Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams
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Miyazaki is anti-war, but he's also extremely pro-ecology as is obvious in most of his films (Nausicaa is an obvious one, but perhaps more obvious would be Pom Poko or Totoro). Broadly speaking, he advocates balance in all its forms. A lot of his main protagonists are strong female characters, and not the "overly girly unicorn princess with magical powers" kind. Violence, like greed, is a disease as opposed to an end (in fact those two concepts are often expressed together in his films, e.g. Spirited Away).
But maybe the best accomplishment in most, if not all, of Miyazaki's work, is his ability to capture the interest and the imagination of the viewers without resorting to cheesy gimmicks, gratuitous violence or sexual innuendos, which seem to be the go-to for a lot of cinema (animation and otherwise, Western and Eastern).
As a statement, it sounds poetic at first, and the first two sentences are absolutely perfect; however, there's something very wrong about the notion of "preserving the balance", and I've seen that notion show up elsewhere as well. Evil should not persist out of any sense of balance, and nothing goes horribly wrong with the world if evil ceases altogether.
Even in nature, there isn't a real balance. Any perceived balance is simply the result of ongoing fighting and current stalemates. When things go "out of balance", groups or species go extinct and things move on. Absolutely nothing in nature is stopping a species from taking over the entire planet, consuming all resources, then going extinct.
And personally, I don't define good in terms of evil. Like a silly saying of defining light in terms of darkness (uh, no, I'll define it as certain energy bands or something, thanks).
Unless you meant this on a conceptual level, like, if we had never heard of the concept of insanity, it might be hard to say we value sanity since it'd just be an unquestioned state of affairs. I don't find that a very useful definition as far as a course for action goes; we'd be quite fine eliminating "evil".
That's exactly the kind of thing I meant, yes. Some things are universally wrong no matter where or how they happen, who is doing them, or what "side" they're on.
This becomes concrete when we are talking about a state which formally supported the Nazis.
I quite explicitly said that this was both an undesirable thing and something to put a stop to.
I don't think the quote supports the idea of evil persisting out of balance, but rather that to advance the greater good one must balance the need to oppose the notionally evil things (which nonetheless contain good) with the need to oppose the evil contained in things which are notionally good.
Its the only interpretation I can see which makes sense in the context of the sentences that the one on balance follows. What is preserved is not the balance in the state of the world between the sides (or between good and evil), but the balance you recognize between the good and evil in each side, a balance that is lost when you commit to one as "good" and ignore the evil it contains, and the good contained in the other.
That much is absolutely true; conflicts and war are evils in themselves, even when some would consider them "necessary".
Take Pol Pot, for example. He deliberately killed one quarter of his country's population. If you think it's just my decision to call that evil, then you are from a place that is so morally different from me that I don't know how to even begin having a conversation with you.
But Pol Pot thought he was doing good. The only response I can imagine is to try to resist that with arms. I don't know what else is possible. But in doing so, I have to make very sure that I don't become some kind of monster myself, rationalizing the evil that I do and calling it good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
Do you think that President Kennedy was an evil man?
However, in the context of moral outlooks that people form in that sort of environment, Pol Pot's values are quite normal. Many German soldiers formed similar views during the First World War; they were very well informed compared to the Cambodians, and in a position to know better.
A world of "no"; that's a kind of "balance" I want no part of.
But perhaps the center path is itself evil if you refuse to stray from it. That would lead many Western minds to the parable of the Good Samaritan, after all. Who would refuse to feed the hungry because hunger is just part of human nature, or refuse to clothe the poor because poverty is just the result of bad luck and bad decisions?
Well... plenty of people who fall prey to the just world fallacy, but that's digressing.
All of the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done in the name of good, and people were slaughtered until it was decided good was done, because the greater evil had to be opposed at any cost, and it was thought to be the lesser of all conceivable evils. But when you oppose evil with evil, where is the good to be found?
I have no idea what message you're trying to convey here. No, none of those qualities (other than survival) are innate, and if you believe they are, you'll do less to stop them. We can be better.
