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Back on My Bullshit: Art and Politics edition

Or, "Yet Again Ted Responds to a Post Without Tagging or Replying to the Original Author Because He's Scared of Conflict."

Had that experience again recently of running into one of those Blistering Nuclear Hot Takes that the internet is famous for. And I've learned that if my immediate, knee-jerk reaction to a statement is intensely emotional, then I definitely need to step back and take a second look, to see exactly why I'm reacting that way and whether the author has a valid point.

In this case, the take was about calling Hayao Miyazaki a fascist, in that his works express a fundamentally fascist worldview and glorify fascist politics and aesthetics. And what with me being an animation nerd and a guy who mistrusts Hot Takes about artists and their Fundamental Worldviews, this provoked an immediate response in me, which I had to grapple with for some time. The results of that grappling appear below.

(As before, I'm not tagging this with the original poster's name or responding directly to their post because this isn't really about them. It's about me gnawing on an idea until I feel like I've gnawed long enough, and not really caring what others think. So please don't reblog or tag this with anyone.)

So the most obvious way to respond to this—what I'm not proud to say was my first instinct—would be to simply post the Porco Rosso screenshot:

Which, yeah, on the surface is a pretty straightforward counter. But it doesn't actually say very much, for a number of reasons. First, just because one of Miyazaki's characters expresses this view doesn't mean much; the artist is not their art. (Media Theory 101 over here, I know.) But within the context of the film it means even less: Porco isn't directly opposing fascism so much as keeping his head down and avoiding politics entirely, preferring to let other people fight their battles while he relaxes on his private island. And in this scene, you'll note that he's meeting his pal, Ferrarin, on friendly terms in a movie theater, even though Ferrarin is now a pilot for the air force under the new fascist government. So although Porco doesn't like fascism, he's comfortable enough to meet with a guy who's working for a fascist regime on friendly terms.

So forget Porco Rosso. Forget also the general content of Miyazaki's films, which are broadly anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-violence in general, etc. What is the specific evidence being offered of Miyazaki's supposed fascist views? From what I've seen, there are three main arguments: the idyllic pastoral aesthetic of his works and how it ties into settler colonialist fantasies; those works of his that directly depict (in a largely neutral-to-positive light) individuals who served under fascist governments; and statements he's made in relation to the previous that seem to show a nostalgia for and desire to return to that idyllic fantasy. Let me describe my thought process about each of these one at a time.

First, the pastoral aesthetics. Obviously Miyazaki, and Ghibli as a studio, has some distinct aesthetic elements that are so obvious and visible that "Ghibli-style" is now a thing you can say on the internet and which will instantly conjure up a vision of rolling hills, white clouds, gentle breezes, and so forth. More generally, Miyazaki has a very clear veneration of nature and humans living in harmony with the landscape that manifests across virtually all his works—think of Kiki only being able to regain her witch powers by spending time in the woods, or the family in Totoro bowing before the ancient tree in their backyard. Hell, I don't need to give examples, anybody reading this knows exactly what I'm talking about.

This aesthetic has of late been conflated with/subsumed by the "cozycore" or "cottagecore" aesthetic movement, which has itself been absorbed by the whole right-wing tradwife retvrn-to-the-land thing, which ... yeah, obviously it's horrible. It glorifies this past that never was, where white people roamed the land and made their dens in lush glades built over native bones. And while Miyazaki's work predates a lot of this modern cottagecore nonsense, it's not impossible that he and they are both pulling from the same well of settler colonialism. Miyazaki's art is more gorgeous and imaginative than the Little House on the Prairie cosplayers who can afford $75,000 stoves but don't know how to milk a cow, but that's just a difference of degree.

I would argue that Miyazaki's view of the "idyllic life" is different from tradwife bullshit in a few crucial ways, all of which boil down to a question of humility: Miyazaki understands that humans can only live in harmony with nature, not by dominating it, and it comes from a different place than the Christian dominionist drive of the right-wing assholes who think that growing your own food and raising nine kids is easy. But Miyazaki's views of living peacefully on the land are still largely rooted in Japanese settler mythology that drove the Ainu from their lands; he's also imagining a verdant land with its original inhabitants bloodlessly removed. It's just that his idyll is a few centuries older than the American Eden.

