This video falls into the pitfall of equating weapons to the suffering, ignorant of how weapons save lives - and how lives could have been ended by weaker ones as well (i. e. Ukraine). Besides, a video essay covering art should not be too confident about geopolitics. *Edit: historically, pacifism has never lead to peace
Hayao Miyazaki was born into the times of war, and witnessed a lot of it in his childhood, he saw the bombings and the attacks that affected many, many people around him. His father was also an aircraft designer for war and military. So you could truly say that it shaped the person who he now is, and it did. We can see it reflected all throughout his films, and his loving cursed passion for planes
@@spritemon98 Yeah truly… Miyazaki once advised if you want to make films, you must observe the world around you in your life. And I guess his experiences are truly reflected in his films
He was born in 1941 which means he was 3-4 years old when the war ended. So realistically he probably has little true memories of any of that stuff… don’t lie
Shows how ignorant this guy is of history. He sees some emotional argument from some breadtuber, or some historically ignorant hippy dippy art house critic and he runs with it.
Not really, godzilla is not an analoge to the bombings, it's about the testings around bikini atoll, the creeping, indestinct and still so very real effects of those. It's is not about the bombings themselfs, it's about the fear of it might happen again. Watch the first movie. Godzilla is not bombastic unmissable as a detonation, it's creeping horror vrom the sea
@@SingingSealRianaThat’s true, but the full quote from the video is “reimagined as nuclear fallout,” which _is_ incorrect. Godzilla _has_ always been nuclear fallout, just not from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
@@rock21611 Nope! Godzilla is literally the Nuclear Bomb incarnate as well the vengeance against Japan for causing World War 2 (according to Dr. Kyohei Yamane and Dr. Daisuke Serizawa). Godzilla Minus One (November 2023) will be more controversial since it will be set 1 year after the Hiroshima & Nagaski Bombings AND be related to the War than the nuclear horror aspect.
@@whathell6tcontroversial or not I can’t friggin wait for Goji -1! Regardless of his shifting purpose, he always plays some interceding role between humans and the Earth (and/or humans themselves). He is that final mystery that remains out of our control, all we can do as humans is react-which is what counts in the end, how we decide to act in the face of unstoppable change.
Fullmetal Alchemist has an interesting perspective on this. Though it's framed from Japan's perception of a Western country (I doubt anyone would ever let Arakawa publish if it weren't), it's characters are constantly grappling with the fact that they and their military were responsible for pointless atrocities. The most determined characters work to build a world were they would be prosecuted as war criminals.
So many fans miss this most crucial point of the whole show. It's incredibly nuanced narrative I've never seen successfully pulled off before or after.
As subversive as Fullmetal Alchemist is with its portrayal of war, I feel Attack on Titan takes it a few steps further. (Spoilers down below) At the end of S3, and most of the final season, we look at Marley as the villains. Even as our favorites commit atrocities, Marley is still the bad guy in our eyes for starting this conflict. Until S4 ep21 (or chapter 122 of the manga), where we see that Eldia, the ancestors of all our favorites from Paradis, were indeed, as vile and barbaric as Marley and the rest of the world say they were. Maybe even worse. Eldia really did plunge the rest of the world into hell. One that lasted nearly 2000 years. Before one guy had enough. And instead of making amends and atonement, he just pulled a giant "Ight, I'mma head out" and erased the memories of the subjects he took with him. Not to mention he left behind many more, dooming them to a life of discrimination, suffering, and hatred, both for themselves, and their fellow Eldians across the sea. Just like Japan, Paradis lives in denial of its bloody history. Literally, since their memories were stolen. Even after learning about it at the end of S3, the majority of them still play the victim. The Yeagerists are hell-bent on reviving that same empire, with even the regular citizens supporting them. By the time the Rumbling is unleashed, Paradis became a full-on perpetrator. Yet, people still defend Paradis, in-universe, and out, even though they are no longer victims. In fact, you could make the case that they are now worse than they have ever been. Attack on Titan shows a war where every side is guilty of horrific sin. Everyone is both victim and perpetrator. The only thing that separates the Alliance from everyone else is their open admission and eventual acceptance of their roles as both. And after everything, after all the bloodshed, anguish, pain, and sacrifice, peace still isn't a guarantee. There is no telling if the future will be better. We're exhausted, battered, and left wondering if any of it was worth it. And all of this combine to make Attack on Titan, at least in my eyes, the 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙛𝙚𝙘𝙩 anti-war story (for better or for worse).
@@CrimsonCharan While I don't agree that it's the most "perfect" anti war story or that if it's even actually an anti war story, ngl, this is definitely one of the most unique takes ive read about AoT considering nearly every fan I've encountered just more or less glorifies and/or romanticizes Eren and/or his genocide, without even considering the consequences of his actions, especially to Paradis and the Eldians AFTER the Rumbling. With Paradis being one of the few surviving "healthy" nations, they're left with a world that's more or less just an ocean of gore and blood, diseases would very likely spread from all the corpses, a number animal species will die off, and Paradis is led by the Yeagerists who (ironically like a lot of aot's fans) glorify and romanticize Eren's atrocities, thus likely once again shape Paradis into the same empire that made the world hate the Eldians to begin with (that is, if they actually live long enough to create one). In an almost amusing and sad sort of way, Eren never really ended the wheel of hate and vengeance that's plagued AoT's world for thousands of years by destroying said "wheel" via trampling everything beyond Paradis. The Rumbling only made the wheel go on further, and now, with everything more or less dead, the wheel now turns its focus on the tiny little island called Paradis, whose people desperately seek freedom the most just like their "savior", and much like him, have now tragically become the slaves to its very ideal.
@@CrimsonCharan bro Marley ARE the villains. You don't get to do a holocaust because you were wronged by an ethnic group in the past. Besides, AOT is all over with the metaphors for various historical events, without an actual philosophical through line, which kind of ruined the series for me. An example here is Marley doing a holocaust, therefore we interpret Eldians as the Jews of the universe. Except in this universe the Eldians (Jews) really WERE the monsters that the Marleyans (Nazis) portrayed them to be. What kind of implication do those parallels carry? Oh yeah, also Paradis does not live in denial. They are A) ignorant to their history, with only the royal family knowing the truth and B) preoccupied with being eaten alive (which is another theme that just fucking disappears into thin air halfway through the show). My point being AOT was a fun show, but it isn't the bastion of intelligent writing people make it out to be.
This brought back some memories long forgotten. I am half Japanese, half Romanian and growing up, the topic of WW2 was very difficult for me, even if I've never been directly affected by it. I don't even know how to put this into words. I remember when my brother broke down crying while trying to read about Pearl Harbor, and how he refused to hear anything about the atomic bombs. I was always taught that Japan was THE victim of WW2, and that Americans and Japanese people are enemies. I was scared when my city was visited by American military because I thought if they figure out I'm half Japanese, they might hate me, or even hurt me. Obviously, nothing happened and I was left confused. Idk what conclusion I'm coming to. It's just just something from my childhood that I haven't really sat down with for a long time. Along with your video about Unit 731 (and the other Units like it), I'm thankful for your videos about Japan and WW2.
The government and emperor of Japan were not victims, but the people of Japan overwhelmingly were. They were indoctrinated for over a generation leading up to the war. The leadership since the Shogunate era had suppressed foreign ideologies such as democracy. Japanese children were taught about their own supremacy and how if they didn’t take China and the rest of east Asia that either the West or Soviets would, and then resource-poor Japan would be next. The small cluster of the wealthy and military elites controlled the media and fed Japan’s people nothing but paranoia and lies to whip up support for an aggressive war in China. And the government conscripted its people to send to kill or be killed there, while continuing to suppress any dissenters. And years later, after the war turned and Japan failed to negotiate a settlement to keep the US out of the war, it faced the wrath of the largest industrial powerhouse to have ever existed at that point. And yet the leadership were overwhelmingly spared the horrors of the war while the people suffered. However, despite this double victim status, we must also acknowledge the complicity or even support of many Japanese atrocities, especially in China. Newspapers reported on competitions between soldiers to cut heads off of the Chinese as if they were describing yesterday’s soccer match. Bayonet practice in the Japanese army was on live targets, either political prisoners (see the suppression of foreign ideologies above) or Chinese prisoners, sometimes civilian. Infrastructure was built by the impressed labor of Koreans and southeast Asians. And Japanese educational systems do not teach this and the right wing government that dominated Japan for the last several decades created monuments to war criminals. And this is why the only commonality between many otherwise rival Asian nations is a dislike of Japan.
My general stance has Jewish is that ww2 for Japan and Germany are crimes that has nations they can never outlive but the general people aren’t responsible for what their ancestors did but has people it is their responsibility to prevent something like that from ever happening and both to some extent seem to get it even if Japan like to be more ignorant of their crimes but that my two cents has a Jewish
@@mrr9636Japan has the issue of not being able to admit their ancestors fucked up. Germany apologized and over time it is not a burden on public relations. Japan didn't apologize, enshrined the warcriminals and then had a Abe (descendent of a major warcriminal) deny Japanese warcrimes. It's like they're trying to piss off the Koreans. I'd be pissed too.
