As The Wind Rises Comes To The US, So Does The Controversy

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Even the quite horrific actions of the US in the Vietnam war haven't been officially condemned or recognized. At the most, by peripheral political figures. Mind you, I think that will change in a few generations when all the actors from that war preventing recognition even now are dead.

The best movie tales we have of that period and its atrocities are movies like Platoon and Apocalypse Now, which are almost fully focused on the suffering of American soldiers, and not on the horrific slaughter and torture of the Vietnamese they terrorized for so many, many years.

Although sadly I don't share your optimism about the war getting better recognition with time. It seems to me that in popular culture Vietnam has only become further mystified and hidden, or when mentioned brought up as something misunderstood, that the public didn't get it. With some unsaid insinuation that if they had the military could've pulled it through and won that righteous war!

I hope I'm wrong there, but I haven't personally seen any signs of improvement.

Not in the west, but popular culture can't stay popular forever. Vietnam have war museums about their suffering, it's just not well known in the west.

Haven't seen Platoon but there's a scene at the start of Apocalypse Now where they're bombing a defenceless rural village, and kids watching it today would probably not believe stuff like that actually happened.

 

[cerebus23]

For unit 731, didn't we do the same thing with rocket scientists in Nazi Germany who gained positions in NASA and helped with the moon landing?

I think there's a difference between a man who develops rockets like Wernher von Braun, and a doctor who vivisected people without anesthesia to test frostbite on them. I'm not trying to defend von Braun, he's a very complicated subject, but I put the scientists who worked at 731 on the same scale as Joseph Mengele. They were monsters.

We should tidy up our own houses, united states japans canada and so on, but until we do we have no right to get preachy with any nation for white washing its past.

I think that we have every right. You're speaking as though other countries aren't asking us to own up, as though we're focusing everything on Japan. Canada has had a troubled relationship with our first nations people for years, and we have had other countries pressure us to make amends and push for better treatment of first nations people. Last year, a census group traveled to several of the most affected native reservations to assess the quality of life there, and their report came up severely lacking.

Every country has to be held accountable for their actions and their history, Japan just seems like the hardest nut to crack, they will fight tooth and nail to preserve their version of history, even when the rest of the world is shouting at them.

If we were to be held accountable way we demand other nations do we would be paying people off in africa, middle east, south america, europe, canada, there is little we have not meddled in profited in by exploiting others, be it slavery, evil in the name of the cold war, evil in the name of oil.

I mean common lets get real here. lets talk about whitewashing, lets talk about painting the middle east as a bunch of radicals that hate us just because and not people that hate us because we have meddled in their politics for years, done everything to keep free and fair elections from happening, hand picked leaders that only look out for our interests and not their peoples, they dont hate us just because.

 

[Jumwa]

Not in the west, but popular culture can't stay popular forever. Vietnam have war museums about their suffering, it's just not well known in the west.

Haven't seen Platoon but there's a scene at the start of Apocalypse Now where they're bombing a defenceless rural village, and kids watching it today would probably not believe stuff like that actually happened.

I wasn't knocking the movies, just saying they are still mostly focussed on the American suffering.

Platoon has a really awful/great scene where the soldiers go to a Vietnamese village, while there one of them gets unhinged and beats a young man to death for no real reason except that the pressures of war are getting to them. He's just venting his rage. Then when his mother is inconsolable with grief and not responding to their commands to vacate her home, one of them beats her then she's simply shot.

The village is put to flames as per orders and they leave.

It's a really horrible, awful scene that shows how the soldiers could take part in such atrocities.

I recommend seeing it.

 

[Reed Spacer]

Historical Revisionism: rewrite the story JUUUUUUUUSSST right, and you can totally reverse the roles of victim and villain in any conflict. It's not just for white people anymore!
Still, Japan is being wussy about owning up to the crap it did in WWII. I am sick of how often America is badly portrayed in anime, as if Japan never, ever, ever did anything wrong ever.

They didn't bomb two cities into glass-filled craters, for one...

