Japan Forum

ISSN: 0955-5803 (Print) 1469-932X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjfo20

Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment

of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the
Fireflies and The Wind Rises

Alistair Swale

To cite this article: Alistair Swale (2017): Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of
traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises, Japan Forum, DOI:
10.1080/09555803.2017.1321570

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2017.1321570

Published online: 16 May 2017.

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Memory and forgetting: examining the
treatment of traumatic historical
memory in Grave of the Fireflies and
The Wind Rises
ALISTAIR SWALE

Abstract: Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a
significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War.
Miyazaki Hayao’s (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been
an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise
such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic
animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical
concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan’s militarist past. To
answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical
context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that
commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki
Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the
reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese
themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological
issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding
transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that
Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on
the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on
highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.

Keywords: Miyazaki Hayao, The Wind Rises, Takahata Isao, Grave Of The
Fireflies, historical memory, trauma, Paul Ricoeur

Introduction
The treatment of war-related themes in Japanese popular culture not only per-
sists but remains persistently controversial. Anyone who takes up such themes in
film, television or print media inevitably is forced to encounter the question of
dealing with the facts of Japan’s wartime experience and the notion of historical
Japan Forum, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2017.1321570
Copyright Ó 2017 BAJS
2 Memory and forgetting

‘truth’. It should be acknowledged, of course, that there are also instances where
graphic novels and animation have provided particularly forthright treatments of
difficult and painful historical experiences outside of Japan as well. Joe Sacco’s
work depicting atrocities in Safe Area Gora
zde (2000), along with Ari Folman’s
treatment of the massacre of Lebanese civilians in Waltz With Bashir (2008)
attest to an extraordinary capacity for these media to make the unfathomably
awful something that can be depicted directly. Even so, the situation in Japan has
been perhaps somewhat distinctive in that it is much more polarized; while some
works have been overwhelmingly pacifist, with at times a strong emphasis on the
Japanese becoming victims of wartime carnage, others have been remarkably
unreserved in attempting to construct a positive narrative on a military disaster
fought by a heroic and nobly self-sacrificing populace.1
The Wind Rises (Studio Ghibli, 2015) comes as another important attempt to
grapple with traumatic historical memory. It is noteworthy as perhaps Miyazaki’s
last feature length production, and also as arguably the only one that explicitly
deals with a specific time frame in Japan’s history – the period from the Kanto
Earthquake of 1923 up until 1937. With the possible exception of My Neighbor
Totoro (1988), which seems to be set in the interbellum or post-war Japanese
countryside, it is hard to say that Miyazaki’s films have dealt with a specific his-
torical era in the sense that one could authenticate the content or detect an intent
to faithfully ‘replicate’ a specific historical sequence of events. Porco Rosso (1992)
is set in an anonymous Mediterranean location that synthesizes a number of
tropes from a broadly European interbellum epoch. At the same time Princess
Mononoke (1997) has identifiable elements from the Muromachi period, but it is
suffused with a narrative that integrates those elements with largely inconceivable
social arrangements and the coexistence of supernatural deities that make it
problematic as a depiction of that period per se. There are other significant
points of departure in The Wind Rises – it deals with the life of a historical figure,
Horikoshi Jiro (1903–1982), who was a designer of the famous Second World
War fighter aircraft, the Mitsubishi Zero. It is also arguably the first Miyazaki
production that relatively explicitly deals with a sexual relationship between
adults, although this is treated rather obliquely. Otherwise, instances of the
staples of flying machines and fantastical flourishes abound.2
While the reception for the film has been enthusiastic, it is hard not to voice a
certain amount of disappointment regarding the degree to which it coheres the-
matically when compared with his earlier works. It should also be noted that
Miyazaki has not been immune to criticism for the manner in which the film
approaches the cusp of the outbreak of broader conflict in 1937 but skirts around
directly depicting or addressing in any detail the horrors of war to come beyond
that date. To be sure, this is a highly personalized view of the epoch in question
and that should be taken into account as well – but the question of how far an art-
ist is obliged to deal with the more sordid aspects of history remains pertinent in
any case.
 Alistair Swale 3

Over the last ten to twenty years, scholarship on diverse media treatments of the
Pacific War and Japanese responses to the question of how the memory of war
should be articulated in the present have been increasingly prolific. Of particular
significance more recently are works such as Mark Williams’ and David Stahl’s
comprehensive collection of articles in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan (2010) and a
highly complementary collection edited by K.F. Tam, T.Y. Tsu and S. Wilson
entitled Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War (2015). Of necessity,
these works make regular reference to some of the leading scholars of trauma and
historical memory, in particular Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub’s Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), Cathy Caruth’s
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Ernst van Alphen
and Mieke Bal’s Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature,
and Theory, (1998) and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma
(2001). Certainly, the question of traumatic historical memory in a more general
sense has been taken up in Japan by certain key figures such as Shimokobe Michiko
(2006) who has been instrumental in introducing the scholarship of Cathy Caruth
to the Japanese academic readership. However, with the exception of commentar-
ies that focus primarily on the cataclysm of indiscriminate atomic and incendiary
bombing in animated features we find that there have been relatively limited
attempts to analyse the distinctive affordances of animation per se and not a great
deal of scholarship dealing directly with the question of traumatic historical mem-
ory and animation in general.3
The Wind Rises presents an opportunity to ask ourselves afresh how such a
highly stylized and, in places, fictionalized account can function as an attempt to
deal with this particular chapter in history, indeed an epoch that behoves us to
engage with it. But in order to evaluate this film fairly we need to revisit what it is
that we might legitimately expect from artistic expression when it is invoked to
deal with traumatic historical memory. We also ought to contextualize Miyazaki’s
latest film in relation to the media ‘texts’ that have preceded it. Accordingly, the
ensuing section discusses some of the complexities that arise when art meets his-
toriography, and this is followed by an overview of how treatment of this theme
in animation has evolved since the end of the Second World War, as well as how
it relates to other attempts to deal with war-themed media, particularly in film
and manga. Overall, I hope to demonstrate that the criteria for evaluating such
aestheticized treatments of history require distinctive conceptual provisos and an
understanding of what an artist can, all things being equal, be expected to achieve
through art (as opposed to pure historiography).