Everyone sees the group they identify with as the victim of the war and in a way they are right, cause there is no wining in war, we all only lose though it making pretty mich everyone involved it's victim. But still it's also pretty much always the case, that all sides are doing wrong, who is victimised is not above victimising others and war is so much more complicated then one is the aggressor and one the victim, one is doing wrong and one is doing right.... But that's a bitter pill to swallow and it is so much easyer to make excuses and blame the other side..... For example with germany, they where decided upon as the instigator of wwI for that was convinient since they lost and all and how that aftermath was handled had a massiv influence on what followed, paving the way for ww2. Hitler would not have had a fraction of the impact and appeal if it had not been for the pretty unfair treatment and actions coming from the allied forces leading up to it. That's in no way an excuse, at all, but it is an explanation, shows the fault does not all lie at one side. Just like what the Nazis did did not negate many germans being against it, many germans trying to hide and help those persecuted and many many german civilians getting raped and murdered by the allied forces both during the war and in its aftermath.. Two wrongs never make it right and we all have very bitter parts in our countries or ancestors history we have to aknowlage, try to understand how it could happen and try everything from preventing a repitition..... Many many people like to forget that japan allied itself with germany while everyone even 99.99% of germans agree on germany having been the one at fault for ww2! That does not make the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima any less horrifying and terrible, even inexcusable in my eyes, but I am of the opinion, that there is never an excuse or justification for war. The having done wrong too does not take away from their trauma!
I know as a human Tim is right: we need to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wish never to use nuclear weapons again. Yet to criticize Tibbets and Truman as men who forgot to cry misses what was going on with the war. Tibbets was one of a handful of men who fought in both Europe and Asia and Truman was a WWI vet. No doubt both men had shed a lot of tears and Tibbets had cited Japan's atrocities. Heck I may not be writing this if it weren't for the atomic bombs. According to my family Japanese soldiers had arrested my grandfather and he would have died if it weren't for the atom bombs ending the war and my dad was born after the war.
Japanese perception of the war is very interesting. Even immediately postwar, it was conceptualized as something done to them rather than something done by them. It was seen as something akin to a natural disaster or a hurricane. So they saw themselves as the victims of a war started and perpetuated by their own government, in the same way that someone can't be blamed for a hurricane hitting them
You think the average farmer or dentist cared in the slightest about a war in a foreign land? Of course not! Their government wanted to expand while thier neighbors' allies were occupied, and didn't care who died for it. Same thing that's happened all over the world for millennia. Part of it was the effectiveness of an amazing propaganda machine on isolated people, part was a draft for every man (and eventually every woman) between 17 and 40. People who WANT to be part of the war don't usually need to be drafted. Being forced against your will to fight and kill and die sounds like a victim to me. Being tricked and lied to by propaganda does as well, though less so. And even past that, the US even admitted at the time, outside thier propaganda of course, that they really just wanted to field test their new bomb. There was no need, they'd spent too much time and money and needed to rush it out there before it'd be breaking a treaty. Still no excuse for continuing to deny the horrors they did, in the same way there's no excuse for any country to do it. The governments were absolutely at fault, everyone else varying degrees of "less so" or "not."
"Forget how to cry"? The Japanese were TAUGHT how to cry by firebombings and nukes. After their diseased ambitions and lunatic "samurai" ideals made them a plague on Asia and LITERALLY enemies of mankind. Poets who grew after the sick dreams and their dreamers were gone now weep on the graves of THEIR fallen and philosophize. let us learn and not forget. Those weeping are the heirs of butchers who reaped what they sowed, after they taught others to forget how to weep.
According to Japanese history textbooks, they defeated Russia in 1905, then nothing at all happened for 40 years, after which America nuked them for some reason....
34:41 Since you already made the comparison to Tolkien, this makes me of my two favorite Gandalf lines. "Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love." And in response to Frodo's "I wish it need not have happened in my time." : “So do I. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
31:39 Having now watched Oppenheimer, the film depicts the atom bomb as a sort of Pandora’s box. While scientifically magnificent, it’s framed as the power it could potentially unleash may bring death to us all. Once Oppenheimer sees the bomb go off, the rest of the film he assumes a “dear god what I have unleashed” attitude. The film does not position this bomb as a symbol of pride for the US, like how Ghibli frames the Zero Fighter as a symbol of pride for Japan, but rather as a symbol of fear and death, and something we will forever live with the consequences of.
That movie made me shake with emotion. Certain scenes were just gut-punching and excellently done. The one that stick out to me most is when he's 'congratulating' the scientists but all he hears is the silence followed by the deafening blast and the scenes of people's skin melting, the blackened corpse he stepped through. All of it really nailed home the point that nuclear weapons are almost eldritch in their power and horror. Theres no excuse for it ever being created, none. And the flim shows that so many people surfing its development KNEW that from outset. Its chilling...
@@penultimateh766It was already evidently clear that the germans, irregardless of the efforts of their scientists, would have been unable to produce an atomic bomb. Its true that they discovered nuclear fission but they could not have made a weapon. Many people even argued, including Heisenberg himself, that the German scientists involved were morally opposed to it and therefore made attempts to secretly sabotage it. Now, whether that is true or not is up for debate. The fact of the matter is the scientists, including Heisenberg, convinced themselves and the Nazi government that materials required to make the weapon were enormous, and they also managed to convince themselves that the US would also abandon any attempts to build a bomb.
@@penultimateh766hitler wouldn't have because he considered it "Jewish science" and the Nazis were never going to win the war even with nukes. the soviets only increased efforts after the US used the bomb and largely had their project on the back burner. Regardless, that still doesn't justify the usage of the bomb. Most of the myths the US uses to justify the bombs usage are bullshit. Japan was already evaluating terms of surrender before the first bomb even dropped.
i’m so glad you covered japan’s role in perpetuating the horrors of world war 2. i’m filipino and the atrocities such as the death march and the colonial influence of japan had on my country, i feel, are never talked about enough - this extends to others countries that are often not talked about when WW2 is brought up. it fills me with so much anger and sadness when i hear about these stories that for all the anti-war sentiment countries like Japan share, they’re still hesitant to own up to their own part in the cycle of violence. which is not to say anything anyone went through is less horrific than the other (frankly those drawings do their job perfectly when depicting the fires/bombings) but i mean to say that there are still topics/facets of history away from western/g20 country perspectives that are overlooked and deserve to be talked about in order to achieve the peace we strive for. even in today’s world there are still so many voices and stories left unheard because only those in power really get to tell their own story. i absolutely adore ghibli and i’m so glad you brought this topic up with pieces of art that are so wildly acclaimed. i think it adds further depth to what’s already there in Miyazaki’s works . I love your videos so much, this one was amazing.
My Japanese-American grandmother was born and raised in Japan. She was born in 1936 and lived near Tokyo so she experienced the fire bombing constantly. Too this day she still won’t talk to me about her experience growing up in the war and I completely understand, even if I do want to know her story and her childhood. I hate that she had to go through such a horrific and traumatizing experience, especially when she was just a child.
There is a very horrifying anime about the nuclear bombing called "Barefoot Gen." My mother watched this anime in her childhood. We live in Russia, and her childhood was during the times of the Soviet Union, so on TV, they mostly showed authentic Soviet cartoons. But this anime was very different from anything ever shown on TV. It was about the horrors that followed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a damn scary anime. I'm not afraid of any horrors, but this anime scares the hell out of me.
I watched it with a friend one night and neither of us knew before hand what the movie was about. We spent the rest of the night sobbing and I have never been the same since. I think everyone should watch it at least once
That film still haunts me. In America, we have such amnesia about the Cold War. We are now in such denial about the current dangers… it’s as if all the warnings & accounts have just made us better at compartmentalising all the horrors.
I watched it at about 13 and it really formed my opinions on war and the disgraces we bring on each other. It’s terrifying and sad and is a must watch for those who want to learn more about WW2 and the aftermath.
While Ghibli films were a big and wonderful part of my childhood that I wouldn't switch out for anything, they did give me a crippling fear of war as a child. It got so bad at one point that I felt the need to tell my parents I loved them every time a plane passed overhead, because I was so sure it was going to drop a bomb on us. Now, living in Russia and seeing the horror and suffering "my" government has brought into the lives of Ukrainian people, I can only hope that this hell won't last for years. And that it won't come to _this._ Thank you for presenting this topic in such a mindful and lyrical way. It truly is terrifying what forgetting the horrors of war can lead to.
In a way the films did their job and in a way they did not, for they reached the wrong people to prevent another war.... I wish you the best and hope with you, that it will be over soon. There is nothing to win in war that justifies the loss on both sides....
@@SingingSealRianaThose with power can not be reached by the same methods those without power can be reached. They have structures enforcing and reinforcing their actions, separating them from normal people, and deafening them to the cries of pain.
You know, the way Miyazaki is about White Rose kinda reminds me of how he speaks of his son. He's too much of a perfectionist and is unable to understand certain aspects of the human experience because, to his mind, there is no practice or experimentation. There is only doing something perfectly or failing completely.
Miyazaki represents the "Toxic Bushido" cultural mentality pretty well, a kind of thinking that encourages perfectionism. It's why being part of the working class as an adult in Japan is very dehumanizing and the ruling class apathetic, and probably why we often see Japan's near-obsession with youthfulness in their media and children/teen characters changing the world.
@@tatianar9429 That's because the US government did its DAMNEST to control this kind of information from reaching their public at the time--I wonder why.