But it's a long jump from "the landscapes he draws ignore historical reality" to "he supports right-wing ideology." Certainly, specific aesthetics can be rooted in an ideology, but I don't think you can make the case that an individual's appreciation of that aesthetic thus immediately equates to their endorsement of that ideology. As an argument, that's just a twist of the dial away from "your kinks determine your morality," which is a statement I definitely don't agree with.

Of course, this is only about the purely visual elements of his work, not his narratives. Visuals don't convey an ideology as directly as a story; it'd be the difference between appreciating Hitler's paintings and reading Mein Kampf. (Godwin's Law, I know, but I had to reach for someone with a definite ideology who had worked in both visual and narrative media, and he came first to mind. Feel free to ignore everything I say from now on, I guess.) Analyzing Miyazaki's works for how their narratives align, or don't, with right-wing ideology is beyond the scope of this post, and not something I really want to dig into right now, but at minimum I don't think you can draw a particularly straight line from, say, Princess Mononoke to settler colonialism, except perhaps in a negative sense.

Anyway, my point here is that I don't think the argument of "his works look like the stuff posted by tradwives, therefore he agrees with them" holds an especially large amount of water. Aesthetics don't necessarily equate morality.

Which kind of provides a segue into the next argument: that Miyazaki is, by creating works that depict the lives of actual individuals who worked under fascist governments, declaring his support for fascism. The two works in question are The Wind Rises, about the life and work of Jiro Horikoshi, and his manga adaptation of Tigers in the Mud, the autobiography of Otto Carius, German tank commander during WWII. I'll be honest right up front: I haven't consumed either work, so I can't comment on the specifics of how he adapts these stories, what he chooses to focus on or ignore.

But as with the previous point, from what I know of them, I think both of these works came out of his interest in machinery, and his appreciation for the people who design and operate them, not out of any love for the ideologies they served. I do think it's regrettable (if I'm being politic, "shitty" if I'm not) that he chose to make works about men who served imperial, genocidal empires, but I can understand where the impulse comes from.

In terms of depicting with humanity people who commit awful deeds or contribute to horrible goals, I think both these works are completely of a piece with Miyazaki's fictional narratives. In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi is devastating the forest and massacring the spirits of the land, but she's depicted with a level of understanding and sympathy; she feeds and employs lepers and treats them with dignity, and justifies her actions as necessary to ensure the lives of others. Kushana in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cares for her soldiers and commands them with respect, and regrets the actions she has to take in service of her aims. Neither of them are "good" characters, but they're not intended to be. Miyazaki's aim with these characters—all of his characters, really—was not to present moral paragons, nor even pure villains, but to show nuanced and multi-faceted individuals with complex motivations. Miyazaki isn't interested in producing morality plays; his interest is in humans.

Which is why I can understand him making works about Horikoshi and Carius: he doesn't see them as a bad man who made a bad plane or a bad man who drove a bad tank, but as people with interiority and complex motivations forced to serve evil ends. Do I agree with that characterization of either man? Not necessarily, but again, that's how I think Miyazaki would justify his work. The quote that I think sums this up very well (which, yes, I did just find on the Wikipedia page, but what do you want? I'm not getting paid for actual deep-dive research) comes from a 1989 interview with Comic Box:

The truth is that I am happiest when I am writing about stupid airplanes and tanks in magazines like Model Graphix.

Miyazaki isn't writing about airplanes and tanks, and the men who design and piloted them, because he agrees with the ideologies of the empires that used them. He's writing about them because he really likes airplanes and tanks. Once upon a time, a little kid visited his parents' factory and saw a giant metal bird fly into the air, and he never forgot it. (Am I romanticizing a childhood in Imperial Japan? Yes. Is that the point of what I'm saying? Please submit your answers in essay form.) Similarly to the above point, just because he likes the aesthetics of war machines doesn't mean he supports their use.