 

[Fat Hippo]

It sounds to me like Japan's attitude towards the bad things it did over fifty years ago is no different from America's. I mean, in the last five years there have been two separate video games extolling the actions of the US in the Vietnam War while at the same time exploiting the "controversial" nature of anything that so much as brings it up.

I should point out that Germany doesn't have this problem. If anything, they tend to have the exact opposite problem [http://satwcomic.com/not-a-yahtzee].

Well that's because Germany was, more than any other country ever, forced to face the terribleness of its own crimes. I personally think this is an extremely important process. An interesting comparison can be made between east and west Germany, as the east under the Soviets never came to terms with itself as the west did, and was always able to say: THEY did it, the Nazis, not us, we're socialists. The result of this today is a far higher number of Neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists in the east, even over 20 years after being reunited.

But really, I think every country would do well to analyze its past more truthfully. Switzerland has only just started coming to terms with its completely opportunistic and pragmatic actions during WWII. We were profiteering and collaborating freely with the Nazis in a rather despicable way, and accepting this fact is an important step to increased emotional maturity on a national level. It is not an easy thing, and it must be harder the larger the atrocities are.

 

[Therumancer]

It seems like the same old song and dance to me, it's just entered a new arena and is getting more attention than usual for about five minutes.

Unlike most of my rants on the subject I won't go into my thoughts on WW II in detail, in part because I'm pretty tired. All I'll say is that you can't produce what amounts to a propaganda piece claiming to be a historical story, and then play the "art" card to defend it when your called on it being what it is. From everything I've seen and heard it very much does deserve the flak it's getting, and to be honest I find it fairly disturbing how many people have been defending it or think it's not a big deal. I find the point that "70 years have passed, get over it" particularly disturbing because half the reason why people are upset is that in 70 years Japan has yet to take responsibility for the things it did, and has even (as this article pointed out) tried to portray itself as victims. Internal American "peace at any price" rhetoric certainly hasn't helped either, since we've allowed those who feel guilt over the use of atomic weapons to color far too much of the history, causing a lot of the facts of the situation to be forgotten, especially points like why we chose to use atomic weapons, and what the alternatives to doing so would have been. Looking back you begin to see the A-bombings (even including the lasting effects) as a sort of humanitarian act, as "sick" as that sounds to some, because it arguably had the least cost in human life of anything else that could have ended the war given the Japanese mentality at the time. It killed a lot of people in a truly terrifying fashion, but when you compare that to a conventional invasion, years of fighting, and what might have been tantamount to a genocide given that the Japanese were willing to literally fight gloriously to the last (even using their kids as weapons) rather than surrender... well the A-bombs were almost a godsend since they got us out of that with minimal casualties. It's just hard to grasp that when the evidence of those weapons is right in front of you, and we don't have anything but projections (which aren't as real) of what the other options would have been like.

But yeah, garbage like this movie is why a lot of people like me continue to have something of a problem with Japan, and honestly as bad as things like 'Unit 731' were, what Japan did to other "lesser races of Asians" was terrifying. People think of the "comfort women" and mass rapes, but really that was their gentler side compared to the mass executions and medical experiments. One Korean Manga I read (but was never able to finish) called "Island" based part of it's backstory on Japanese experiments conducted on Koreans, I would have thought it was BS, except for some of the information in the back of the manga showing actual records and photos that parts of the story was based on (which I later looked up myself). It's something most westerners aren't aware of (heck most of us don't even know much about things like Unit 731, when we should, since it made Hitler's camps and Mengela's antics seem almost humane by comparison), but really it shouldn't shock anyone that Korea continues to be upset after 70 years of denial and Japan wanting to venerate it's "heroic warrior spirit". Personally though as an American I don't even think you need to get that academic after that "peaceful spirit of Japanese Aviation" assaulted Pearl Harbor, and drew the USA into World War II when prior to that (despite how a lot of historical accounts make it sound) the US was very divided about getting involved overseas and wanted to remain more or less isolationist. One could ultimately argue that it was Japan's eagerness to exploit it's air force that eventually lead to them getting atomic bombs dropped on them, especially closer to the time that it happened, I'm sure more than a few people were looking at the decimation and thinking "that's for Pearl Harbor" after those bombs hit, far more than do now, as we are detached the events. That said our fateful harbor attack and the horrible deaths of some of our soldiers in Japanese experiments pale compared to what they did to the Koreans and Chinese who were not as able to defend themselves, and never really got to have their payback the way the US did when our military eventually wound up defeating them decisively.