@@tatianar9429 there are some of us who do. The true destructive capability is near impossible to fathom unless you've seen it first hand. It's difficult to comprehend in a practical way what a kiloton or megaton are, although Nukemap by Globalsecurity does an interesting job. I was taking a history class and when we got to WWII we were discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The professor allowed me to present to the class using it. Instead of centering the blast abroad, I made our college campus ground zero. The people who were previously cheering the use of the weapons quickly became gravely quiet. When the last war that was fought on American soil ended 158 years ago and was fought with black-powder weapons, getting people to imagine the destructive power of war is not very effective.
Part of the problem with Japanese understanding of the war and war responsibility, comparative to Germany, is that in Germany there was a very surface-level clear origin point for that kind of mood and rampant nationalism out of which Naziism grew. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goring, Rohm, etc were all very public figures with very well understood philosophies and beliefs, and it became very easy to associate the Nazi movement and German war efforts and crimes in the context of those figures. Whether or not you ascribe to the belief that Germany was led by those men, or that those men were led by Germany, Germany itself certainly took the former approach, and has never really grappled in a meaningful way with the idea that the common people have just as much responsibility, not really helped by how the Nuremberg Trials were prosecuted. (There is the idea of Kollektivschuld, but that's always seemed to me more of an academic thing touted in intellectual circles rather than something really internalized by the common civilian population. And there's certainly a good argument to be made that that 'guilt' only came about when there was a public consciousness that Germany as a nation was going to be held accountable to what they'd done. You can find polls conducted by sociologists in post-war Germany where many Germans, even a majority, still believed Naziism was a good idea beneficial to the German people. But that's all a topic for another day I suppose.) Comparatively, Japan never had that point of focus. Japan's war and its war crimes were, in many respects, not really the act of individuals or done on the direction of individuals, but were things done by the motivations of everyday soldiers, corporate executives, low-level officers, and even civilians (with some glaring exceptions of course). That leads to a sort of distinguishment where Germany abides by the 'Great Man' idea of history, which is nearly impossible to also attribute to Japan no matter how some historians like to pinpoint Tojo, which is certainly inaccurate by timeline if nothing else. That makes it very hard to grapple with the war, because in order to do so, it requires acknowledging that Japan was fighting a peoples' war, in the sense that every level of society was bought into those ideals. It requires serious introspection into culture, and how they came to that point that they considered it morally permissible to do the things they did as an entire society, not just as a passive, powerless observer as the Germans sometimes like to frame their civilian population, but as participants. There really was just never any serious protest against the Japanese prosecution of its war efforts, and the public was fully in support in nearly all respects. German society was too, right, but again they have the 'Great Man' theory of history to fall back on and deflect through. As an example, many, many aspects of Japanese power at that time were actually centered in the junior officer corp who acted independently of the higher command structure, and often contradictory to what that higher command structure wanted at any given time. Or the feuds between the army and the navy, or between the military and the corporations, or between the corporations and the civilian government, and so on. Japan didn't have central figures to blame, so instead of really tackling those problems, as a society they just... Gave up discussing it at all, at least in mass media. This isn't intended to be a condemnation really, not of either Germany nor Japan's modern thought on the conflict. All things being equal I think Germany has handled it as well as might be expected, and certainly better than many other nations, and I think Japan's pacifism, whether it originated out of a victim-mentality, or a sense of introspection largely serves the same purpose (though how the modern government has gone since the Abe administration is a different matter.) I think no nation is good at understanding collective responsibility as a society, least of all the large colonial powers. Just look at discussions of slavery in the United States or the Native American purges and wars, or the U.K.'s responsibility in India, or the Dutch in Indonesia, and how fractious those conversation can be. But it is something interesting to study and I think vital to the study of the topic in particular if you want to discuss it meaningfully in an academic setting.
I think the largest difference in the German and Japanese mindset of the war and the way we look at it is how we think of citizens. The more democratic a nation the more they tend to judge the citizens of other nations as responsible. Germany, as a democracy at the time, has to reflect on the actions of the nation as at least partially their own fault. Japan being a monarchy, the citizens get a bit of an out since they didn't put the government in power. But as a Democracy Americans tend to have a very "citizens are liable for their government" mindset. European Enlightenment ideology gave us the idea that the government exists at the consent of the governed. That wasn't (and still isn't) universal in WWII.
@@codybaker1150 Japan of the time was not really a monarchy. They had a monarch, but they were a constitutional democracy with elected officials just the same as any other nation. The Taisho period had Japan as the strongest democratic force in Asia. It was the populist militarist movement that moved it from there to a corporatist oligarchic-dictatorship, but it certainly didn't start there, and was not destined to end there either.
@@codybaker1150Japan was really more of a military dictatorship than a monarchy. The monarch still had ultimate power, but he largely left the military leaders alone and allowed them to make Decisions with his passive approval. It was kind of a similar situation to fascist Italy actually.
@@pennyforyourthots I agree that is more accurate, but it's more the idea of the "Power is derived from God" idea from the monarchy era than "power is derived from the consent of the governed" that I am referring to. Even if their government was every bit as complex as a western constitutional monarchy
Odd that Miyazaki feels that way about the White Rose, a group of students who did nothing more than distribute leaflets. The only thing that would remotely describe them as fanatical would be the unflinching courage with which they went to their deaths.
Maybe he laments that they died so young. It's not that different from the position that the sacrifices of every young soldier to ever die for their country is ultimately a pointless and unconscionable waste of life. There is no doubt that they were brave; but in either case was the fight really worth dying for? The dead obviously can't defend their position, so their choices can only be judged from the perspective of those they leave behind. We will never know the answer.
Seems strange to me, too. The White Rose in Germany wasn't about violent resistance or "support killing or beeing killed". Maybe a mistranslation, or another "white rose society"? There was a quite old and influential movement in China called White Lotus that led to violent uprisings in the 19. century, and there are certainly thousands of other resistance groups in Japanese or East Asian history that I've never heard of...
the man is a living contradiction, if you watched documentaries about him you will see how much of a nihilist he is sometimes, how he really hates his work at times even if he can't stop producing it. Even how bad of a husband or father he is. People are complex and rarely wholly virtuous, especially if they grew up during war time on the wrong side in a family that profited from the wat itself.
I feel like Miazaki was more concerned about choosing a path which most likely ends in early death instead of a path of trying to be as much human as the system allows you so that you don’t endanger yourself while not being more cruel than absolutely necessary. But to me that seems more like a resignation. The reason the Nazis could become so strong is because people went along with it if it meant they themselves would stay safe, if it meant that the system wouldn’t turn on them. But you can’t end a corrupted system if you always just try to maneuvre your own way through it. And you certainly can’t prevent it. You need to draw clear lines which should never be crossed and any crossing needs to have clear immediate consequences. The Nazis didn’t start to kill right away. They went step by step. First raising anger, exploiting the poverty of the people and their worries, blaming certain groups, secluding them, one by one stripping away their rights until they were hardly viewed as human anymore. And when you stop seeing a human, you stop worrying about killing. When it all happens gradually, then where exactly is the line? When they start killing? No. It’s when you start to view them as even slightly lesser. When you forget that all human beings are equal in their rights and dignity.
As someone who went to a "Siblings-Scholl" school (named after the white rose's leaders) and who has read most of their works (I was always especially drawn to Sophie Scholl's texts, as her perspective was just a bit different from the rest, being the youngest and slightly sheltered at the beginning), I would absolutely call them fanatical. They absolutely didn't want to die, obviously, but they were very much understanding of the risks they took. I've heard a definition of fanatical as "being willing to kill and/or be killed for a belief" and while they were pacifists and would never kill, they absolutely fit that description.
It should be noted that cluster munitions were only banned by countries that don't really use Artillery as part of their doctrine, over 92% of all the world's artillery capacity belongs to nations that still use cluster munitions
The only countries which banned cluster munitions were the ones who barely if ever used them. It's a useful weapon, one which, while leaving behind dangerous unexploded ordnance, probably- and yes, I mean this- saves lives in the long run. If an enemy can be forced to see how a war cannot be won, they are much more likely to capitulate. Cluster bombs make it easier for them to see this. This is harsh, I know, but that's war.
I remember watching Howl's Moving Castle for the first time. I remember I almost missed the scene where Howl and Sophie first meet because of the discomfort I felt watching the guards bother Sophie, to put it lightly. I wanted to leave the room. And frankly, I didn't know exactly why I didn't like the scene, I watched Graveyard of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke at this point, which had heavier scenes depicting much more graphic imagery of war. And even as I finished Howl's Moving Castle without much discomfort after that scene, and I loved it. I loved Studio Ghibli. I love these heavy, dark, but whimsical stories. It was hard to articulate back then but I think I can word it better now. Everyone gets to talk about how awful the bombings were and the devastation Japan went through during WWII. They're allowed to express this in a museum filled with paintings drawn by survivors, as gruesome as they may be. But we, Filipinos, we build one statue- one reminder of the women the Japanese captured and raped and tortured, and the Japanese government wants it removed. I like that Tim brought this up, we really can't ignore what Japan has done during the war and their part in instigating it. I truly feel sorrow for the victims and survivors of the atomic bombs. I felt horrible at that scene of Howl's Moving Castle. And I still feel there's much to discuss about what to do now with these devastating super weapons. But Japan doesn't get to erase what they did during the war as well. I don't think they get to tell other countries that they were blameless victims nor dance around the fact that they've committed atrocities as well. These stories will always be for the innocent people caught in the crossfire to tell. And watching Sophie and Howl fall in love and save each other in spite of the curses placed on them and the war they find themselves in, it made me happy. Also goddamn if a woman says to leave her alone you leave her the fuck alone. (I love Studio Ghibli and Japan btw, I just wanted to get this out of my system because comfort women and their families and especially the survivors deserve to be heard too and I don't like what the Japanese government did here, not the country itself.)