So it's not that he's saying we need to defend the balance with evil; rather, we should defend the balance with the people we see as evil. Because their side sees us as evil, and unless we seek balance, the only solutions are extermination of one side or the other, or eternal war.
Take The Lord Of the Rings - the good and the evil is very clearly defined. Sauron and the Orcs are objectively evil, and you can kill as many orcs as you want without feeling any remorse. Sarumans industrialization is pure evil. Aragorn is the rightfully ruler purely by virtue of being a "good guy" and having the right ancestors.
Now compare to Princess Mononoke. Obviously the corruption of the nature is an evil thing, but Eboshi is not "evil", she saves the outcasts of society, lepers and prostitutes and gives them life and dignity, but as part of her plan she upsets the balance of nature. This is much more complex conflict as in Tolkien, and the solution is not as easy, since you cannot just kill all the bad guys.
Saddam was a villain to be sure, but as far as people actually living in Iraq were concerned, his regime was nowhere near as bad as what followed. For some reasons why, check out http://riverbendblog.blogspot.ie/
> We really can't do anything right as far as intervention, at some point we have to accept we can't make things work out in other people's countries and there will always be evil rulers we can't do anything about.
I agree completely.
Source: "The Whisper Within: Zen and Self" (p. 150)
For more on the controversy here's a link to the Chicago Reader review that sums up why some perceived it as being sympathetic to fascism:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-wind-rises-hayao-mi...
One is that I'm tired of both the congratulatory and the flagellative uses of "Western." Feminism is no more a western tradition than it is an Arab, Chinese or Congolese one. It's a modern cultural movement. Similarly, simple good vs evil plot settings are not western. They exist everywhere. They're often from propaganda, naturally occurring hero worship, morality tales and depictions of a culture's own history. GRRM (mentioned here) is as western as Tolkien and is definitely a modern example western literature.
The complicated moral depictions in Game of Thrones are not new, but they are definitely strong in the current zetgeist. It comes and goes and has often reached the point of cliche. Hercules (and his analogues like Samson and Cuchulainn) are often depicted with character flaws, often involving women and madness in some way. We've been through a period when it was out of fashion. I think hollywood film tradition is very largely to blame, their perfect hero classics. The awesome comedic writer like Adams, Pratchet, Joseph Heller or even Franz Kafka earlier on mock this constantly. Humour is great for this kind of thing, satirising the current literary cliches.
That brings me to my second point. Today's storytelling is taking this stuff to a whole new level. The complex morality tales and decompacting of group decision making dynamics that we see in everything today is really awesome, in my opinion. I think it's great art, or at least to my taste. Playing with moral perspective and depicting the complexity of people acting in groups is an awesome thing to explore. There's a ton of depth there and a ton of artistic flair required to bite into it. In my opinion, it hits the best notes when you have been wrenched so much that your sheltered sense of morality breaks down. It still exists, but its grim rather than fiery. Evil gets demystified, banal and sad. When a bad guy gets a just end you take on the role of a reluctant but dutiful executioner rather than a hot blooded cheerleader at the gallows.
Walter White is awesome because he's complex like a real person. His angst isn't just a flat "he's angsty because X." That's very hard to do. I think the only way to get that stuff across is the moral grey areas and the "shit happens" unfolding of a person. Long format TV series give writers time to do it.
This stuff is really fantastic in modern art. TV shows, books...
When her valley is invaded, the peaceful Nausicäa runs to the room of her ill and bedridden father. He's dead, surrounded by soldiers. She screams, seizes her father's sword, and enters a killing rage. Truly, even a young and sweet girl can feel hate and killing intent, and she may even act accordingly. Nobody's born an angel nor a demon, but we can all become insensitive or cruel. Just read Primo Levi or Herman Langbein to see how most people transform in a few weeks. Anyway, that sequence made me cry.
I'd also like to mention the opening of this movie, inspired from the medieval "tapisserie de Bayeux" that relates England's invasion in the XIth century. The ballet of robots along a burning city is incredibly beautiful and moving. How stunning that Miyazaki starts his first film with the artistic beauty of a war scene!