And that leads into the final point, that Miyazaki has made statements which appear to ignore the historical reality of these machines' use in favor of admiring their creation and design. The original poster quoted part of an article from The Guardian in 2013 about the controversy over The Wind Rises. I want to highlight this section, which was also in their quote:

Miyazaki, a warplane enthusiast since childhood, insisted Horikoshi was beyond reproach. "Jiro Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan," he said in a 2011 interview with Cut magazine. "He wasn't thinking about weapons – really all he desired was to make exquisite planes."

Look at how Miyazaki is framing things: he is discussing Horikoshi as a creator, not as part of the imperial war machine. (The second paragraph also neatly mirrors the first, which emphasizes Miyazaki's own love of warplanes despite the strong and consistent anti-war message of his films.) I don't agree with Miyazaki's opinion that Horikoshi was "beyond reproach," but I can understand how he would regard Horikoshi as a man dominated by his times and forced into an intolerable position.

I think Miyazaki put his foot in his mouth when he tried to respond to these criticisms, but again, let's not mistake his poorly-phrased and ill-considered defense of a biographical film about a complex man for a full-throated declaration of right-wing politics. Indeed, let's look at a couple paragraphs from earlier in that same article:

Japanese nationalists, meanwhile, took to online forums to denounce Miyazaki, a former trade union official with well-documented leftwing leanings, as a "traitor" and "anti-Japanese" for the film's focus on the futility of war. But they were most angered by an essay Miyazaki had written to coincide with the film's release in which he condemned Japan's modern-day drift to the right, including plans by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to revise the country's pacifist constitution.

Or maybe we could point out that Miyazaki refused to attend the Academy Awards in 2003, when Spirited Away was nominated, due to the United States' bombing of Iraq. Or, just for kicks, let's look at his remarks on accepting the Ramon Magsaysay Award in the Philippines in 2024:

“The Japanese did a lot of terrible things back then. They killed many civilians. The Japanese people must not forget this. It will always remain. With such history, I solemnly accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines.”

Doesn't exactly sound like the views of a hardcore fascist to me.

Here's the conclusion that I take away from having seen/read most of Miyazaki's work: I don't think he's a very political person. Or rather, since we are all political actors both subject to and able to influence politics (albeit to a limited degree), I don't think he sees the world in terms of politics. I don't think he cares about systems nearly as much as he cares about people: individuals and their reactions to the circumstances under which they live and work. I would describe him as a humanist, I suppose, as much as that term can have a definition: someone who is fascinated by the choices that a person makes about the situation in which they live.

Seen through this lens, his works about Horikoshi and Carius make perfect sense. Miyazaki wants to make art about people in specific times and places forced to make difficult choices. He doesn't give much thought to the systems under which they lived, except to generally condemn them, but neither does he consider how his biographies of men who contributed to the deaths of millions might read to an outside observer.

(If I were feeling psychoanalytic, I might also speculate that this is partly the reason for the messianic tone of Nausicaä, which I always found odd considering that he's not a Christian, nor does he tend to employ Christian iconography in his work. Miyazaki's works tend to focus on one or a very small cast of characters, and in an adventure story like Nausicaä, particularly one so long and developed, the natural instinct for a creator so focused on characters is to make his protagonist into someone who can transform the system fundamentally. Hence, Nausicaä as "the blue-clad one" who will save the world from devastation is a natural outgrowth of his humanistic impulses. But that's just a theory. A game theory)

Anyway, all of this boils down to: no, Hayao Miyazaki isn't a fascist. But like Porco, he doesn't particularly want to fight the system, or even pay much attention to it; he'd rather remain on his private island with his plane, looking at the sky.

(Lastly, for the commenters on the post who were saying things like "of course he's a fascist! he was born in Imperial Japan!", please submit a 5,000-word essay detailing how much control Miyazaki had over the location of his birth, and how much agency he had over his country's direction during WWII considering he was born in 1941. For extra credit, tell me how I was responsible for the Gulf War at the tender age of 6.)

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