 

[Garm]

*Insert Jingoism here*

Payback?
A decision to needlessly end the lives of thousands of innocent civilians whose nation could no longer fight is Payback?
My Grandfather threw his decorations into the sea at the thought that he fought for atrocity-justifying "patriots" like you.

That post killed off half of my neurons.
This movie is not a denial of Japanese war, simply because it doesn't bring them up.
It is a personal story based on the POV of a Japanese Aviation Engineer.
Bringing up Unit 731 in such a movie would be utterly pointless and detrimental to the narrative, and also completely out of place in terms of tone.

Also, try not to ramble in your post.

OT: Miyazaki is a supporter of giving reparations to comfort women for the trash that they were put through.
This lady is doing nothing but stirring up controversy. Just because Miyazaki isn't bringing up war crimes in this film doesn't mean he is denying them. The fact that he was raised in the 40's yet doesn't deny them is a miracle in and of itself.

 

[Garm]

In any case, I openly invite any with an understanding of the differences between American and Japanese culture as well as Japanese reactions to WWII to comment and correct. All I can say is that this is an incident when history rears its ugly head and we have to deal with how the culture dealt with it

Most of the older politicians avoid the subject like the plague due to it being a career-killer regardless of what your stance is. For most politicians the only way to get anywhere is to simply avoid taking any sides and be vague as possible. The few Japanese veterans I've met who fought in the war paint themselves not as victims but as being young romantic who had no idea the implications of what they were doing. A pilot told me he had been told that it was for the glory of the emperor, and that was all the reason he needed. (Once again the Japanese virtue of unquestioning loyalty rears it head)

A soldier in the Imperial Army who had killed American POWs told my Grandpa he did it because it was better for them to die than face the shame of surrender, and that he considered it a favor to be killed rather than left alive.

My Grandpa also recalled a Yamabushi who had been at the battle of Nanjing telling him that the massacre of Chinese civilians was not systematic, and was done due to geurilla tactics used by China's troops (robing civilians of their clothes and discarding their uniforms, setting fires randomly to buildings to disorient and cause chaos, etc.). For what it's worth the monk also apparently took a girl who he met at Nanjing back to Japan and married her.

There is evidence for almost any side to the story of Nanjing. :/

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

In any case, I openly invite any with an understanding of the differences between American and Japanese culture as well as Japanese reactions to WWII to comment and correct. All I can say is that this is an incident when history rears its ugly head and we have to deal with how the culture dealt with it

Most of the older politicians avoid the subject like the plague due to it being a career-killer regardless of what your stance is. For most politicians the only way to get anywhere is to simply avoid taking any sides and be vague as possible. The few Japanese veterans I've met who fought in the war paint themselves not as victims but as being young romantic who had no idea the implications of what they were doing. A pilot told me he had been told that it was for the glory of the emperor, and that was all the reason he needed. (Once again the Japanese virtue of unquestioning loyalty rears it head)

A soldier in the Imperial Army who had killed American POWs told my Grandpa he did it because it was better for them to die than face the shame of surrender, and that he considered it a favor to be killed rather than left alive.

My Grandpa also recalled a Yamabushi who had been at the battle of Nanjing telling him that the massacre of Chinese civilians was not systematic, and was done due to geurilla tactics used by China's troops (robing civilians of their clothes and discarding their uniforms, setting fires randomly to buildings to disorient and cause chaos, etc.). For what it's worth the monk also apparently took a girl who he met at Nanjing back to Japan and married her.