"These stories will always be for the innocent people caught in the crossfire to tell." Well said! When it comes to entire peoples, you basically always have a mixture of innocent people, perpetrators of atrocities, and anybody inbetween. Some Japanese people committed atrocities, some were victims of atrocities, and some were probably even both.
well said, and also keep in mind the only reason japan thinks it can still bully people these days is because it has the full support of the us for its bad behavior.
@@johannageisel5390 That's definitely an ethos that most of the Studio Ghibli films, especially those made by Miyazaki, seem to follow. Military forces and personnel are near unanimously portrayed as antagonists who do nothing but pillage, kill and destroy blindly and indiscriminately. Films like Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises depict the army as a bunch of arrogant buffonishly destructive imbeciles. Princess Mononoke meanwhile has the invading warlords portrayed as a faceless bunch of bandits, in sharp contrast to the more sympathetic people of Iron Town. And Howl's Moving Castle has a mixture of the two depictions, the military force largely shown as a destructive presence, while the few representatives we see of said military (the King, the soldiers who harass Sophie at the beginning) are blustering idiots. Meanwhile, the protagonists of the films tend to fall into either of the latter two categories. The protagonists in Castle in the Sky and Grave of the Fireflies are children who are victims of vast militaristic campaigns that they don't really understand. The central conflicts in Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke don't even directly concern the protagonists, who get dragged into the fighting against their will through random happenstance. In Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie has no real connection to the war that ultimately leads to the destruction of her hometown, while Umi's main story in From Up on Poppy Hill is directly connected to her father's death during the War. And then there's other characters who aren't necessarily perpetrators of war, but nonetheless are not uninvolved with the central conflicts. Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso each look at how those who fight in wars ultimately lose their humanity, visually shown by the title characters in both films literally turning into animals. Princess Mononoke sees the otherwise decent residents of Iron Town turn into violent killers and industrialists in order to protect themselves from the invading warlords, and in the process turn the peaceful forest spirits against them. And then there's Jiro in The Wind Rises, whose passions and skills are co-opted by the Imperial Japanese military, in turn making him complicit in the horrific acts of violence that they inflict elsewhere. Ultimately, I think Miyazaki does a fantastic job at depicting war in his films, and I think that's in large part because he knows to centre it around the people caught in its crossfire, whether it be the innocents who have no real part in the fighting, or those decent people who forsake their own morals and decency as a part of the banal nationalistic dogma fuelling the conflicts.
Small correction (11:10 in the video): The first atomic bomb wasn't dropped by a B-17 "flying fortress", but instead by a B-29 "superfortress". Great video though!
Hi Tim, small correction. The problem with cluster munitions is not at all that they affect large areas, there are other comparatively capable stuff there. The real problem of cluster munitions - is that each one of hundreds smaller submunitions has a chance of not exploding and staying as a defacto mine for many years after the war ends.
As a youtuber who's specialized in Miyazaki, and also very very influenced by your content Tim - I am touched watching this. Thank you for making this video. The scene that stuck with me in regards to Miyazaki's particular colour of horror was the bombs, and especially the sound of a breath that precedes them (what a wonderful narrative choice!) in The Wind Rises. Something about that scene, with the ground being pushed like a liquid, being at the start of a journey that, beautiful as it was, would also bring death to others - there's something about that that feels utterly beautiful and terribly sad to me. Thank you for the research, thank you for the care you put into this.
I watched Oppenheimer when it came out. It offhandedly mentions the destruction a few times but does focus heavily at times on the hubris and aftermath of the bombings. What was unknown to me was that there was a list of 12 cities in Japan, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as potential targets. Another target was Kyoto which was stricken from the list by the US’s Secretary of War at the time because he had honeymooned there. Early in the film Oppenheimer and some of his students celebrate the scientific discovery of splitting the atom only to immediately realize the horrific military implications of the process. The movie ends with Oppenheimer admitting that he believes his work has lead to the destruction of the world, not immediately, but eventually.
At about the 13 minute mark, you are talking about having distance between us and the violence. I served in the U.S. Army from 2004 to 2017. During that time, I was deployed twice as an artilleryman. In my first deployment, I spent most of my time in the turret of a humvee. In my second tour, I was doing artillery. I had, and still have a front row seat to having killed at range. When I fired the howitzer, all I saw were numbers in the sight, and when I pulled the firing mechanism, to the cheers of my fellow Soldiers, I knew that I had done a grave thing. The responsibility of killing at a distance is a strange thing. It's sterile; it is devoid of immediate consequence. I used to advocate for the stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. It took becoming a Soldier and seeing war first hand to fully realize its horror. Thank you for allowing me to comment, and thank you for keeping this story alive. It is especially relevant with nuclear war rearing its ugly head.
Thank you for your service and perspective. I hadn’t heard of (nor considered) getting rid of aircraft in war before this video, but it makes sense. The more impersonal war is, the easier it becomes.
@@eos_aurora aircraft are as much a part of war as the meat grinder of bodies and minds. From my perspective, the aircraft are not evil, or dangerous, in and of themselves, it's how they're employed. During my third, and final, deployment I was riding a medevac helicopter in the Tagab Valley not far from Bagram Air Base. That flight saved an Afghan soldier's life. There's a lot wrong with war, but if you're careful, you can find more humanity in a war zone than you might think.
I am shocked that Miyazaki would disparage the White Rose like that. Certainly not everyone is cut out to resist in that way and there is value in trying to be as humane as possible to others in a given situation but I think it's also wrong to condemn more proactive resistance than that.
I paused the video to come to the comments as soon as he read that. White Rose as fanatic? They were active resistance instead of resistance by omission. Pamphlets don't strike me as fanatic. I agree it's really odd
@@ASpaceOstrich To be fair, I don't think Miyazaki was talking about the "impact" of such actions. The White Rose society might have not been all that impactful at the time, but what kind of impact would a Nazi soldier keeping his humanity have on the war at large? I think we would need to read the whole thing instead of judging by the little extract in this video, I am sure there is some context we are missing here.
Oppenheimer has an interesting perspective on the atom bomb. It doesn't necessarily take a side on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it presents everyone's reasons for being for or against the bombings in a mostly neutral context. What it does make a bigger statement about is the atom bomb as a concept, it portrays it as a Pandora's box which could lead to a massive escalation in weapons of mass destruction. There's a section earlier in the movie where (spoilers I guess) one of the scientists theorizes that it's possible for the fission reaction to continue spreading out indefinitely, setting the air on fire and causing a chain reaction that would end the world, they eventually crunch the numbers and realize that the chance of this happening is zero-adjacent, and lo and behold the Trinity Test goes of without setting the planet on fire. At the very end of the movie (years later in universe) Oppenheimer says that after realizing the destruction that these weapons are capable of inflicting, he fears that the atom bomb may have set off a chain reaction to end the world after all.
yeah but you get how being "neutral" quote unquote is itself an insanely ideological position to take in context? Like a "neutral" depiction of the holocaust or american slavery? That claims to be neutral because it depicts some of the perpetrators restling with their counscounce? but you know doesn't even think to depict things from the perspectives of the victims? choosing not to condemn something on that scale is just as much a radical choice as outright supporting or opposing it. the movie seemed far more interested in following petty power plays between high level bureaucrats, that occurred after the fact, which to me was far less interesting and really seemed to miss the larger issue. also you know its kind of bullshit, because it wasn't even really "neutral" at all, there wasn't a single Japanese character in the movie and none of the fallout was even actually literally depicted, just alluded to in the hallucination scene. Like if you just depict someone with their skin sloughing off without commentary, as japanese media often did, it would be tough to call it "neutral" but it would be just as accurate.
@@chriss780 The atomic bombings were a lot more morally complex than the holocaust and slavery. Nobody knew if Japan would surrender or not, and if they didn't it was believed that the only alternative would be a full on invasion of Japan (which would obviously have caused many more deaths on both sides) I still disagree with dropping the bombs, since Japan was already loosing on all fronts and would have very likely surrendered, but comparing it to the holocaust is, frankly, silly.
@@chriss780 It's ultimately a movie about Oppenheimer, not about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I disagree about the mostly neutral context OP claims there is- it depicts everyone's reasons for being for or against the bombings through the lenses of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's own views on the bomb change as the development and the war goes on- he sees it as noble and a race against the clock to beat the Nazi tyrants to the most destructive weapon on the planet. Then, as Hitler dies and dissent grows, he shows clear conflict between going against the usage of it and going with the usage of it, but ultimately settles on the 'necessity' of it to (possibly) avoid the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Finally, when the usage of the bomb finally comes to bear, the reality settles and it crushes his soul. The reason why none of the fallout was actually depicted or why there were no Japanese characters was because Oppenheimer never met these people- Oppenheimer never saw the destruction his own creation wrought upon the Japanese people. He could only guess- hence the hallucination scene. And ultimately, the larger issue that Oppenheimer is trying to sell is not the fact that 226,000 people died in the bombings, but that the development and usage of nuclear bombs set into motion a chain of events that could very well lead to the destruction of life on Earth as we know it.