Memory, narrative and history: representing the

‘Unrepresentable’
The question of memory, what it is, and how it becomes something
‘historiographical’ as we attempt to render it as some kind of ‘truth’, is at the
4 Memory and forgetting

heart of our concerns here. To be sure, a majority of the commentators alluded to

in the introduction hold in common a sense of the aporia of memory, and, to
varying degrees, the ineluctable object of representing history in any authentic
sense. Accordingly, the aporia of memory and the difficulty of conceiving of the
possibility of historiography in the midst of an increasingly sceptical intellectual
climate require some serious philosophical reflection.
Perhaps one of the most consistent and thought-provoking thinkers dealing
with such concerns is Paul Ricoeur who commenced on a journey of philosophi-
cal investigation of such matters in History and Truth (1965) in the 1950s, devel-
oped his ideas further in the three-volume series Time and Narrative in the 1980s,
and finally returned to precisely the same set of concerns in his final major work
Memory, History, Forgetting in 2004. He was also distinctive in the degree to
which he discussed the relation of fiction to historiography, noting that they both
held seemingly much in common but could nonetheless be distinguished in cer-
tain key ways based on the difference in the materials adopted to develop narra-
tive – the process of what he suggested led toward distinctive modes of
representation, or ‘refiguration’. This facilitates rather neatly the foregoing dis-
tinction between the analytical and aestheticized approaches, and puts a clear
focus on how we are to understand the relation between the two in practice.4
Ricoeur was at root a phenomenologist of the continental tradition who none-
theless developed a highly adaptive and fluid hermeneutical methodology. Tak-
ing his first cue from Husserl, he posits memory as not an individual but a
collective phenomenon, - he also understands that the process of re-appropriat-
ing memory and re-presenting it in the present requires the overcoming of the
problematic nature of representing time. Memory is not an entity in itself but a
construct based in ‘traces’ (artefacts, archives, material culture) combined with
‘testimony’. He also acknowledges that historiography is not simply a matter of
relating facts, but in a sense replicating something like the process of fictive
‘emplotment’ – albeit with parameters that are not subject to change according
to one’s whim. There is great utility in his conception of both fictive and histo-
riographic writing as an exercise in ‘extended discourse’ – a linguistic act of creat-
ing a narrative that bears a ‘truth’ beyond the composite elements. And in both
cases there is the acknowledgement that metaphor has a role to play in pursuing
both forms of discourse. Finally, an important addendum to consider from Ric-
oeur’s commentary on memory is his account of pathological attempts to block
or falsify memory (Ricoeur, 1988, pp. 177–185).
Applying this approach to the matter of analysing the relation of fictive and his-
toriographical discourse in animation or manga ‘texts’ that deal with the Pacific
War, we can acknowledge that the subject matter is at once deeply personal and
deeply communal; the experience of fire-bombing (for example) is at one and the
same time an individual disaster but also part of a tapestry of a nation’s calamity.
As we shall see in the ensuing sections, ‘testimony’ takes on, very literally, an
integral role in enabling a remembering of war experience as a historically
 Alistair Swale 5

apprised experience. Grave of the Fireflies presents the most telling instance of its
significance. The ‘traces’ – buildings, artefacts and paraphernalia of the era – also
play a vital role (particularly, as we shall find, in The Wind Rises). And then there
is the role of narrative, including metaphorical, devices that are employed in sur-
prisingly ingenious ways to great effect, whether identified in the work of Tezuka
Osamu or Miyazaki’s last film. And if we are to consider attempts to block or fal-
sify memory, we find numerous instances that have emerged in the last 20 years
as those who hold the power of testimony gradually cease to be here to maintain
that testimony.
Ultimately, Ricoeur enables us to address more fully the concerns raised by van
Alphen who acknowledges the aporia of memory but also has an altogether more
optimistic view of the capacity of fictive narrative to reveal literary truth alongside
the moral power of historiographical narrative, which can be pursued simulta-
neously, albeit in a highly dynamic and exploratory manner. An artist may well
employ materials that are verifiable in some historiographical sense, but the key
litmus from a purely aesthetic perspective is whether the aesthetic elements pre-
dominate or whether the narrator has pursued the ‘historiographical operation’
to its full conclusion. In reality, of course, the historian embellishes and creates a
narrative for effect, and the artist cannot be entirely indifferent to ‘the facts of the
matter’ if they are to communicate meaningfully with their audience, all the
more so if they wish to treat subject-matter of a markedly historical nature. These
caveats apply to our consideration of anime ‘texts’ that deal with the painful sub-
ject of wartime experience – we must manage an awareness that we are dealing
with artistic expressions that at the same time engage with a set of circumstances
where the ‘facts’ (or rather dicing with fanciful treatment of the facts) imply polit-
ically or even ethically problematic conclusions.