And he's right. The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.
So the bombing of Japan was "evil", Japan's own bombings were just a "misuse" in pursuit of a "dream". How very neutral.
> The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.
Economic sanctions are an alternative to war. Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased? Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces broadcast on television. The victims of economic sanctions are never heard of except as dry statistics.
> Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased?
Saddam had already been stopped from doing what he pleased. He had been comprehensively kicked out of Kuwait. It should have stopped there.
> Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is only a contradiction if the two kinds of accusations come from the same people.
In any case, I wasn't proposing to spend twelve years bombing Iraq instead of the economic sanctions. I was proposing that after Saddam had been kicked out of Kuwait, that should have been the end of the matter.
"Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not 'collateral damage,' but a premeditated murder. [...] Of course elite war-bringers [...] do not themselves pay the 'prices' they decide are acceptable."
This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor.
I think you're misunderstanding what "war-bringer" means in this case. It's not America vs. Japan: it's the governments vs. the people. Both the American government and the Japanese government brought war, but the people of the countries (especially Japan) were forced to suffer for their governments' decisions.
Also, the comment missed the entire point of the article, as you established. Just because Japan attacked Pearl harbour doesn't mean an unnamed mother deserved to burn to death, nor that her child deserved to starve to death.
Neither victim, nor many of the other civilians in WW2 or Iraq, had a say in the politicking that led to their destruction, which is the true horror of war.
And wars are started by civilians, for the most part. Why should young men be the ones to feel all the pain?
I agree that all members of American and Japanese society share some level of responsibility for participating in total war, but I also think your "no civilians" statement goes too far. It is obvious that some members of a country have more direct effect on the war than others and that once you get far enough away (children are civilians, adults who do not work are civilians, workers who deliver mail are civilians, workers who make vehicle parts are probably civilians, workers who make tanks might be civilians, etc). To argue otherwise is to view war as some kind of 'original sin,' where the level of your contribution is immaterial and any association is sufficient to make one a combatant. If that's the case, then you and I and everyone alive today is certainly indicted in the many wars we are not working to stop. Even people working to stop one war are helping others to continue by not working to stop them. It's absurd.
Civilians do start wars and, in the modern era, they are often held to account for the wars they start. War crimes tribunals indict military and civilian personnel alike. I also agree that young men bear an unequal and unjust burden in war - but the suggestion you make is silly. The solution is not to extend that unequal burden by allowing more people to be killed, but instead to give young men more options to avoid being killed and killing others.
Arguably, the US was right. If I understand correctly, the US was determined to break Japan's militaristic social organization, to prevent another war. They needed unconditional surrender to do so. And, in fact, Japan has not been aggressive after World War II. They didn't re-arm and start another war, with hundreds of thousands of more (at least) casualties.
So the moral calculus is really not as simple as what you say.
They wanted to keep all the land they had gained imperially (Taiwan and some other land, I forget offhand). Which was essentially an "OK, we lose. But we get to keep everything we took before we lost." which was denied by the Soviets and would have been denied by the US.
The issue being glossed over is that anyone speaking against the war or saying Japan would lose would be murdered by fanatical military leaders. If you were against the war, you were against the Emperor and Japan. A traitor.
Civilian deaths are not justified by political military conquest. Especially when any civilians who speak out against the political military conquest are killed. That's a lose:lose scenario for the civilians and I don't see how anyone could morally justify such a choice.
"Die going against your country or die because of it." is hardly a choice...
There's such a thing as "pacifism", where you believe that violence should always be the final alternative. Then there's the sophomoric thinking of defining "pacifism" as "we should never go to war, ever". Sometimes, you have to fight.
From TFA:
“Is it the enemy’s or one of ours?”
“What difference does it make? Stupid murderers.”They preferred settling among the local populace, including forced marriages/rape. It's harder to rebel when the invaders are your neighbours or even your fathers.
Cynically speaking, that's better than just evaporating innocents.
1. The Japanese would not have capitulated until much more suffering would have taken place.
2. Negotiations with Russia were going on over the division of Germany and the atomic weapon blasts tempered Stalin's resolve that he had the more effective fighting force.