@@zerolantern5794 No, he did see pictures of what it did to the victims, but the movie didn't actually show any of them. Just his reaction to the slideshow presentation. It was a missed opportunity, and apparently left such little impact on you that you forgot about the scene. If they actually showed one of those images he looked at (which could be recreated with actors), it would have been haunting and impactful and underscored why he changed his feelings so drastically.
@@joshuasgameplays9850 especially silly since japan killed twice as many only chinese civillians as the holocaust, and far far more counding the rest of south east asia, and they killed more people in nanking than the nukes, many of which they took their time to rape both before and after their deaths too
17:33 I had a similar experience when I was younger and got to go on a trip to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. Standing in the box car and seeing the piles and piles of shoes, then personal effects. It’s something you can’t unsee. The cruelty of it all.
I was in yad vashem and had a very similar experience just staring at the piles of shoes. It was a trip with other 15 year olds and the bus was basically silent when we left.
I think that's why the Ghibli stories hit so differently, you can somehow tell how much emotions and memories are worked into them. A great video. Thanks Tim.
Wow, you really unpacked a lot here, and this was beautifully done. I lived in Korea for two years, then I lived in Japan for 2 1/2 years. Because of my time in Korea, I knew how Koreans felt about Japan, about how in denial Japan was. In Japan, I experienced the denial first hand and was told it was 'Korean propaganda', and this was pretty upsetting to me. I am from Christchurch, and in Godley Heads/Awaroa, there is a coastal defence battery in preparation for world war two. The problem is that the Japanese education system brushes over their part in the war, so most have no idea that their country invaded others and committed many war crimes. I had one student in Japan that booked me for a one on one to talk about it, as he went to Indonesia and was shocked to see Japan had built buildings during their invasion; he had no idea Japan invaded other countries. We then compared Japan and Germany, how Germany is pretty self-reflective on their historical atrocities, and it's understandable why countries like Korea can't really move on when what happened to them isn't even genuinely acknowledged. I missed out on visiting Hiroshima, so it was great to see some of the pictures. War is horrific, and Ghibli's take on humanity is interesting, and I love that flying was shown to be beautiful when it isn't used for violence. Side note: does anyone else get Stormlight Archive vibes from those creatures in Nausicaa of the Valley?
You really need to read about Unit 731 and "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" to understand why OSS understood why using the Atomic Bomb was necessary. Studio Ghibli could have made movies that showed what Imperial Japan did to the: Chinese, Koreans, Allied POW's & Civilians, etc etc... 'As Imperial Japan was so savage that members of the Third Reich who witnessed their barbarism wrote letters to Adolf Hitler on how fucking savage their Japanese Allies were to Chinese Civilians... Personally, I would have handled the US assault on the home Islands differently had I been in a position of power back then: As when Imperial Japan threatened to kill all Allied POW's & Civilians in their custody, I would have arranged for a thousand Japanese POW;s to be released wearing static line parachutes over Tokyo Imperial Palace, after their heads were removed. The first Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Unit 731 in occupied China, with instructions to the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists on how to create an exclusion zone as that may have saved the lives of millions of Chinese from Unit 731's Weaponized Bubonic Plague, and other Bioweapons. The second Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Tokyo Imperial Palace and the third on the greatest Military target left, probably the Japanese Navy. And then I would have dropped leaflets on the Allied intentions for civilians explaining that without an unconditional surrender, that holy hell would would be dropped on Imperial Japan's remaining targets.... If you don't understand why my hard line approach, then you haven't considered what would have happened if "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" had been successful. Given that three suicide planes would have been launched from an I-400 class carrier submarine to drop Weaponized Bubonic Plague on San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland. This would have killed at least a quarter of the population on the West Coast at a minimum. More likely it would have spread & killed about a quarter of the world population... The response by the Allied Powers & non-aligned Nations would have been making sure that the Nation of Japan & the Japanese People would only exist in history books and photos... That is the ind of fanaticism that Studio Ghibli & other Japanese Media choose to ignore, as they made something worse than the Atomic Bomb and tried to us it because they believed that "Imperial Japan would rule the world for a time"....
This explains why I was so scared of Ghibli movies when I was younger. Even the ones that aren't strictly about war are influenced by this severe sadness and mourning of the horrors of war. You can see it even in the designs of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro. The younger me wasn't ready for the reality Ghibli was depicting, but now they are some of my favorite movies for that same sorrow infused with hope. What a great video, Tim.
personally I like the fact that Miazaki never went down the ''wo is us'' path with this stuff, a lot of his messages are equally applicable AGAINST japan for the horrific atrocity's they committed against Korea and China, atrocities that were so grievous that literally SS officer traveled to China to essentially ask the Japanese to chill the fuck out and stop murder fuck raping china..... i love that his anti nuclear stuff has never been about demonizing any specific nation or people and more about warning against the weapons and war as a concept, in Nausicäa part of that movie is understanding and being at peace with both nature and one another, and showing how selfish warfare only brings EVRYONE down, and leaves the earth scarred and battered.
So much of anime is a direct response to this cultural trauma. From the early days of Godzilla and Astroboy all the way to Naruto and the tailed beasts being a direct representation of the atomic weapons held by super powers of the modern era. There is an endless wellspring of cultural analysis here. I think you covered a very important chunk of it. You also did so very respectfully .Very cool.
Where you showed the pictures i shed a tear. It reminded me of my grandgrandmother who witnessed the firestorm of Dresden. It was not a nuclear bomb but that destruction from above she described that after the bombing of Dresden she said it was a grey mass after the died out. No blue sky no colour everything was a grey mass. Aircrafts truly brought us a form of killing no other weapon ever could give us
You can also find these themes explored in the manga One Piece. The Buster Call - the ultimate form of military attack used by the Marines. "People can't be seen on a map. Without any emotion, they're just erasing one small island off the map. That's what a Buster Call is!!" - Nico Robin
There's been a bunch of criticism of Oppenheimer about it not showing the Japanese view of the bomb to which the obvious answer is to watch Japanese stories that do talk about it in their own words, not ours
Not showing the Japanese side made the whole thing this American jingoistic inability to see the human toll of their "brilliance." They, and their allies, do it all the time; ISIS/ISIL was this collection of barbaric mongrels, black and brown refugees this mass of encroaching deadly parasites and diseases, North Koreans this nation of deluded cancers, Cuba this jealous unwanted rabid dog, China predator nipping at your heels, or even Russia as this unreasonable demon out to steak your soul. Not showing the human toll of their "heroicism" is per the course when you know even the director (in this case creators of the bomb too) instinctively didn't see the humanity on the other side of their weapon of mass destruction. They pontificate about the wrongs they did, intellectually asses their shame in a self serving thought of nothing humane and then celebrate the devastation they caused.
@@Strogman25 No film, no matter how many hours long, will give you an unbiased and complete view of history. It's fair to demand that Nolan should have added more perspectives in, but just as fair that I don't think Nolan had any obligation to.
Even without that perspective, the movie, at least in my eyes, was able to effectively show the horrors of the bombs, and the guilt Oppenheimer had to live with. Also, showing the aftermath of the bombs might border on gratuitous and disrespectful for some people.
Considering atomic bomb is a sensitive topic for the Japanese, it’s impressive that Miyazaki brings it up so often. How much of Miyazaki’s message got through, is uncertain. One repeated and somewhat worrying recent trend in Japanese media is ‘protect’ You have heros perform all levels of atrocities and destruction under the justification of ‘protecting what’s important to them’ Almost like how Imperial Japan justifies the wars as ‘protecting the emperor’ Older generation creators like Miyazaki and Torino don’t usually do this. I hope it’s just lazy writing of younger creators rather than some rabbit hole worth another one of Tim’s video.
Can you list examples of these heroes willing to do atrocities to protect what is important to them. The most recent one I can think about is Attack on Titan. The main character literally commits g3nocid3 and even then the way story events are positioned. It's actually the most logical action because Paradis facing an existential threat from a World that sees them as the d3vil
You probably got the best example. The way Attack on Titan portray ‘there no other way’ is pretty much Imperial Japan’s justification of war. Similar justification were seen in my favorite game Tales of Xillia, where the main characters become sympathetic then aided the invaders, who were dying from lack of resources. Again, similar to Imperial Japan’s narrative when they were starved off from vital resources due to western sanctions. The earliest character I can think of where protecting goes off the rail is Char and Lalah from Gundam, which is portrayed in a less favorable way. The way they talk like Amuro should die because the two have to protect each other, still haunts me today. Tomino Yoshiyuki seems to dislike this idea so much the characters in Space Runaway Ideon blow up the universe by trying to protect what’s dear to them. Protect is simple and instinctive, just dehumanize the enemy as pure evil and exterminate with extreme prejudice. It felt like works that tries to humanize enemies like Demon Slayer is a rarity now days. Where badass power fantasy heroes with cheating capabilities wiping out pure evil enemies is more of a norm now. Kirito is one of the few power fantasy heros I can think of that doesn’t do this... But it literally takes a ‘New Type’ of human to be able to understand each other, is probably Tomino’s most cynical take on humanity. The greatest similarity between Tomino and Miyazaki is their faith in children and (some extent adolescents), as they are still open to new experiences and ideas. What genuinely hits me with the two is, even they have been through the darkest of humanity, they are still trying to make the world a slightly better brighter place, with their deeply humanizing stories. Just like the characters in their works. Fun fact, regardless of how often Tomino’s work gets dark, this guy still believes he’s making stories for 10 year olds :/
It’s about as sensitive to them as the concentration camp/Larg is to European to my understanding. Motives of a gigantic superweapon that wipes away innocent civilians shows up in Japanese media about as much as an Orwellian superstate in western stuff.