Animation: the post-war legacy

As already outlined, the evolution of film dealing with historical memory of war
in the post-war period is relatively well-covered. Perhaps the thing that surprises
most, however, is just how quickly the film industry managed to recover under
the watch of the Occupation and generate material of considerable quality,
including in some cases material that dealt with the war experience. As Dick
Stegewerns details in his recent overview of the Shin-Toho oeuvre of war films
immediately following the end of Occupation in 1951, there was, from the first
opportunity to engage with wartime themes and experiences without restriction
or censorship, an eagerness to construct a commentary of that experience that
established some of the staple topics for film and other media that succeeded it:
the preoccupation (understandably) with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the tragic fate of the Himeyuri Butai of school girls on Okinawa in the
final land-based conflict with the US at the end of the war, and the hagiography
of certain military figures who also presented dramatically ‘tragic’ narratives
6 Memory and forgetting

(Yamamoto Isoroku and Yamashita Tomoyuki being two cases in point).5 Over-
all, it should not necessarily surprise us that tragedy is the dominant theme of
these narratives and certainly this resonates with what could be described as a
highly attractive aesthetic that one finds in other literary genres as well. What
does perhaps surprise is the speed with which the Occupier’s view of the war was
discarded and furnished with a ready supply of content that proved to be popular
with the general public.
What we find in the case of animation, however, is something quite different.
The first thing that becomes clear is that there is something of a hiatus immedi-
ately following the end of the war – in marked distinction from the case of con-
ventional cinema. And this despite the fact that right up until the end of the war
there were some excellent animated features being produced, for example,
Momotaro – Umi no Shinpei, an avowedly propagandist depiction of operations in
the ‘South Seas’ presenting the idealized line of Japan’s liberation of Asia from
the West, which was produced in 1944 and released in April of 1945. This fol-
lowed on from the 1943 feature length animation (Japan’s first) entitled
Momotaro no Umiwashi, and both productions, despite their political implications
are broadly recognized for attaining a high level of technical sophistication. How-
ever, with the end of war, the output derived from this expertise seems to dry up,
with Suteneko Torachan (1947), directed by the doyen of animation in the early
Showa period, Masaoka Kenzo, being a rather solitary blip in the immediate
aftermath of the war.
So there is a marked demarcation between what emerges under the occupation
in terms of animated features and what emerges thereafter. Much has been made
of the American impact on character design, especially with regard to the enlarg-
ing of the eyes in the character design (arguably in emulation of the Disney con-
vention) but I would argue that the lineage that seems to prosper in the long run
owes more debt to the legacy of Masaoka Kenzo and his Nihon Doga Sha than
other lines of development. Of particular note is the fact that Nihon Doga Sha
was acquired by Toei in 1956 and restyled as Toei Doga (later Toei Animation),
and developed as the eventual incubator for talents such as Miyazaki Hayao and
Takahata Isao. Within two years, Hakujaden (1958), Japan’s first full colour ani-
mated feature was released and was followed soon after by Shonen Sarutobi
Sasuke (1959), which went on to be released internationally and garner the top
prize in the children’s animation category at the Venice International Film Festi-
val in 1960.
Tezuka Osamu presents an interesting alternative case in relation to the fore-
going; he was initially part of the new movement of animators centred at Toei up
until the 1960s but then branched off and established his own animation com-
pany Mushi Pro in 1961. This emerged as essentially a clearing house for
Tezuka’s own creations, which included, most famously, Astro Boy, Princess
Knight and Kimba the White Lion and stands as testament to Tezuka’s extraordi-
nary individual passion and distinctive creative style. And yet, for the same token,
 Alistair Swale 7

Tezuka remained relatively remote from explicitly historical approaches to histor-

ical themes. As is broadly acknowledged, his works all have a deeply moralistic
dimension in the sense of generating an indictment of human greed and
destructiveness in a generalized sense, but it is not until the 1980s that Tezuka
makes one particularly emphatic commentary on the Second World War with
Message to Adolf (Adorufu ni Tsugu), which was serialized in the weekly maga-
zine Shukan Bunshun (Bungei Shunju) from 1983 to 1985. The work has three
‘Adolfs’ in play, one the son of a German diplomat in Japan (Adolf Kaufman),
another the son of Ashkenazi Jews (Adolf Kamil) and of course the third
is Adolf Hitler himself, who comes into the story through the discovery by a
Japanese student living in Germany of incontrovertible evidence that Hitler
actually had Jewish blood.
By contrast, the work of Mizuki Shigeru (of Ge-ge-ge no Kitaro fame) marks a
pointed distinction in terms of a willingness to engage with Japanese recent
military history and to directly discuss the experience of Japanese soldiers
within it. With an avowedly didactic aim, Mizuki produced a series of
works that dealt with the Second World War, Hitler: A Biography (Nihonsha,
1971), Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths (Kodansha, 1973) and fifteen years
later, Showa: A History of Japan (Kodansha, 1988–1989). Of these, it is the
second that stands out as delving deeply into the Japanese experience and
directly confronting the legacy of Japan’s military operations in the Far East
and the Pacific.
Correlating to Mizuki’s work, there is of course Nakazawa Keiji’s manga that
deal with the experience of nuclear apocalypse, commencing initially with a per-
sonal account of the horrors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima with Ore wa
Mita, (1972), progressing to a long-running extrapolation on the material of the
previous work in Hadashi no Gen (Shueisha), the highly popular manga which
ran from 1973 to 1985, and was eventually reworked and released in two feature-
length films through Madhouse in 1983 and 1986.6
Clearly, the distinction between establishing an understanding of war and pro-
moting a particular interpretation of that experience is not easy to make. What
we can say is that some of the most powerful commentaries on war in Japanese
animation (or manga) have tended to be rooted in the power of ‘testimony’
(in the sense that Ricoeur employs it). It should be conceded that in some cases
the science fiction genre has also demonstrated a great capacity to engage with
themes such as war and human suffering. However, in these cases it could also
be argued that their efficacy in dealing with history in specifics and trauma
beyond a more generalized sense could be seen as actually relatively limited.7
Overall, then, we see that the material dealing with war experience through ani-
mation is relatively ‘niche’, with a significant emphasis on creating didactic testi-
mony based on the accounts of people who have experience, with less emphasis
on the potential for fictive ‘refiguration’.
8 Memory and forgetting