3. Innocents die in war. Whether from gas chambers or fire bombings or atomic bombs. If we want to stop this from happening then we need to reduce the frequency of war. Especially total war. Or do you really expect the US to send in it's bachelors to rape defenceless Japanese prisoners for decades? In the time of Alexander the great less than 3% of the population was used in fighting forces because manpower was required to keep up the food supply. It was a completely different era with a completely different set of circumstances that we don't even fully understand because we don't have the same level of records about it.
Mainly, I feel the phrase "total war" is a hyperbolic, "binary" phrase that doesn't allow for meaningful, nuanced debate. That's all I was trying to counteract.
Your points are all correct, of course.
You kill several of those victims, of course, and make sure the rest won't ever escape from poverty. I'm pretty sure that'll teach a dictator to not victimize them.
Or, just maybe, a dictator oppressing its own people isn't good enough reason to start a war. But I'll not insist on such radical ideas.
With regards to your point into human rights violations, I'd strongly suggest you look deeper into the conflict itself as "human right violations" is smoke and mirrors. If "human right violations" were a reason to start a conflict, Russia and/or China should have invaded us by now for all the human rights violations our police force are committing against our citizens, for all human right violations at Guantanamo Bay, etc.
And that justifies the murder — yes, murder — of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants ... how, again?
Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes against humanity is a grotesque notion. The best way to show the Japanese people the horrific nature of war and occupation was to bring it to their doorstep. If they want to portray themselves of victims, it should be of their own leadership, not the countries that needed to defeat them.
> the Israeli blockade of Gaza, US sanctions on Iran, and the new Saudi blockade of Yemen, as the infanticidal atrocities they are.
I am the author, and I would respond that 9/11 was a despicable act of mass murder committed under the same terrorist rationale and collective guilt fallacies under which the above listed crimes are also committed. Two wrongs do not make a right, and neither do two atrocities. For more along these lines, see this other essay of mine: https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/the-symbiosis-of-savagery-68d...
Collateral impacts on civilians is not the same as collective guilt. When did the US or Israel say they wanted to punish ordinary Gazans or Iranians for the crimes committing by their leaders? The unfortunate reality is that dealing with difficult international problems like this often lead to actions that impact the innocent - be it through bombs or sanctions. Yet the guilt should be attributed to those who create the problem, not those forced to take action. Or are you actually siding with Hamas and the Mullahs?
It's easy to point the finger of blame at those trying to resolve some of the most tricky and difficult problems in the world, coming up with solutions that work is an entirely different matter.
America forced Japan to open it's borders (because the US wanted to use their lower islands to establish a more efficient trans-Pacific trade route). At that point, Japan realized that the game in Asia and the South Pacific was colonize or be colonized. Had we not invaded Japan for US trade route profits, had we not been demonstrating that colonial imperialism was the way forward, then Japan would have been far less likely to be pressured to behave similarly (the actions of all sides leading to an inevitable war no matter who fired the first shot).
I have no rose-colored view of Japan's actions (my adoptive grandmother and her parents spent most of the war being terribly mistreated and starved in a Japanese concentration camp). At the end of the war, most of these men were executed for their crimes, but despite all the well-known American war crimes, not even one American soldier was charged for crimes committed and everything was hidden behind the American flag.
In 'Grave of the Fireflies' a war is occurring, but is not the focus. It didn't matter to those children who the 'enemy' was and it didn't matter who the 'friendlies' were (neither side was willing to help them when they were incapable of helping themselves). It didn't even matter that the war ended exactly one week before Setsuko died.
I agree with the author that it was premeditated murder, but the murderer was not the US or even Japan. It is every one of us who are unwilling to stop this from happening in the here and now. WW2 is a fading memory, but the innocent casualties of war are not.
However, in this case, the spoiler (which I read long ago) told me that it's a film I want to skip; I don't enjoy stories with bad endings, no matter what message they're trying to convey or point they're trying to make. There's too much of that in reality already to seek it out in fiction.