@@silverhawkscape2677 Regarding AOT, I think it is the fans who are wrong because many of them romanticise Eren's actions for fun. The creators make it obviously clear that committing such horrible atrocities is wrong no matter the situation. Remember when the Scouts debate on whether to stop Eren, Hange furiously says "Genocide is wrong". It also shows that nations tend to justify their horrible actions as "protection". Both Marley and Paradis do it in the show and Japan did this in real life. The show is critical of war and maybe even Japan's portrayal of it.
What I find most fascinating about Ghibli films, and thus the vision of their creators, is that they tackle such complex and heavy subject matter but are funny, hopeful, entertaining, inspiring, aspirational. They show us what is wrong with humanity, but also what is right about it. It is the vision of someone who grew up amongst destruction but did not let it consume them, as the violence of WW2 consumed so many others.
You really need to read about Unit 731 and "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" to understand why OSS understood why using the Atomic Bomb was necessary. Studio Ghibli could have made movies that showed what Imperial Japan did to the: Chinese, Koreans, Allied POW's & Civilians, etc etc... 'As Imperial Japan was so savage that members of the Third Reich who witnessed their barbarism wrote letters to Adolf Hitler on how fucking savage their Japanese Allies were to Chinese Civilians... Personally, I would have handled the US assault on the home Islands differently had I been in a position of power back then: As when Imperial Japan threatened to kill all Allied POW's & Civilians in their custody, I would have arranged for a thousand Japanese POW;s to be released wearing static line parachutes over Tokyo Imperial Palace, after their heads were removed. The first Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Unit 731 in occupied China, with instructions to the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists on how to create an exclusion zone as that may have saved the lives of millions of Chinese from Unit 731's Weaponized Bubonic Plague, and other Bioweapons. The second Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Tokyo Imperial Palace and the third on the greatest Military target left, probably the Japanese Navy. And then I would have dropped leaflets on the Allied intentions for civilians explaining that without an unconditional surrender, that holy hell would would be dropped on Imperial Japan's remaining targets.... If you don't understand why my hard line approach, then you haven't considered what would have happened if "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" had been successful. Given that three suicide planes would have been launched from an I-400 class carrier submarine to drop Weaponized Bubonic Plague on San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland. This would have killed at least a quarter of the population on the West Coast at a minimum. More likely it would have spread & killed about a quarter of the world population... The response by the Allied Powers & non-aligned Nations would have been making sure that the Nation of Japan & the Japanese People would only exist in history books and photos... That is the ind of fanaticism that Studio Ghibli & other Japanese Media choose to ignore, as they made something worse than the Atomic Bomb and tried to us it because they believed that "Imperial Japan would rule the world for a time"....
I must admit, I had to skip a minute or two into the video because I can't deal with real injuries no matter how much violent media I consume. After that, I was glued to this video. I have things to do right now, but I'd love to finish watching this later. I am not normally interested in this subject matter, but you've opened my eyes to a new layer of Miyazaki's work. Very well done.
After visiting the memorial museum in Hiroshima I stood by that famous building, below where the bomb was detonated. You could feel the weight of the act, the horrors that followed. It was oppressive, and dark...
Howls Moving Castle was the first Ghibli movie I fully watched and really nothing has surpassed that experience, the happy, colorful start of the movie compared with when the war comes home, the walls of fire, Howl struggling with his internal monster and that moment when he says to Sophie after she begs him to leave, “No, I’m done with running … Because I’ve finally found someone I want to protect” I was quite literally cries during the movie. Having been raised in a very Nationalist and pro-war environment that movie truly shattered how I viewed the world and really helped me understand that people are people, no matter their nationality, religion or anything else. Thank You Hayao Miyazaki and please continue to make amazing films like these.
What’s interesting to me is that on the outside, Ghibli’s work is full of juxtapositions - for a contemporary American audience, the terror of war doesn’t belong in a kids movie. But for the generation that founded Ghibli (Miyazaki, Takahata and the rest), war was an integral part of their childhood; just as much as going outside and chasing grasshoppers or seeing mothers make food, or any other “wholesome” Ghibli tropes. They cannot be separated.
My 97 year old great uncle, who recently passed on, was twelve when a bomb landed just outside his childhood home. Maraculously everyone survived but in some of his final words to me, he described the war and its effects, he told me my great great grandfather used to have night terrors from his time fighting in Northern Africa as well as other things. But one set of words stuck with me; "If there is an Hell on this earth, I have seen it.". I think in the months before he died, he became excellent at showing his family how bad the war truly was with nothing but the tone of his voice and the careful use of words to describe what he had been through as a child. I hope he finally finds the answers to the questions he asked all his life, RIP.
I would highly recommend the film In This Corner of the World. It's a historical anime from 2016, mostly very sweet and small. But its depiction of firebombing and the nuclear war tore my heart out, even as it restored it in the end with how two broken souls find and complete each other. It doesn't get talked about, but it's final act is incredibly effective, particularly because of the smallness of the rest of the film.
The weird irony of this situation. A country that committed some of the if not the most unspeakable acts of violence, barbarism and depravity to their neighbors as well as Asia at large but never speaks about how awful they truly were. Only the force used to subjugate them.
Yep they had the same ethnocentric beliefs as the Nazis did and were effectively going thru their own genocide in Asia that the government still won’t acknowledge but they flew under the radar with the anti nuke stuff
This is why I have a respect for the Germans, they have come to understand and reflect on what their ancestors did and accepted the truth rather than deny it.
@@chriss780 The AFD are sadly not going to replicate what the Nazis did. They are moderate conservatives, Germany is just that far left and the media that biased against them.
“At some point along the way, these people forgot how to cry” This is so important. Crying is often seen as a sign of weakness. But crying reminds of us empathy, crying helps us connect. Crying is healthy.
Do not forget that none of this would have happened if Imperial Japan had not, in its all but boundless pride, believed itself entitled to rape, pillage and possess all the world it could reach. Pride, their terrible pride, set them on the path to this horror. I am glad to see this video didn’t forget that.
Honestly. I want someone to Subvert Miyazaki films and their ideas. Showing the horrors of war but instead show the supposed victims to be just as cruel as to be almost deserving. Like how Japan was Nuked but it was celebrated by the nation's they had invaded and pillaged.
@@silverhawkscape2677 nah I wouldn’t say deserved because these were mostly civilians, but it should be shown that actions have consequences, every action causes a equal or more powerful reaction, the fault of there predecessors and the men who decided to commit these atrocities in the name of there country and people
@@magpipe146 I don't agree that the people of a state are blameless when their government does evil things, because dictatorships cannot gain and keep power if the people oppose or even simply don't support them.
@@williamhenry8914 not really that simple in an imperialistic society, built on “honor” and national pride, any country is expected to fight for there own home team, and another note, the civilian population doesn’t have any power to declare or stop war in an EMPIRE.
@@magpipe146 The civilian population has *all* the power. People imagine incredible acts of bravery, but it's unnecessary. Enough people refusing or even just failing to do their jobs properly and no state can survive. You can kill a state stone dead with mere sloth, at close to no risk to yourself, if enough people join in.
Not afraid, nor ashamed, to say this made me cry and silently sob so I wouldn't have to explain to my coworkers why the tears WILL NOT STOP.... And God I never want them to.... I haven't cried like this in a long time. Thank you
The Bombing of Darwin, also known as the Battle of Darwin, on 19 February 1942 was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. On that day, 242 Japanese aircraft, in two separate raids, attacked the town, ships in Darwin Harbour and the town's two airfields in an attempt to prevent the Allies from using them as bases to contest the invasion of Timor and Java during World War II. - Wikipedia
The fighting on New Guinea was a huge turning point int Japan’s conquest, as stopping them there had prevented them from gaining a staging ground for an assault on Australia. Odd a Kiwi doesn’t know that. He’s pretty knowledgable. Though I suppose NZ is fairly out of the way and of less importance strategically.
thank you, this reminds me to meditate on my enemy/trauma. The beauty of the vehicle it came on and how profoundly it is required to create any semblance of relatable content. It is kinda hard to focus on the pain of beauty or the beauty of pain but it is a good story when the result is human humility.
As I have studied wars, ancient or otherwise, I noticed that it's the innocent that pays the greatest price..... always. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
M*A*S*H has perhaps the best quote. Hawkeye says to the Chaplain along the lines: War isn't hell. Only people that deserve to be in Hell are there. War spared no one. Innocent, drafted, volunteer alike.
@@penultimateh766 this comment suggests that the people of Japan had any choice in the regime. I suggest that you read Japanese history to understand why the vast majority had no say, and that the Peace Faction was very, very weak.
i was so afraid of the giant warriors in rhe the valley of the wind as a child.i didn't understand what about them was so scary. i kept having nightmares about them and spent nights wide awake, hoping not to catch a glance of a towering crimson monster looming over a burning city. something about being so small and meaningless infroof such a creature... how little control over I have over being crushed and how little it seemed to care fueled by my childhood imagination... my mother threw away the animation in the result. but as an adult looking back... children belive what they see... and those monsters have captured the concept and terror of war perfectly.
For the first half i was wondering if you were going to comment on how the framing of Japan as the victim is grossly wrong, and then you did. Thank you.