The great exception: Grave of the Fireflies

Despite the undoubted significance of Barefoot Gen (1983) as an account of war-
time suffering, the animation that arguably took the feature-length treatment of
this subject matter to a new level aesthetically with a less didactic approach was
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) produced by Takahata Isao at Studio Ghibli.8 It
would be difficult to imagine a more poignant and hard-hitting account of the
tragedy and cruelty of war in either conventional cinema or animated formats,
and certainly the excruciatingly slow demise of the doomed brother and sister
towards a pitiful end makes it a heartrending tour de force. All this granted, it has
been suggested nonetheless that, despite the clear merits of the film as an ani-
mated feature and the deftly handled evolution of the plot, there remains a resid-
ual unease that the series of historical events that led up to the conflagration of
war are out of reach and do not register at all. Some have even suggested that it
perpetuates a perception amongst the Japanese as ‘victims’ of the war rather than
as a populace who were fervently and fanatically devoted to the militarist cause.9
Despite any of the foregoing reservations that might be entertained, however,
Grave of the Fireflies, and more particularly its significance as an attempt to trans-
pose the essence of Nosaka Akiyuki’s 1967 short story of the same name, stands
out as a benchmark in Japan’s post-war treatment of the war experience, and of
the capacity of animation to facilitate precisely the complex overlapping of fictive
and historiographical ‘refiguration’ as articulated at the outset. In this connec-
tion, David Stahl’s excellent exegesis of Grave of the Fireflies is indeed a key
resource for discussing the working out of wartime trauma.10 The merit of his
commentary is the deeply sympathetic account of Nosaka’s eminently painful
process of dealing with ‘the return of the repressed’. In particular, it is ‘the mix-
ture of dissembling, confession and testimony’ that he so pertinently captures as
being not the symptoms of a person incapable of ‘handling the truth’, but in fact
needing to work through an admixture of fact and fiction to eventually emerge at
a point of ‘reconciliation’.11
It is perhaps hard to find a better instance of a narrative text that exemplifies
Ricoeur’s account of the uneasy relation of the fictive to the factual inherent in
‘historiographical operations’. It has the added bonus of providing an example of
how rejoining with the past can also entail, indeed necessitate, a degree of passing
over the details of memory to aim for what is only possible through certain kinds
of selective ‘forgetting’ – forgiveness. What becomes amply evident in Stahl
(and Hiroko Cockerill’s excellent commentary) is that we cannot demand ‘all the
facts’ quite as we might like them. Nosaka’s public accounting for his wartime
experience entailed, after initial recognition, some acknowledgement that not all
the detail of his own description of his experience at the end of the war was
entirely full and accurate. It cannot be doubted that the burden of the first-hand
witness is no easy one – Nosaka was clearly a tortured soul.
 Alistair Swale 9

But since Grave of the Fireflies, there have been precious few attempts to engage
with the experience of World War Two directly through animation, or create ani-
mated material that works on the premise of articulating a series of events relating
to that historical experience. With the exception of some recent productions that
have commemorated the end of the Second World War through the adaptation
of personal testimonies, most of the material produced, intriguingly enough, has
been published in the form of manga (at least in the first instance) only to be later
issued in the form of animation.12 For example Silent Service by Kawaguchi Kaiji,
was released as a manga in Big Comic Spirits from 1988 to 1996 (Kodansha), and
later released as an OVA in 1997 and 1998 through Sunrise. Its distinctive plot
gambit was to conjure a hypothetical contemporary scenario where a Japanese
submarine, named rather eponymously the Yamato, strikes out as a rogue ele-
ment disregarding both the Japanese high command and US ‘allied’ interests by
embarking on an independent political and military agenda on the high seas.
And of course it is impossible to discuss the ‘revisionist’ tide of the 1990s without
referring to the work of Kobayashi Yoshinori who debuted as a deeply subversive
and iconoclastic manga-writer through Big Comic Spirits. His Gomanizumu Sen-
gen (Gentosha, 1992–1995) was unusual in that it took on a number of ‘taboo’
topics, from the position of buraku in Japan to daring to question an uncritical
view of the Imperial family, but his output took a decisively radical turn with con-
tent that was unmistakably aimed at redressing the so-called ‘masochistic’
account of Japanese modern history. This included his controversial apologia for
the Japanese Imperial Army’s activities in Nanking, as articulated in his now
rather infamous Sensoron (Gentosha, 1998, 2001, 2003).13
So overall it is hard not to conclude that since Grave of the Fireflies there have
been relatively few serious engagements with Japanese military history either in
manga or anime, apart from a disparate selection of productions that employ the
events of that time as a ‘setting’ or to obtain motifs of the era that are then trans-
posed into a fantasy world to facilitate a romantic adventure. As was established
rather emphatically with regard to Grave of the Fireflies, the highly personal expe-
rience that played such a deep role in the formation of the creative collaboration,
is largely missing from more recent productions, and it is perhaps now not possi-
ble to expect such forms of high impact ‘testimony’ from those who have con-
crete historical concerns or do not have the necessary reservoir of experience to
drive the creative process.

The Wind Rises

This brings us back to The Wind Rises. I would suggest that it is very unlike
almost all the antecedents that we have discussed in the foregoing. It is not a
memoir, it is not an attempt to leave a didactic testimony nor is it an exercise in
psycho-therapeutic catharsis. Indeed it is so enmeshed in metaphor and a
10 Memory and forgetting

