The Wind Rises

Just finished watching Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises" with the kids. I love Miyazaki's movies. I grew up watching Totoro, Valley of the Wind, and consider myself a fan. One of my favorite movies is "Porco Rosso".

I didn't know anything about this movie, so I started watching without any expectations. As it turned out, it was absolutely gorgeous yet heartbreaking.

In this movie, the main protagonist is Jiro, a real-life Japanese aeronautical engineer who designed the Zero plane, a fighter used by the Japanese Navy to slaughter Americans at Pearl Harbor during WWII.

Jiro is depicted as a sweet-natured idealist dreamer. Indeed his vision is inspired by peaceful civilian uses for aircraft. But he's not so naive after all. To keep his dream of designing beautiful airplanes alive, his work is a compromise. He's well aware that he's building fighters for the Japanese Navy for the upcoming war effort.

The visuals and music are absolutely breathtaking.

I found myself weeping towards the end of the movie. I thought of my late paternal grandfather.

In 1926, at age 16, my grandfather was sent to Japan to further his study. His dream was to become an civil engineer. After a decade of studying, he graduated from the best university in Tokyo and returned to China. Just like young Jiro, my grandfather was full of passion and dreamed of designing the most wonderful roads and the most beautiful bridges for his country. But soon the war broke, and my grandfather took his gun and fought against the Japanese Army, the very people who trained him for the past decade. The following eight long years of Japanese invasion inflicted extreme atrocity upon the Chinese people. Growing up, my grandmother would vividly tell me horror stories of their suffering under Japanese cruelty. Unlike Germany, Japan has been reluctant to fully acknowledge its vicious involvement in WWII, even till this day.

In "The Wind Rises", Miyazaki praises Jiro's passion to pursue the beauty of his soaring airplane, but what's the price paid behind this dream? Miyazaki fails to hold the responsibility shy of the realization of this dream. I agree with Will, "He glorifies a wartime villain."

I couldn't help telling the kids about "the bad guys". True, it's all too easy to judge the bad guys when we are the good ones. But without the courage to face the truth, history may repeat itself. "The wind rises, we must try to live." But how are you really "living well"? Can you really justify the means and consequences of your dreams and your actions? What if your dream come-true is the very nightmare come-true for thousands and thousands of innocent people? Jiro doesn't seem to wrestle much with his moral dilemma.

Tonight, I'm mourning my late grandfather. Incidentally, the setting and period of the movie coincide perfectly with his decade-long stay in Japan as a young student, same age as Jiro. As Jiro rides trains through the rural idyllic Japanese fields, as he walks among the busy crowds of people in traditional kimonos and getas, as he goes about his daily life in traditional Japanese houses with wooden beams and sliding paper doors, I saw my young grandfather through Jiro, and I was absolutely touched by those lovely scenes and wished Jiro had never built his beautiful killing machines.

My young grandfather


My beautiful grandmother with her children.  My dad is the little boy on the left in the front row.


My grandparents in their 90's.  I miss them terribly.