13:50 The song "Bomber" from the album "Carmen Miranda's Ghost" touches on these themes in the form of a scifi story about the pilots of a space bomber going on a mission to bomb some unspecified target on a planet down below, with lyrics such as: "He just flies the bomber He never sees their eyes when the hell comes down He just flies the bomber" and "Now make the run, so quick it’s done, and death screams toward the ground But moving fast, they're so far past, they never hear the sound A final turn, as from the stern they watch the mushrooms grow That fill the night with deadly light, and kill the world below"
i want to point out that in the Nausicaa manga series its a muuuch more developed environmental cautionary tale, and directly talks about the futility of war, use of wmds, the illusion of control over nature. similar to sheeta's message at the end of Laputa 22:30, the main plot point in nausicaa is that no matter what advanced technology is used, you cannot control nature, and war only leads to mutual destruction. the factions in the story experience this, as a large part of the story is around one of the nations using devastating bioweapons, triggering an apocalypse, and half of the land that was usable for humanity is destroyed (think the end of nausicaa with the ohmu but without the happy ending). from the very beginning till the end its essentially a continuous demonstration of the misery and horror of war, the hubris of using technology for control and violence, for all the characters involved
I don’t know if any else has commented about it but the descriptive name Flying Fortress was used by the B-17 which was used against German, the B-29 was the Superfortress.
So that is something that I had never before considered, the zeitgeist of war among the people. In North American and European stories that focus on war, the battle in the skies is almost always heroic. Death comes from above, especially in British shows, but there’s the underlying of perseverance there. However, a ground war, with columns of tanks and marauding infantry is presented as the terror. Even in Red Dawn, it was paratroopers and tanks that caused most of the problems because that was the devastation of war that we mostly understood. Our cultural memory of the of the Mud of the Great War and the grinding ground campaign of WWII gives us most of our horror of war. In Canada, our horrors of war are mostly the aftermath, the broken people who come home and the shattered families left behind by those who never returned. We, as a country, want to forget and move on, and our stories reflect that. The war is always far away, and the devastation purely in the minds of the veterans. Having watched a little further in the video, you reference Tolkien, which brings to mind his use of AirPower in his books. Dragons brought indiscriminate death from the air, the eagles were ostensibly on the side of good but were ultimately of limited use in the wars. Everything important that happened, in a military perspective in those books, happened on the ground. Foot soldiers battling it out, a cavalry charge into death. His understanding of war was an infantry war with machines of death being the ultimate representation of destruction and terror. His wars reflected his experiences on the Western front, the horrors and bravery of the common infantryman in the trenches. This is a truly fascinating discussion Tim and I wanted to say thank you for that. It is going to help my writing incredibly! In world-building, I have to determine how the people I’m writing about relate to war, what are the stories they tell about it and how does it affect their perception
13:15 That was the whole thing with why Jedi Knights use lightsabers too. So that they can alway see who they harm, always empathise with the enemy. The Sith use lightsabers as a statement to show how they have cast aside mercy.
I can recommend the film John Rabe. It's about the massacre of Nanjing (China), where Japanese soldiers commited unthinkable atrocities. John Rabe, a German diplomat and Nazi prevented many horrors. There is one scene in the film that also happened in reality that struck me the most. Chinese civilians hiding under a giant Nazi flag in the hope that Japanese Bombers would reckognize it and not bomb that area. That flag, which is a symbol of humanity at its worst, being used as a protection for civilians including children, something that is inherently good, that sticked with me.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie scared the crap out of me as child. More specifically “Goodbye Blue Sky”. The depiction of the beginning of the Blitz to rapid militarization of industry and the decline of humanity depicted in the people’s ragged & tattered close scurrying through rumble while the elongated gas mask became a permanent fixture. The crow swooping down to rip & tear at the ground revealing the whole world was bleeding. In any nation with a standing army the swords wants to be used. The multitude of clandestine units of every nation carrying out inhumane experiments. Answered more questions about humanity than we would ever ask outside of the banner of war. “After all, He who must not be named did great things-terrible yes, but great.” People like Miyazaki have been fighting back their entire lives culturally using other forms of media & legend giving rise to Godzilla, manga, & anime. The world took away their weapons & they took up their pens.
I know this video is about Studio Ghibli’s connection to the wars and bombings. But when I was in Japan recently I visited the Hiroshima peace and memorial museum (I can’t remember the exact name) and the museum itself left a huge impression on me. The whole thing was dimly lit with artificial lighting to keep all the items from sun damage and aging. It was so quiet and the atmosphere was heavy. There items of clothing and other small things that people were wearing/caring when the bomb dropped. They even had the actual section of the steps with the shadow of the person on the steps. If you ever go to Japan I really recommend going there.
Miyazaki’s films are meant to ask the audience to be better. It’s asking the FUTURE generations - the ones who ARE remote from the violence - to keep choosing to live and never let war happen again.
Tim those strings at the end on top of the art work slides did me right in. Kite I *just* composed myself after the slides & the strings come along to shred my heart + run my mascara all over again.
Amazing work, thank you for bringing other points of view through this videos, and making such a good job in the content and the composition of the video. Thanks again for your work!
Love this type of video essay. 2 weeks ago, I visited a theme park in France, Puy Du Fou, all about live reenactment of awesome history of the musketeers, knights, roman gladiators and so on. It was very cool and interesting, but the experience that affected me most was a replication of the western front during ww1 in an attraction, for us to walk trough. Extremely loud sirens going off, bullets whizzing past my head all the time, earth shaking from bomb shells hitting the roof. Screams and machine gun fire. Even the green glow of lamps illuminating musterd gas and the corpses it caused, only to end with rows upon rows of graves draped in french flags... This was the experience my country, its allies and its enemies, went trough daily. It touched my very core and I still get goosebumps writing about it. Your story reminded my of that past, how we can still be foolhardily sent to war on such a horrific scale. Id love to see more of this!
Hearing about your visit to the museum in Hiroshima reminds me of the time I visited the Holocaust museum in D.C. That was a very chilling experience as well. Humanity has done some awful things in history I'm afraid, but we've also occasionally made marvels and done great things. Thank you for this video essay. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️
As a chinese, now living overseas, depiction by japanese media on how they "suffered" in WW2 has always come across slightly tone-deaf. Especially when paired with their governments denials of war crimes and suffering dished out to others. As an adult now, I just find it hypocritical for them to depict japanese suffering without talking about suffering they brought onto asia as a whole. While I would let my child watch ghibli and fully absorb the message that "war is bad". I would also teach them history. How women stick pig skin to their face to avoid being raped by japanese soldiers. How indiscriminate murder was made leisure activities. How the general japanese society failed during and after and till today, to criticise those atrocities.
It is rather notable that they are so averse to unpacking their past. As a German, the Japanese way of dealing with their history has always seemed rather daft to me, when compared with how my own nation handles the crimes of those who came before.
@@draochvar9646 I think germans need to be a bit less smug about their precious "Remembrance culture" as its mostly a myth, doesn't really meaningfully exist, it was US cold war propaganda based on exagerating a few successes of the german student movement in the 60s against open glorification of nazism, to make liberals less sqeemish about rearming a bunch of nazi generals in the bundeswahr as the cornerstone of nato. the success of the AFD in the last election show german anti-fascism was always skin deep. West Germany was a nazi rump state from the start and historians will look back at the 1991 Anschluss and german reunification as a great historical tragedy and triumph for fascism.
@@chriss780 tell me you know nothing about German political discourse and historical culture without telling me. My god how much ignorance can you pack into a single comment.
@@draochvar9646 pathetic evasions, most germans just buy their own PR, and are eager to whitewash how deep fascism runs in the country to this day, because its more convenient and palatable narrative then facing the truth When Germans start patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves on how "liberal" and civilized" they are, it makes me want to spit. The second the economy contracts 0.002% or god forbid have to see a brown refuge germans throw away the masks and start electing ADF brownshirts in droves. German "memory culture" is pathetic moralists drivel discarded the second there under the slightest discomfort. They never did shit to materially atone to their victems, that they weren't forced to, its all just worthless talk. I despise how they've literally just unilaterally decided their reformed THEMSELVES and forgiven themselves without even bothering to ask their victims. Tell me why is every major corporation in germany today descended from ones that got rich off slave labor in the holocaust? and most of the major families? Almost every major rich family? God I hate german hypocrisy and self-righteousness so fucking much.
@@draochvar9646 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany_Must_Perish! Great reading material by the way. Shame people didn't have the stomach to go through with it.
I appreciate how you address this because I usually see Japans roll brought up as a Well What Aboutism but this is nuance. I always enjoy your essays but this one really got me. It reframed Oppenheimer in an interesting way as well, because I had no intention of seeing it. Now I’m a bit curious. Mainly because I’m always interested in the competitive ways each nation views its own roll in history. Ever since the eye opening experience of visiting a WWII museum in China honoring the soviets liberating a city there from the Japanese. It was my first experience with world history from a pov other than a US class room.
The creature from Nausicaa felt like more than just nuclear symbolism, the fact that it's a heavily damaged child from the Bad Old Days who is forced to commit the same atrocities (thereby destroying itself) could be seen as symbolism for attempts at instilling militant nationalism via fascist rhetoric in Japan following WW2. You know, the stuff it turned out people like Shinzo Abe were fully behind. Just a thought.