fantasy-like treatment of the subject matter that it makes any strong claims to
being an engagement in a historiographical account tenuous. It is arguably also
not an overstatement to suggest that the keynote of The Wind Rises is in fact the
dream, and the wind is the metaphorical leitmotif employed to thread the narra-
tive together. The dream enables time and place to be uncoupled from conven-
tional constraints and to free, to some extent, the obligation to maintain a strictly
chronological approach to narrative.
In the opening sequence, a dream sequence (of course), the juvenile Horikoshi,
wearing the distinctive admix of traditional and western clothing of the Taisho
period, climbs on to the roof, mounts his aircraft which is perched on the gable,
and takes off into the sky in an aircraft with wings that are a purely fantasy-like
combination of bird feathers and wing. After flying through the countryside to
the approbation of the people below he is caught unawares by the appearance of
a zeppelin-like flying machine that is accompanied by malevolently hissing and
heaving bombs that float in formation beneath it. Horikoshi’s plane is attacked
and disintegrates – which leads to his waking up in an agitated state, but not as
the boy but as an adolescent. This in turn cuts to the first fantasy meeting with
Caproni who addresses him as the ‘Japanese boy’ and converses with him while
walking along the wings of his aircraft while in mid-flight. This cuts to a train
coursing through the countryside where the mature Horikoshi of 1923 is riding
in a cramped third-class carriage toward the capital.
In this series of vignettes Miyazaki is encapsulating the problem of time, with
all the concomitant shifts in place and identity that complicate any attempt to
represent the past. The flourishes of fantastical embellishment are not simply
there to confuse but arguably to remind us that the consciousness of a child will
not be the consciousness of an adolescent, and in turn will not be the conscious-
ness of the young man that you see before you, despite the fact that they are the
same person. As if to accentuate the intrinsic instability of even the shift to a spe-
cific time and place as represented by the view of the young Horikoshi on the
train, the train seems to heave and hiss its way along the track, the billowing
steam and the whistle sound combined with vocal layers that imbue an almost liv-
ing quality to the mechanical.
Horikoshi vacates the carriage to give a woman a place to sit and perches on the
steps between the third and second class carriages – this is when Naoko makes
her first appearance with her chaperone – and it is also here that Horikoshi’s hat
flies off in the wind and is caught (rather athletically) by Naoko. This is the first
metaphorical moment of connection between the two – they are almost literally
blown together by fate, and they even exchange lines from Valery’s poem The
Wind Rises before Naoko returns to her carriage. This sequence segues into a
more breath-taking distant view of the Bay of Tokyo, where the waves emanating
from the epicentre of the Kanto Earthquake sweep toward the city and literally
ripple through buildings and roads toward the location of the train, which
buckles and shudders as the earthquake strikes where Horikoshi and Naoko are
 Alistair Swale 11

passengers. The visual impression is in fact something equally reminiscent of a

mighty wind striking the city and perhaps this is the key function of the wind
motif –the wind blows for good and the wind blows for ill. And again, in a flour-
ish that integrates the sound of the train with the epic rumbling of the ground
caused by the earthquake, we find the same human vocal layering applied to their
sound in both instances.
Consequently, the dominant theme from the outset is not so much simply the
impending catastrophe of war, but the sum total of adversity that human exis-
tence might throw our way – everything from natural disaster, to illness, to per-
sonal failure and the need to keep going even when things seem hopeless.
Indeed, we might even question whether The Wind Rises ought to be even consid-
ered a ‘war film’. In ‘“May the Wind Be With You!” The Beauty of Commitment
and the Inevitability of Evil in The Wind Rises’ Maria Grajdian highlights how
this is in fact very much the core concern of the film. She notes the significance
of the title as it derives from Paul Valé ry’s poem The Graveyard By the Sea
(Le Cimetière Marin, 1922) which commences with the phrase ‘The wind rises…’
and then continues with the phrase ‘…we must try to live!’, this would seem to
resonate deeply with what is in fact perhaps the dominant message of the film –
persevering with one’s dreams and life purpose regardless of the vicissitudes that
might present themselves (Grajdian, 2015, p. 260).
So, as already alluded to, the wind brings Horikoshi and Naoko together, and
despite her tragic illness, the aim of their living is to strive to make the most of
that love that they share while they can. The parallel struggle for Horikoshi is to
harness the wind, join with it, to succeed in flight. This becomes his vocation. At
the same time, however, this wind also brings disaster. Apart from the earth-
quake, there are several aerial disaster sequences – one of the most telling is a
dream sequence that occurs while Horikoshi is visiting Germany to visit the
Junkers design headquarters. The highly idiosyncratic G-36, a colossal aircraft
that was so large that engineers could directly attend to the engines from within
the wing itself, appears as a flaming, disintegrating wreck falling from the sky,
albeit in the markings of the Ki-20 Japanese variant that Mitsubishi produced
after securing the rights to use the German design. The wing of the Ki-20 with
the Hinomaru insignia falls into the snow-covered field near where Horikoshi is
walking. There is also a disastrous failure of one of Caproni’s aircraft to succeed
in taking off, which leads to the Italian furiously attempting to destroy the film
footage of the event from the camera.
On another level, as Sakai Makoto notes regarding Miyazaki’s My Neighbor
Totoro, the long shadow of tuberculosis – still untreated for many in the immedi-
ate post-war period – reflects Miyazaki’s grasp of a ‘big picture’ scale of human
tragedy; war is one key instance in human suffering, but the prospect of ill-health
and death through the ravages of an incurable illness are also part of the fabric of
human existence (Sakai, 2008, pp. 144–150). Miyazaki’s concerns in The Wind
Rises can arguably also be construed in such terms – and it is no surprise that in
12 Memory and forgetting