Huh, like people who are 15 years old who would not have watched it yet ? Do you think people watch all movies that came before them ?
> I mean, it's an 18-year old movie.
It's a 27 years old movie actually. Get your facts right.
That... I mean... That just proves my point more. Jesus. I'm sorry that I apparently made a blunder in my quick mental math and provided a more conservative answer than the truth. Stop making it sound like it ruins my entire argument, especially since my argument wasn't even based on the exact number of years.
Instead, my argument was that after a certain amount of time, it's pointless to worry about spoilers because enough time has passed to actually give a person a chance to have watched the movie if it interested them. Stupidly declaring everything a spoiler just makes it so that it's impossible to talk about a movie and have a real discussion, as this article does. If we worried about spoilers for a 27-year old movie, this article wouldn't exist.
So you assume folks who are in their teenage years have to forget about seeing older movies without any spoiler? Is that your conclusion ?
Instead of you know, putting a spoiler tag, which takes 5 seconds when you write an article.
Plus, many platforms don't have spoiler tags by default, so have fun putting these magical spoiler tags in.
Edit: And you know what? If you were a 15-year old teen with an interest in Miyazaki's movies, or war movies, or whatever interests you to want to watch said movie, and you've just been let onto the internet, what are you going to look for first? The movie that you so desperately want to see, or an article about it that could potentially spoil it? Like seriously, that's how ridiculous your hypothetical is right now. The chance of it happening is so absurdly low.
you dont need spoiler tags, you simply write down in words:"careful spoilers" in case you can't even be bothered finding a CMS that does spoilers.
> what are you going to look for first?
What if you are on HN, you stumble on this article you had no idea of, and did not know about Ghibli movies - and poof, you are spoiled without warning. That's how ridiculous your point is. The possibility is very real. If you don't see it, no point discussing it further.
You are making a big deal about something that is neither a big deal, nor likely to happen.
I'm not even comment on the fact that this, of all places, is going to be the last place your mind suddenly opens up to the magic that is Ghibli. If you were inclined to enjoy those movies, you would have found them through friends, or anime discussion boards, or some other place, not by looking at some article about war films.
> LeMay also oversaw and championed the enforcement of the total blockade of Japan by filling the waters around its port cities with aerial-dropped mines, which, for example, caused shipping through Kobe to plummet by 85%. This campaign was dubbed, with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy, “Operation Starvation.” Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not “collateral damage,” but a premeditated murder.
Newsflash: people kill other people in wars. Including civilians. Wow, I would have never imagined. And yes, you try to kill as many people as you can, because that's how wars stop, when the losses are big enough that you consider capitulation. Japan's military indoctrination gave the US not much choice anyway, since they were ready to fight till the last man.
> LeMay was instrumental in the US shift from high-altitude bombing with general purpose explosives to the low-altitude incendiary bombing of Japanese cities that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the famine-inducing ruination of the economy. He later became a tireless advocate for bombing Vietnam, as he put it, “back to the Stone Age,” and for bombing the whole world back to the Ice Age by launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.
That's a complete misunderstanding of the thinking of LeMay. There are many documentaries/books about him, and you can read "Command and Control" if you want to get a good view of LeMay and why he acted like that during that period. Whether you liked him or not, he was a rational person. His idea of nuking the Soviets first came from the fact that for some time, the US had clear superior nuclear power vs the Soviets, and that one should not wait until the Soviets develop enough bombs to be able to destroy the US if they decide to strike first. If the Soviets had decided to strike first, it would have destroyed the US chain of command and left nothing for retaliation - that is why LeMay started the SAC program to have bombers constantly in the skies with nuclear weapons, "just in case". That program lasted until after the fall of the Soviet Union. And bombing the Soviets first when the US had a clear advantage (in the early 50s basically) would not have resulted in the whole world being destroyed, most likely only the Soviet Union would have paid a hefty price while the losses in Europe/US would have been less.
Seriously, don't write about History if you know nothing about it.
And this is a better outcome than what _actually_ happened how...?
Most observers agree that it was "mere luck" that we did not annihilate each other at those precise time points.