have now directed ten feature-length films. Since we can spend much more time on making one film compared to the old days, I feel even more that my life has grown shorter. This is actually how it feels to me.

⭑

This may not be the right thing for me to say, but I was not thrilled about publishing this book. When the editor informed me, “We’re putting out the follow-up to Starting Point: 1979–1996,” I responded, “Oh, really?” But it wasn’t as if I had an active interest in its publication. If I am to publish a book, I should write one with the clear awareness that I want to do so. A book that has collected the likes of talks I have given here and there, or what I was obliged to say, or what I wrote because I was asked to write something seems to me to reveal evidence of my shame. So, frankly, I’m not too happy about it. When writers pen even a short piece, they most probably are expecting it to be included in a book someday. But I don’t have any such expectation.

So many thoughts concerning the world jostle inside my head. When I speak in public or write a piece, I try to narrow my topic and present it in a positive way without expressing my destructive negativity. But that is just one part of me. I am a person whose negative aspects—brutality, resentment, hatred—are much stronger than other people’s. Though I have dangerous moments when my control fails, when I suppress my negative aspects and live my life normally, I am thought of as a good person. That is not my real character. I don’t know what kind of person I really am. There seems to be another “Hayao Miyazaki” unfamiliar to me. I try not to care about this discrepancy anymore. Yet when I see this collection of my writings and my statements, even I can’t guarantee that it is the real Hayao Miyazaki.

⭑

There are some planning proposals for films in this book. To convey to the staff what the film is about I write a proposal. But as the film is being made, the film itself changes, and it doesn’t go according to plan. The reality is that only as I work on a film do I, myself, gradually come to understand the content of the film.

That is why I consider films not to be something I am making, but something that is the result of mixing many different elements together. Rather than “I wanted to do it this way, so this is what I did,” it becomes “It turned out like this because we were forced to do it this way.” I don’t have the sense that “my own ideas are at the core.” It is very nebulous as to whether it was my idea or whether someone else’s idea came flowing in. What turns out to be better is not what I thought up in my head, but something that I hadn’t anticipated.

There was a time when I logically and consciously structured a film with an introduction, development, turn, and conclusion, or organized it with a calm scene followed by a dramatic scene, but that was so uninspiring for me. My other self said, “It’s meaningless to go through all this effort just to make a film like that.”

I firmly believe that I have made each film by expending all my effort and somehow managing to complete it. So nowadays my feeling is “What more do you expect of me?” I am fully convinced that I did as much as I could. If the result is “no good,” then all I can say is “Is that what you think? It’s no good?”

A film lasts twenty or thirty years at most, and not forever. No matter what kind of masterpiece it is—for example, no matter how terrific Sadao Yamanaka’s1 films are, there aren’t many people who still watch them. I think films appear and disappear and don’t last for a long time.

I myself don’t want to go out to see films that much. I can go for a walk every day, but I don’t want to see a film every day. “Why, then, am I making movies?” It is probably a case like the proverbs: “The dyer’s clothes remain undyed” or “The hairdresser’s hair is disheveled.”

⭑

I am now experiencing old age for the first time in my life. I’m a freshman oldster. Each day is full of surprises that make me think about what being elderly means.

When you reach old age, a door creaks open. That door opened for me a few years ago, after I turned sixty. What I see through the door is not a straight road, but a hazy, gray world, as if heaven and earth had merged. When I turn around, I see a familiar alleyway, but I can’t return there. The only thing I can do is to walk toward the gray world. Here and there I see the shadowy figures of my seniors who are walking slightly ahead of me. But it is not as if we build a sense of solidarity, and I must walk alone.

When one gets old, each day is a challenge. I need to exercise, take short walks, and prepare myself each morning to go to the studio. This is because I can’t think about the film I’m working on twenty-four hours a day, as I could when I was more energetic. When my brain matter overheats, the filaments may break off. I must catch my brain waves during the short time that I am able to concentrate. And then, unless I flip the switch before my brain overheats and turn off my head from thinking about the film, the filaments will break. This is what it means to grow old. My recent major task is to figure out how to concentrate without overheating my brain.

It’s a lot of bother, this getting old. I thought it would be a calming process, but it’s not tranquil at all. I make efforts to become calm, but to no success.

⭑

When I look back on these ten years, in addition to making films, I worked on the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, and in April of this year we opened a company nursery school, the House of Three Bears.

I wanted to create a nursery school not to do good, but because I wanted to be helped by the children. What I feel when I watch children is, above all, hope. I now well understand when people say that old people feel happy when they watch little children. This is a major discovery for me. Even as we discuss various pessimistic topics like “the end of civilization” or “the collapse of mass-consumption civilization” or “the fate of life on Earth as its crust enters a period of active movement” we cannot come up with any answers about what to do.

Though we may seem to be living lives of routine each day, each experience is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Yet it is incredibly difficult for us to perceive the significance of the experiences in our own lives. But when we look at children, for them each day is full of new things. For children, these are a series of significant events, and it is a delight to be able to witness these dramatic scenes.

As to what happens to children when they grow up—they become normal, boring adults. For most adults, there is no glory and no happy ending. All that awaits them is a life in which even tragedy may be ambiguous.

Children, however, always offer us hope. They are the spirit of hope that will experience setbacks. And they are the answer to our future.

I think that in the long history of the human race we have felt this way over and over again. That’s how the world is made. It is not that we create something, but that we are already in that cycle. That is why, though we may falter, we have not met with destruction.

Hayao Miyazaki
May 20, 2008

Sadao Yamanaka (1909–1938) was a Japanese filmmaker and screenwriter who worked primarily in silent films and whose work focused on historical themes and social justice. He was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and died during the occupation of China. Only three of his films survive. Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), about a ronin samurai, was a heavy influence on the work of Akira Kurosawa.

HAYAO MIYAZAKI was born in 1941 in Tokyo. After graduating from Gakushuin University in 1963 with a degree in Political Science and Economics, he joined Toei Animation Company as an animator. Miyazaki directed the TV series Future Boy Conan in 1978 and the feature film The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979. In 1984, Miyazaki wrote and directed his feature Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, based on his original graphic novel which had been serialized in the monthly animation magazine Animage.

Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 with Isao Takahata, and has directed feature films including Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008), and The Wind Rises (2013).

His film Spirited Away broke every box office record in Japan, and garnered many awards, including the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival and the 2002 U.S. Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature Film. Howl’s Moving Castle received the Osella Award at the 2004 Venice International Film Festival. Miyazaki was also awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2005 Venice International Film Festival. In 2012, Miyazaki was named a “Person of Cultural Merit” by the government of Japan. In July 2014, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Hall of Fame. The Wind Rises was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature. In 2014, the Board of Governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement.

Miyazaki has published a number of books of essays, drawings, and poems, including Starting Point: 1979–1996, which is published in English by VIZ Media. He has designed several buildings, including the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, which opened in 2001, for which he serves as Executive Director.

Miyazaki is currently working on the feature film How Will You Live?, based on the best-selling juvenile novel by Genzaburo Yoshino.