this film the eventual death of Naoko from tuberculosis forms an integral part of
the overall narrative.
There is ultimately an air of fatalism that pervades the commentary on these
events – Naoko will die, Japan will go to war, planes will crash as they undergo
trials, and even the planes that are successfully developed will most likely go
down in flames in combat. Failure and disappointment are just as real prospects
as personal happiness and professional success. The question that remains here,
is whether Miyazaki is entitled to treat an era with such clearly problematic ethi-
cal and political implications from such a perspective. An answer to this is pro-
vided, somewhat imperfectly, by a consideration of how far we can regard his
animated feature as an attempt at historiography or a predominantly fictive
refiguration.
Overall, when contemplating the question of whether The Wind Rises is a fictive
or a historiographic undertaking, we must surely conclude that the ‘refiguration’
evident in the film is more consonant with the role of fiction than with a
‘historiographical operation’ (to use Ricoeur’s phrase). The key point of distinc-
tion rests on the fact that Miyazaki has very little testimony to offer about the war
from first-hand experience – he was a four-year-old child. What he does aim to
articulate, and succeeds in articulating one might suggest, is something of what
he did experience at the end of the war – a shocking episode of being confronted
with the random cruelty of war and the largely incidental circumstances that
determine whether one person, or family, lives, or another group dies. Faced
with this rather profoundly unsettling ‘truth’ of war, his response is to embark on
something of a paean to the one dignified response that one can make under
such circumstances – again, ‘try to live’.
Even so, apart from the rather broad theme of living in the face of adversity, the
motif that gives rise to some alternative concern is the role of technology in the
film, which has a significance beyond the conventional flights of fantasy or meta-
phorical flourishes exhibited in Miyazaki’s earlier films. As both Napier and
Lamarre have highlighted in their commentary on earlier works, machines serve
as tropes of amusement and fantasy as well as key metaphorical devices for devel-
oping a commentary on the relation of humanity to technology. In the case of
Lamarre, the mechanical devices, and indeed other stylistic elements such as the
use of vast skyscapes and wind, are deeply intertwined with the ‘animetic’ possi-
bilities of the multiplanar animated image. But as Selen Çalik has argued, The
Wind Rises represents a point of departure from these previously relatively stable
categories of interpretation.14 She highlights that there is no ‘girl-God’ who acts
as the bridge between technology and nature as identified by Lamarre in the
overwhelming majority of Miyazaki’s earlier works. The only significant female
protagonist, Naoko, is fated to relative powerlessness, removed from the work-
place of her husband and doomed to a premature death. Selen Çalik concludes,
rightly in my view, that the hero of the film, Horikoshi, is ‘stranded in his fantasy
world, which becomes the only space for the wind to still blow freely’ (Çalik,
 Alistair Swale 13

2016, p. 265). The concomitant result of this is that technology, in particular the
instance of that marvel of engine-powered flight, remains within the realm of an
almost pristine state of neutrality. Indeed, Miyazaki makes it clear in various
utterances, particularly those of Caproni, that designing aircraft is a magical call-
ing in its own right, one that transcends the ends to which the technology might
be put to, including the evil aims of war and conquest.15
Clearly this perspective on technology as something neutral and in some sense
separated from the political and ethical is problematic. Yet it is possible to recog-
nize and acknowledge to some extent that the dream of flight is in another sense
a distinctive realm of endeavour that one might not cease to pursue because of
the potentially evil uses the technology might be put to. We are forced to ask
whether a designer should cease to work on an aircraft with potential military
applications once they know that war is indeed on the horizon. On one level we
might well say that they should; however, very few people actually seem to take
that stand. Hence, we have in The Wind Rises the presentation of what Susan
Napier described rather aptly as ‘a nasty truth about the human condition’ (Nap-
ier, 2014) – people who are otherwise ‘good’ will indeed continue to pursue their
area of expertise (not just in aircraft design, but in myriad other areas of militarily
sensitive technology) because they largely have little practical alternative. If we
have any doubts of the depth of this conundrum, we might also consider the ethi-
cal dilemma that scientists participating in the Manhattan Project acutely felt on
realizing the potential for indiscriminate carnage that would inevitably ensue
with the actual deployment of the atomic bomb in the field.
Aside from this ethical dilemma, which I do not pretend to be able to offer a
conclusive response to here in this context, we might also look at technology in
its other more historiographical guise, employing Ricoeur’s perspective, as a tan-
gible ‘trace’ of a particular epoch. Not all of the resources that a historiographical
discourse might employ are limited to ‘testimony’, they will include, from a phe-
nomenological perspective, the artefacts and material legacy of a particular
epoch. As such, the Zero is a material embodiment of the zeitgeist that certainly
merits special attention, not simply as an icon of aeronautical design, but also as
a symbol of the Japanese people’s broader aim of joining the first rank of industri-
alized nations. More particularly, it is something that transcends an individual’s
experience and can legitimately be classed as a phenomenological bearer of a gen-
eration’s aspiration – a legitimate locus to historiographically identify such aspira-
tions even if we do not agree with the military implications or accede to the
notion that the world is merely one great arena of competition for domination. If
there is an aspect to The Wind Rises that does warrant some positive evaluation
from a historiographic perspective it must surely be Miyazaki’s attention to the
detail of not only the technology of aircraft, but also the materials associated with
daily life. Everything from the attention to detail in architecture, to costume and
indeed the enthusiasm for integrating Western and Japanese cultural practices is
lovingly reproduced to evoke a world that has yet to fall under the emphatic
14 Memory and forgetting

hegemony of an ultra-nationalist regime hell-bent on leading the nation to a mili-

tary catastrophe in the name of national aggrandizement.
Finally, we might also consider some continuities that inhabit the narrative of
The Wind Rises, giving it an unmistakable mark of Miyazaki’s personal vision and
commentary on the present world. As Sakai Makoto notes, a fundamental con-
cern of Miyazaki in many of his films has been to suggest some kind of ‘antidote’
to the modern condition, particularly that of adolescents and young adults, who
he seems to regard as being in need of some sobering advice for dealing with life.
What particularly assists us here is Sakai’s elaboration on Miyazaki’s view of the
association between anime and otaku culture. It would be fair to say that just as
Miyazaki has been resistant to the sobriquet ‘anime’ being applied to his own
work, he is equally reluctant to endorse otaku culture – indeed his works resist
many of the staples of anime – the highly sexualized stylization in character
design and the seemingly obligatory oversized eyes. Miyazaki is in fact deeply
opposed to the kind of immersive excess associated with otaku culture and what
he would describe as the fatalistic nihilism of contemporary youth (Sakai, 2008,
pp. 31–40). Small wonder then that most of his major works, from Kiki’s Delivery
Service to Spirited Away and ultimately The Wind Rises contain the subplot of the
main protagonist finding their place in the world through work (even in Spirited
Away it is a condition of Chihiro’s being able to remain in the netherworld that
she sign a contract to work with Yubaba). This too, is clearly not a historiograph-
ical field of concern but it is one that relates to Miyazaki’s broader contemporary
concerns – and to this extent we might even suggest that he has taken up a deeply
‘didactic’ mission through The Wind Rises.