There is evidence for almost any side to the story of Nanjing. :/

So in principle, the soldiers may have been following Japanese virtues of honor, loyalty and death before dishonor in ways that were twisted by the imperial army and navy? that is sometime interesting and sounds like the evidence presented at Nuremberg but worse.

As for the politicians, it may be a career killer but they are the people who help guide the youth and populous. I would think that the society has to accept the crimes done at some point.

 

[hentropy]

While none of what Ms. Kang said is necessarily wrong, I think it's just misdirected. Even as she says she doesn't blame Miyazaki directly, she does seem to imply that he should have made an entirely different movie about Japanese massacre of various Asians. It's a perspective I don't quite understand. The US loves to ignore or trivialize the genocide of the American Indians, but yet I don't expect every single movie set in 19th-century US to be about American Indian genocide or slavery.

And yet, we've sort of been conditioned by Hollywood that if you place a movie in WWII-era Germany, it has to be about the Holocaust or some other monstrous thing. It can't be about ordinary Germans trying to get by in a realistic manner, or about a brilliant engineer trying to build the perfect plane. No, no, if you make THAT movie, you're irresponsible for trying to portray humans as humans as opposed to repugnant caricatures.

It's always important to remember that the Nazis were not the German people, and that the Japanese were not all Tojo. They're governments that took over their countries mostly by force and went on to create an poisonous culture of fear and oppression, not just to foreigners but to their own people. Other issues are present- there are denialists and nationalists within Japan that try to rewrite history. Totally true. You can make a movie about that, if you like, or raise hell about it separately. But don't demand that every movie set in a certain time in place have to showcase the absolute worst things that happened during that time, otherwise they're being "irresponsible", or try to tear down a movie because it doesn't push your pet issue. There's not one scene in the movie which attempts to excuse or justify a war crime, unlike the countless examples and general perceptions of the US that the war crime of incinerating 250,000 civilians in Japan or firebombing a mostly civilian city in Dresden was necessary to end the war. Miyazaki nor the Japanese people have any "responsibility" to make every movie set during WWII a story about how bad their government was at the time.

 

[Therumancer]

*Insert Jingoism here*

Payback?
A decision to needlessly end the lives of thousands of innocent civilians whose nation could no longer fight is Payback?
My Grandfather threw his decorations into the sea at the thought that he fought for atrocity-justifying "patriots" like you.

That post killed off half of my neurons.
This movie is not a denial of Japanese war, simply because it doesn't bring them up.
It is a personal story based on the POV of a Japanese Aviation Engineer.
Bringing up Unit 731 in such a movie would be utterly pointless and detrimental to the narrative, and also completely out of place in terms of tone.

Also, try not to ramble in your post.

OT: Miyazaki is a supporter of giving reparations to comfort women for the trash that they were put through.
This lady is doing nothing but stirring up controversy. Just because Miyazaki isn't bringing up war crimes in this film doesn't mean he is denying them. The fact that he was raised in the 40's yet doesn't deny them is a miracle in and of itself.

Actually he's trying to present The Japanese people of the time as peaceful, and re-invent the guy who gave Japan a lot of it's war machine as some kind of peaceful dreamer, while at the same time trying to imply Japan as being the victims of aggression as opposed to a group of imperialists who set out to pretty much conquer the world and use lesser peoples any way they saw fit.

Things like "Unit 731" are relevant because they display the Japanese mentality of the time, which is nothing like that movie presents.

As far as his attitudes about comfort women, that's actually one of the smaller things that Japan did, it was pretty bad due to the scale, but really it's the tip of the iceberg, being sympathetic to that one thing, doesn't change the rest of the war, or excuse the movie he's created and the way it tries to present history.

I see it as being a lot like Von Braun, the guy was pretty much a monster who was responsible for Hitler's "V" rocket programs and all of the people they killed, as well as the horrible deaths of the jewish workers he had working in his rocket factories. He did indeed get us to the moon, and had a long history of space travel, but in general despite "operation paperclip", if people try and present him as some great humanitarian after the fact they get called on it.

