That is why I have left family affairs and raising our children to my wife. She was a colleague when we were at Toei Animation, so she understands my work and how much labor is needed to complete a project. She had wanted to continue to work on her drawings. When we got married, I promised her that we would both have careers. Until our second son was born, I used to take the older one to preschool and meet him there at the end of the day. But when I saw our older son walking home half asleep, I decided that it was impossible for both of us to work.
I still feel contrite about breaking my promise. But since then I have been able to focus on my work.
from Starting Point: 1979-1996
I’ve called The Wind Rises a self-indulgent, self-flagellating film. This is because it is a film in which Miyazaki lays bare his view of his own life work and the demands he placed on his family and employees along the way. Ultimately he accepts it, justifies all of it to himself as well as on everyone else’s behalf.
The above quote tells us about the sacrifices of Miyazaki’s wife and children. As for his employees, in another essay from Starting Point Miyazaki talks about a finish inspector who he worked with on his tv series Heidi, Girl of the Alps. Japan infamously has a culture of overwork, which is especially evident in the animation industry. Of this woman who was getting an average of two hours of sleep per night, Miyazaki writes:
Part of me feels that no one should work that hard. But part of me also wants to have the energy and dedication she has for her work. It would be easy if we were merely trying to produce a quality of work that corresponded to our limited budgets and schedules. But to move forward a single centimeter or even five centimeters beyond that, we need to have the support of people like her. It’s not a case where one person’s job can be shared by two. I need to have someone who understands my intentions and will dedicate himself or herself to the job. And I know this is very egotistical thinking on my part.
Like Miyazaki, Jirō also pours all of his energy into his work. The big difference between the two is that Jirō makes warplanes which will go on to kill many people. Miyazaki of course despises war so I think of his choosing to make a film about an active participant in warfare as an extension of his sense of guilt towards the people in his life (whose sacrifices are the cost of his work).
In the chapter on The Wind Rises in Miyazakiworld, Susan Napier dances around this issue, bringing up several interpretations of the film, ways to reckon with the film’s subject matter: a man who was complicit in contributing to Imperial Japan’s war efforts. But in the end Napier can’t avoid the question at the heart of the film because it is a question Miyazaki explicitly asks himself and the audience: would you rather live in a world with or without the pyramids? Would you rather live in a world with or without Miyazaki movies? And Miyazaki’s answer is “with.” The human sacrifice had to have been worth it for these beautiful monuments, these monuments to beauty.
Because “beauty” is key. On the role of Jirō’s wife Naoko in the film, Napier writes:
One day Naoko simply disappears, walking quietly out of Jirō’s life in order not to burden him or take him away from his important work of designing the Zero. We never see her die.
Toshio Okada has interpreted Naoko’s decision as evidence of Jirō’s fundamental selfishness. “Jirō loves Naoko because she is beautiful, like an airplane,” he says. “Had she gotten old and lost her beauty, their love could not have continued.” Naoko’s offscreen death, he argues, supports the unreal quality of the story. I agree, especially since the real Horikoshi’s wife did not die young, and the couple had two children. The movie’s ethereal Naoko–forever young and forever childless, romantically stained by the trauma of tuberculosis–supports the movie’s otherworldly and fantastic quality, gesturing back to the vanishing-woman motif seen in Castle of Cagliostro.
It’s disturbing to think of a man valuing his wife only for her beauty but there has to be at least some reduction, some flattening of her in his eyes if he is to ask for her life like this (the way Jirō does; the way Miyazaki does). (Also, isn’t it striking how Miyazaki also takes out the two children when he has two children of his own?)
So I think we see glimpses of this “romanticizing” impulse in Miyazaki’s films (when he chooses to indulge it). When young girls like Clarisse in Cagliostro or Fio in Porco Rosso declare their love for the older male protagonist, the men resist, restrain themselves because the girls are too young. But the fantasy is played out nonetheless: the fantasy of a beautiful young girl offering you her life. Or even briefly in Princess Mononoke when the first thing Ashitaka says to San is “You are beautiful” and she jumps back as if he just pierced through to the essence of the humanity inside of her. As if that was the essence of her humanity.
Miyazaki’s movies are very beautiful and embody a lot of love. But it takes more courage to actually love people than to merely fantasize about love, no matter how sensitively observed and rendered your fantasies are. So it is beauty that Miyazaki leans on, depends on, escapes to when he reaches the limits of his empathy. It is beauty that he uses to hedge against his personal selfishness, his own failure to love. The irony of a children’s filmmaker not raising his own children. He seems aware of all of this, but of course self-awareness is no excuse.
The Wind Rises is a portrait of a man with blood on his hands. A man who, for the sake of creating something that could bring some joy to others, monopolized the joy of those around him indefinitely.
As much as I love Miyazaki’s movies, could I live without them? If it meant that his wife could have lived a fuller life; if it meant that he would have shown more affection to his children? Then, yes. Absolutely. No question.
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