Conclusion
As we have seen in the foregoing overview, the evolution of animated productions
and manga from war’s end to the 1970s provided an important counterpoint to
the material that was produced from the 1980s onwards. It is perhaps somewhat
surprising, given the vigour with which the Japanese film industry regrouped in
the immediate post-war period, that animation did not enjoy such an immediate
resurgence. Indeed there is a fairly marked disjuncture between the lineages of
animators at war’s end and the generation of creatives that were trained in the
Toei studio from the 1960s onwards. Part of the reason for this lay in the con-
straints on resources, but it is perhaps also due to the impact of the American
style of animation that favoured animation as ‘juvenile amusement’ rather than
as a more nuanced vein of artistic expression.
And yet, slowly but surely, manga and anime that dealt directly with the
trauma of Japan’s wartime experience began to appear. Taking our cue from Ric-
oeur, we find that indeed personal testimony was the primary source for the most
impactful engagements with that collective history – the most well-known and
arguably most successful examples, such as Mizuki Shigeru’s Onwards toward our
 Alistair Swale 15

Honorable Deaths (1973) and Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen (1973), do indeed
stem from profound personal experience. And perhaps it is even enough to have
shared the experience in a more oblique way, as Takahata’s adroit treatment of
the original material of Nosaka’s Hotaru no Haka attests.
Yet despite the examples noted above, it has nonetheless been more common
from the 1980s onwards to see themes of war and destruction transposed into a
parallel science fiction environment – often with a clear message of disapproval
for war and suffering, but no particularly direct treatment of the historical events
of the Pacific War itself. Perhaps this is to some extent inevitable if, as Ricoeur
would seem to imply, that what ultimately underpins ‘historiographical oper-
ation’ in discourse is ‘testimony’ – when the generation that lived the trauma is
passing on, other modes of discourse will take their place. If we compare the posi-
tion of Miyazaki Hayao to the likes of Mizuki Shigeru and Nakazawa Keiji, or
even Takahata Isao, we must frankly acknowledge that Miyazaki could not be
expected to engage in the experience of war and remembering of war in anything
like the same manner.16
I would suggest that we need to acknowledge this point of difference, yet his
contribution is an important one, even though it might not completely satisfy the
rigour of historiographical discourse. There is, without a doubt, an ethical obliga-
tion amongst artists and historians to engage with unpalatable episodes in one’s
national history, but there are also some important and subtle differences in the
imperatives of historiography that need to be born in mind when evaluating
Miyazaki’s particular response. The Wind Rises, for reasons outlined in relation to
questions of narrative and historiography, presents a mode of discourse that is of
a subtly (and perhaps unavoidably) different order. On the one hand, the film
presents a specific time and milieu, and is rich with ‘traces’ of the period as
depicted through the urban space, machinery and architecture. On the other
hand, it clearly has a preoccupation with a fictive narrative that concerns itself
more with the thematics of life and the struggle to persevere against adversity in a
very generalized aspect, which makes it highly problematic to consider it as a his-
toriographical work.
A resolution of sorts is offered by the insight that Ricoeur’s theory affords with
regard to the concept of overlap between literary imagination and historical imag-
ination. As noted at the outset, the metaphorical impulse is vital to historiography
as much as to fiction; this makes Miyazaki’s reliance on the dream sequences in
The Wind Rises not necessarily an instance of evasion of historical discourse (as
might first be thought), but in fact a relatively plausible mode of engagement
with a past he has no direct experience of. Miyazaki focuses on the historical
‘traces’ because he cannot rely on his own personal ‘testimony’. What is actually
remarkable is the degree to which he seems able to ‘refigure’ a world out of such
material. Indeed, it could be suggested that it is perhaps this very capacity to use
this adjunct of fact and fantasy to evoke a specific time and place that enables
The Wind Rises to present a distinctive historical perspective.
16 Memory and forgetting

Ultimately, Miyazaki offers a vision that is of relevance to our understanding of

one of the most cataclysmic epochs in Japanese history. We must accept that it is
a commentary rooted in personal concerns and personal preoccupations. Miya-
zaki is dealing with ‘what he knows’ – a love of flying aircraft, and a legacy within
his own family of a father who was an engineer within the aeronautical industry
during the war. The fact is that Miyazaki was a juvenile when the war was being
conducted and he witnessed events of that period from a limited, although clearly
not altogether sheltered, perspective. This, in any event, does not place him as a
protagonist within his world at that time. So we are perhaps forced to conclude,
despite some degree of disappointment, that although Miyazaki has not grasped
the political ‘nettle’ of his subject matter, he is at least retaining an artistic integ-
rity that focuses on the ‘muthos’ of what drives him personally. And, somewhat
tenuously I would suggest, we might also conclude that it presents a historical
perspective of the world before the war that seems to resonate with him, granted
with particular constraints, but also with a purview that makes sense within the
compass of his broader work.
Overall, we wind up with a deeply personal reflection of an individual anima-
tor’s background, an explanation of sorts of where this particular person’s pas-
sions stem from, and an attempt to try to portray a country that this person
would wish the world to remember – the one that had not yet invaded Manchuria
in 1931, nor instigated all-out war with China in 1937, nor of course embarked
on the full commitment to total war with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
It is perhaps in one sense a na€ıve field of concern, but it is the one that Miyazaki
felt compelled, and in another sense, ‘qualified’ to relate.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Filmography
Akira, dir. Otomo Katsuhiro, Toho, 1988.
First Squad, dir. Ashino Yoshiharu, Studio 4 C, 2009.
Grave of the Fireflies, dir. Takahata Isao, Studio Ghibli, 1988.
Mobile Suit Gundam I, dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki, Bandai, 1981.
Patlabor II, dir. Oshii Mamoru, Production I.G., 1993.
The Place Promised In Our Early Days, dir. Makoto Shinkai, CoMix Wave Inc.,
2004.
Senjo no Varukyuria, dir. Yamamoto Yasutaka, A-1 Pictures, 2009
Space Battleship Yamato, dir. Matsumoto Leiji, Toei, 1977.
Toshokan Senso, dir. Takayuki Hamana, Production I.G., 2008.
Waltz With Bashir, dir. Ari Folman, 2008.
The Wind Rises, dir. Miyazaki Hayao, Studio Ghibli , 2013.
 Alistair Swale 17