Okay granted, Japan had a genius of aviation, but more accurately he should be portrayed as a willing participant in creating a war machine, with the full intent and knowledge of what it was going to be used for, and in agreement with it's agenda, because that's pretty close to what happened, and why so many people are upset about it, just like people have gotten irked at attempts to whitewash Von Braun after the fact.

Of course to be fair part of the reality of war is that when you win your monsters get to be heroes, when you lose they are just monsters. Take Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris for example, he's a big time war hero (British, but also decorated by the US) whose big deal was the massive slaughter of civilians in order to break Germany, where he was known as "The Butcher". A lot of people are quite blunt about it, as that's what war is, and why it sucks. Japan should at least engage in the same kind of honesty, by all means present the guy as doing what he thinks was right, but don't try and pretend he wasn't a militant warmonger fully complicit with the planned murder of lesser races, the war started, and no the Japanese were not the victims.

-

As far as the A-bomb goes, the alternative to dropping them would have been a conventional invasion of Japan. The Japanese of the time were nothing like the Japanese of today, and would have fought virtually to the last man, they were even weaponizing their children in the end. The idea of an "honorable last stand" being far superior in their mind to surrendering to what they saw as their genetic inferiors. We would have killed far more Japanese by doing this, not to mention our own losses. The A-Bomb was mostly a weapon of intimidation, and ended the war with a lot less casualties than would otherwise have been endured, by demonstrating to Japan that there would be no "epic last stand", they either surrendered or we were going to outright erase them, they would go out with a pathetic whimper instead of a roar, and when it was over nobody would likely remember them other than as a bunch of radioactive sludge messing up some small islands. That's what did the job, we broke their spirit.

See to win a war, it all comes down to being a bigger bastard than the other guys. The idea is to break a people, or wipe them out entirely. The military and government are not the end goal, they are what is between you and the core of a civilization to begin with, their protectors. In a war you want to defeat the military so you can target the civilians and break the society. World War II was pretty much the last REAL war where people got this, we just decided to buy into our own propaganda afterwards, and that's why pretty much every war since has been a complete mess which ended with us going in with "humanitarian goals", not attacking the civilians or the culture, and spending tons of money and lives until we realized we weren't going to achieve anything and then going home. Germany was largely beaten by simply being more brutal in our slaughter of their civilians and infrastructure than they were to the allies, we dropped more bombs on them than they did on Britan during The Blitz, and ran around wiping out women and children left and right as we literally battled our way to the elite building to building, many of the people who died were just defending their homes. If you ever bother to look into US/British wartime atrocities (they can be tricky to find, but records exist, including books of pictures and evidence, though you have to request some of them specially by title at libraries) let's just say you'll find garbage we did that was every bit as disgusting as what you've seen from concentration camps. Groups like "The Hitler Youth" didn't just evaporate because killing little kids was inconvenient for example...

At the end of the day I'm a realist, not a moralist. I think in reading my posts your actually feeling some more, neglected, neurons firing up, than them dying. It might not be a comfortable thing to think about, but it happens to be the world is... it sucks, and unlike fiction, it's the biggest bastard, not the moral guy who sticks to his principles, that generally wins, and if you stop being as big a bastard as you can be for long enough then you just become a victim to the next biggest bastard.

I'm sure SOME GIs were upset over the dropping of the A-bomb, but years ago I heard the guys who dropped the actual bombs on "Imus" and their basic attitude was "Yup, and I'd do it again". Honestly I think the reactions were very much positive among "the greatest generation" and I've noticed people that were actually alive then (as relatively few of them as they are) tend to have very little nice to say about the Japanese. Like it or not, this being an atrocity is more the result of modern politics and propaganda than anything, and the general tendency to want to side with those
in pain or being seen as the underdogs.... and yes, during World War II there were still peaceniks and anti-war sentiments even towards the end, despite how history presents it there were still plenty of people argueing for isolationism and to let the rest of the world take care of itself. They were however a minority by this point, but they did exist, as they say there is always going to be an exception to every rule, as well as people wanting to adjust their attitudes retroactively as propaganda changes people's opinions.

The overall POINT here though, which I think you missed, is that the anger Koreans, Chinese, and others feel is because they never got their payback. Whether you scream "atrocity" or not, you still get to be content in the knowledge (and a degree of security, whether you want to admit it or not) that in the end we "got" Japan in the end, and we did so on a truly epic level. Pearl Harbor, 731, the antics of Kamikaze pilots and suicide attackers, we avenged it all. We were attacked, and we rebuilt and wrecked holy vengeance on them. To a Korean for example, that never happened though, their people suffered at the hands of racist Japanese lunatics, people were being chopped up by scientists, the women raped with imputiny, and their entire culture crushed under foot. The US never had any real fighting during the war on the US mainland so we never suffered like that, yet we got our payback, Korea on the other hand arguably suffered worse for it's comparative powerlessness, and never got to avenge itself, just watch the war ended by others. Especially if your a product of modern "peace at any price" liberalism, I don't think you can really GET that point of view. Japan answered to the USA and it's European allies, but it never really did when it came to Korea.

 

[hermes]

"Spanish-language animation-news website dismissed my article as typical American propaganda."
God damnit, someone must shut up, or at least flat out ignore, this particular strain of my countrymen. I apologize for them, they are just close minded weeaboos that have no idea what they are talking about

I'm afraid that maybe coming from Spain it might be more than just weeaboos. Spain has similar issues regarding its past, hasn't it?

I don't know the website she speaks about, but I don't find it hard to believe in the very least, specially if its not a Spanish, but a Spanish speaking site...

Many Hispanic populations (specially in South America) has the idea that anything North American and in English is propaganda. Not really a weeaboos or historic revisionists exclusive issue...

 

[hermes]

Okay, I get her points, and the WWII is kind of the elephant in the room of that picture, but if that is not chosen to be Miyazaki's focus, I don't think its fair to put it as a critique against it. In a way, it reminded me of people that complained about Grave of the Fireflies, because the story of two orphan children didn't emphasize the role of Japan as the villain, completely missing the point of the movie. I get that history revisionism is a pretty real subject, but to imply that there can't be sympathetic stories about people that live in a warring country, because of their relative involvement in their countries politics, is missing the point entirely.

And while Japan is not exempt on revisionism in media, neither is Hollywood. At least two of this year Oscar nominees for best picture are very loosely "based on real stories" (that I know of: Dallas Buyers Club and American Hustle, there could be more), or heavily editorialized. As far as the public knows, the depiction of Horikoshi as a dreamy boy that just loves planes is no less accurate than the depiction of Wallace by Gibson, Patton by George Scott, Lincoln by Day-Lewis or Howard Hughes and Edgar Hoover by DiCaprio. Countless classics are built on the premise that the artistic view is superlative to the hard facts of a story.

So, while I won't defend Miyazaki's intention of romanticizing a time that probably needs a lot of romanticism anyways, or only focusing on some aspects of the story he wants to tell, I don't share the perspective of people that condemn him while, at the same time, praising movies like The Aviator for historical relevance. What is good for the goose...

 

[MPerce]

Super late to the party here, but I just saw the movie, and....I thought it condemned Japan's role in the war pretty strongly.

The engineers frequently comment on how tragic it is that their creations are just gonna be used for war, and most of them think the Japanese government's war-mongering is going to backfire(the phrase "Japan will blow up" is used a lot). But Jiro keeps designing the planes because that is his passion. It doesn't make it morally right, of course, and the movie never tries to portray it as morally right. His priorities are fucked up and Miyazaki knows it.

Meanwhile, the military brass are always depicted as loud-mouthed morons, and at the end of the movie Jiro basically says, "Yeah...my life is terrible." So while it never specifically points out Japan's war crimes, it still portrays Japan in a negative light while still focusing on the personal tragedy of Jiro.

Oh, and Jiro and Nahoko do have sex. I mean.....the scene where she's in bed and says "Come here," and he's like, "Are you sure?" and she's like "Yes, come here," then Jiro turns off the light and the screen goes black....that was obviously supposed to signify that they had sex, wasn't it? What else could it be?