Notes
1. See Dower (1995, 10–28). There is, as it turns out, an emergent scholarship on such themes in
relation to animated features and amongst them we should note the work of Raya Morag
(2013) and Annabelle Honness-Roe (2013). Morag’s work is immensely ground-breaking in
that it links highly effectively the duality of victim and perpetrator within the same volume.
Nevertheless, the purview is couched largely in the language of psychoanalysis and does not
readily gel with a Deleuzian analysis, it’s obvious merits notwithstanding. Honness-Roe has a
more commensurate theoretical approach and it will be relevant to the concerns of this article
accordingly.
2. For a particularly incisive review of The Wind Rises which enumerates these kinds of points of
departure see Susan Napier’s review, ‘Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines: Miyazaki’s The
Wind Rises’ in The Huffington Post, updated 23 January 2014.
3. There is an increasing body of scholarship dealing with the earliest origins of manga and
anime, for example Otsuka Eiji’s research on early Showa animation and Thomas Lamarre’s
commentary on Norakuro Nitohei in his articles on ‘speciesism’. See Lamarre (2008, 75–96).
4. Ricoeur in fact distinguishes between three levels of representation , or ‘mimesis’ –
‘refiguration is the third and most imaginatively reconstructed level of representation and
interpretation’. See Ricoeur (1984, 51–74).
5. See Stegewerns (2014, 93–106).
6. See Nakar (2014, 177–199). For a complementary overview of early graphic depictions of war
see also Rosenbaum (2012, 133–151). For an overview of the postwar line of developments in
Japanese animation see Kumi (2008, 46–52).
7. See William Ashbaugh (2010, 327–353). There is also the obvious instance of Akira (dir.
Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) which ostensibly also revisits the legacy of nuclear oblivion, albeit
with an edgier dystopic tone and preoccupation with an existentialist crisis; see also Napier
(2005, 39–48), and Fisch (2000, 49–68).
8. For a discussion of the complementary career paths of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao see
Yonemura Miyuki’s overview (2008, 26–36).
9. See also Goldberg (2009, 39–54).
10. See Stahl (2009, 161–202). For a complementary narrative incorporating interview materials
see also Hiroko Cockerill (2012, 152–163).
11. See Stahl (2009, 169).
12. Following Ame no Hi ga Furu (Mushi Pro 1988) there appeared Gurasu no Usagi, (Magic Bus,
2005) and Ano Hi Bokura ha Senjo de (NHK 2015). In terms of their visual design and didactic
function it would be appropriate to place them in the same category as Hadashi no Gen. Other-
wise, this period witnessed a procession of largely juvenile, protagonist-centred works that
transpose the matter of Second World War history into hypothetical scenarios that variously
require the protagonists to engage in battles that are, nonetheless, almost entirely stripped of
their original historical significance and imbued with either a mythical or even farcical treat-
ment of the subject matter. For example, Toshokan Senso (Kadokawa, 2006) by Hiro Arikawa
was based on a light novel series combined with the illustration work of Adabana Sukumo and
builds on the motifs of romance with military themed settings. The light novel evolved into a
four volume series and ultimately was made into a 12-episode televised animation series by
Production I.G (screened on Fuji TV in 2008) and a feature length film, Library Wars: The
Last Mission, was produced in 2012 with the same creative team and released in 2012. Preced-
ing Toshokan Senso there is also Shinkai Makoto’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days
(CoMix Wave, 2004). See Walker (2009, 3–19).
13. Ultimately his aim would seem to evoke strong emotions, but these are the largely instrumental
ones associated with ‘patriotism’ – an ideal that, if anything, thrives through indifference to
18 Memory and forgetting

history. This aligns very neatly with the categories of narrative that actually undermine mem-
ory and historiography as delineated by Ricoeur as ‘manipulated’ memory. See also Driscoll
(2009, 290–304).
14. See Çalik (2016, 258–273). For a detailed account of Lamarre’s understanding of the
mechanical within animation see also Lamarre (2009, xviii– xxvi).
15. See also Breen (2016, 457–459).
16. Miyazaki never undertook explicitly to tackle the rise of militarism in Japan in The Wind Rises,
but he has been consistently vocal in his defence of attempts to thwart rewriting of the Japanese
Constitution and to bolster resistance to the broader tide of historical revisionism. See for
example 『 宮崎駿さん、安倍首相を批判 』at http://www.huffingtonpost.jp/2015/07/13/miya
zaki-hayao-vs abe_n_7789934.html. For an analysis of the essentially “autobiographical” char-
acter of The Wind Rises see Sugita (2014, 283–287).

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Alistair Swale is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Waikato, Private Bag
3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. He can be contacted at alistair.swale@waikato.ac.nz.