I did a project in my senior year of hs that compared the art of survivors to those who have only heard accounts. The art of survivors is so visceral and real with this feeling of something utterly horrific and yet the art is beautifully ghastly. Just looking at a handful of these pieces, it’s eerie to see
I think it's also important to consider the themes of why Miyazaki has weapons reflect humanity. Technology is inherently neutral until a person enacts their will upon it. But as to what can lead to extreme violence and acts of desperation. Is usually, a very human sense of fear. The people in Nausicaa were so afraid of the toxic jungle, that they convinced themselves that they could take back control with a weapon. Which isn't too different from the real world, people will tear each other apart in horrific ways, in response to feelings of fear, sadness, or hatred. Which were all at insane complex heights during WW2. Leading to the creation of weapons, that even now, feel like they should have stayed in whatever science fiction we pulled them from.
you brought to light that I have an eerie connection to these films, Pocco Rosso and Howls moving Castle being my favourite Ghibli films... Since the age of 12 or 13, I have been fascinated by nuclear physics specifically nuclear power both fusion and fission and its ties to the atomic bomb.
Where once the Dutch took their knowledge, collected from all over the "west", to Japan, for them to learn. All those years later, it would see the full might of another path that knowledge would go. I find it almost poetic how Nagasaki would end up being bombed of all places as it had always been the only place the outside world could see the whole country.
even more poetic that it was never the primary target, it was Kokura. The only reason they resorted to their secondary target, Nagasaki, was because too much cloud and smog and smoke from factories and previous fire bombing campaigns prevented accurate bombing.
@@InquisitorXariusdude. How can you watch this video and say something that heartless? Absolutely no one ever deserves to be the victim of nuclear weapons.
@@althelor You call it heartless I view it differently. The people of Nagasaki were largely innocent and to me represents what Japan could have been if not for the malevolent influence of the Imperial filth. Kyoto is the heart of The Imperial Theocratic Autocracy that poisons and enslaves the minds, bodys, and souls of the peoples of Japanese Civilization. Hiroshima was justly targeted, Nagasaki was not, for Kyoto is the heart of the evil that corrupts Japanese civilization, and Nagasaki to me represents a Japanese Civilization free of Imperial Evil.
26:48 THANK you. I’m glad this is increasingly brought to attention. I remember the times when kids in NewZealand would ask me what Korea is and I had to answer “it’s between China and Japan”. And all they knew about Japan was “cute characters”.
Incredible video! Going to Hiroshima was one of the most harrowing experiences in my life. You get a slice of this feeling through Miyazaki’s work along with all the contradicting emotions that come along with it -Terrence
Your acknowledgment of Imperial Japan’s war crimes is important, which is why I find that samurai movies that criticize the warrior code act as veiled criticisms of Japan’s militarism during WWII. Films like Harakiri (1962), The Sword of Doom (1966) Samurai Rebellion (1967), and Ran (1980) often show the absurdity of the shogunate and the follies of samurai honor.
Everytime i hear "grave of the fireflies" i cry. Just at the name. The movie sticks with you. Though animated, it's as painful as Schindler's List if not more so. It's so heartbreaking, i sobbed the whole way through, but its worth the watch, it's so well done. I cant watch it again, i watched it once and i dont think i could do it again. Studio Ghibli films are always my favorite, the world building is just incredible and the characters are lovable. There's always something to relate to or some message to take from the movies to build empathy.
What you said about what you saw in the Hiroshima Peace museum was just like what felt on my previous visit to the Nagasaki Peace museum and Park in 2015. it was haunting, but necessary for me
Very interesting analysis! I’ve always been intrigued by how obviously impacted Miyazaki was/is by the bombings of Japan, but have never looked further into it. Was very happy to come across this well put-together video comparing the real life influences to Ghibli films. Thanks!
1:51 3 of those movies are not technically Hayao Miyazaki. From Up On Poppy Hill and The Secret Life of Arietty are both co-written by him and not directed by him. Whisper of the Heart he wrote, but he did not direct it.
I included them because writing is a pretty important part of the creative process, but I guess if you discount them the point becomes even more stark. ~ Tim
Incredible, breathtaking, and eye opening Hello Future Me was one of my favorite writers/ avatar UA-camrs. But now become one of my favorites entirely with what you did on Miyazaki and WW2 and unit 731 will open everyone’s eyes on what really happened during war. Thank you Tim.
Hey uhh just one itty bitty thing on nuclear weapons. Neither in the bombing of Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were residual radiation injuries sustained, there was initial radiation of course, that's just what happens if you get exposed to Neutron radiation and X-rays, but there was no fallout victims. Serious contamination was not present and both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are beautiful thriving cities today. The black rain was the ash and debris that got thrust into the air after the explosion Both bombings were airbursts which made it so that there wasn't a whole chunk of irradiated dirt got thrown dispersing radioactive material, like in Atom Lake or Castle Bravo.
Between this video, the one before it, and your video on Japan's war crimes, I've loved what you've been putting out recently. Thank you for your work.
My grandmother was born late 1938, only six years old when the war came back to Germany. Old enough to remember the bunkers and the aftermath after nights full of bombs. When I first watched "Grave of the fireflies" my grandmother sat with me. Just after a few minutes she stood up, in tears and wasn't able to continue the film. She hasn't watched it to this day. Too realistic and too many memories that would keep her up at night. She thinks it's a great movie, even tough she hasn't watched it. Just for the heartbreaking feeling it gives you, a feel of how it really was back then. Or how is right now in all the other wars.
Good essay. Beautiful and moving. Now I'm kinda waiting for a part III: FullMetalAlchemist and dealing with being the heirs to old atrocities. Or "Wait, are we the baddies?"
Oh wow. You just made me completely recontextualize that series right there. I know the country of amestris was largely based off of Germany, but there is something to be said about the way that the country being founded on atrocities and human sacrifice could be a lense on Japan hiding their involvement in the horrible things they've done during war. (or the US brushing off the dark parts of our history or reframing it to make us look like the good guys)
@@althelor Hey, happy to help! Now, of course the aesthetics in FMA are taken from European fascism. Serial numbers not so much filed off as barely covered with duct tape. Hiromu Arakawa also calls her magic system "alchemy" and names the main antagonists after the christian seven deadly sins. But to be honest, I find these inspirations (or appropriations) shallow and superficial. I don't think she spent a lot of time researching them. Don't get me wrong: I love FMA and I don't find _it_ to be shallow and derivative! I think it's more like, instead of stealing or reverse engineering a a grand piano, she painted a sheet like a grand piano and threw it over her own weird home constructed instrument. She's borrowing some trappings from european culture and history to tell a very unique and japanese story. That's why I think it is safe to make this interpretation of FMA's "Are we the baddies?" theme.
@@danguillou713aaaaaaand you are frighteningly wrong. The Alchemy in FMA, to name only one aspect you brought up, is steeped in ties and connections to actual alchemical beliefs, systems and practices (there's a wonderful series of videos here on youtube going into that). And then there's Amestris and ho boi, where do I even start with this one. As both a scholar of history and a native of Germany, it is eery how on the head FMA is to many aspects of Imperial Germany, the Weimarer Republik and the Nazi Regime. Now of course, a lot of these experiences are mirrored in Japanese history, the use of humans in horrific experimentation comes to mind, but then there are facets to the story that someone that only took the "trappings" of european history probably wouldn't have picked up on. So, to say Arakawa's inspirations from European culture and history are shallow or superficial is either just ignorant or downright disrespectful.
@@draochvar9646 Interesting. I'd like to watch that series of vids: I don't think youtube likes hyperlinks in comments, but if you tell me the name of the channel I can find it. For my part, having read up on the subject now and then over the years, I can say that I didn't see anything that reminded me of what I know about European alchemy, either historical or the jungian re-interpretation of it. Where is all the time spent in labs, boiling, mixing, burning, distilling stuff? Why do these "alchemists" use magical diagrams to throw spells? Fireballs and ice towers and stuff - that doesn't seem very alchemical to me. Where is the convoluted theories about subjects like: the four elements, if there is an aether, the role of astrology, why phlogiston has negative mass, or if spontaneous generation of life is a thing or not? And if you go jungian - where are the personal transformations into purer and purer versions of yourself, where is the male-female emperor/empress discussion? Maybe there's was a lot of things in the manga that didn't make it into the anime. (I have only watched the two anime shows FMA and FMA:Brotherhood, and haven't read the paper version, but I have read that first half of FMA and all of Brotherhood are pretty faithful.) All I can say is that in the shows I watched I didn't spot either practical details or underlying themes taken from what I think I know about western alchemy. But I might have missed something, let me watch those vids and if they change my mind I'll get back with a retraction. I'm from Sweden, but I too think of myself as a history nerd. (Only one year at the university, but over three decades of recreational reading and about four meters of shelf space behind my back as I'm writing this.) So, disrespectfully, I disagree with you about the "on the head" thing. Amestris to mee looks like a generic fantasy military dictatorship with some actual details taken from Imperial Japan. In real history, the dictators of the fascist states, the "führers", were buffoons. Hipkler was a weird and silly little man, and so was Mussolini. In the propaganda of course he was a hyper competent alpha male, not unlike King Bradley, but this isn't Starship Trooper, what we see in FMA is what is actually happening, not some meta in-world propaganda version of it. The real fascist states inundated their subjects with incessant propaganda, all day, everywhere, but in the FMA dictatorship the state seem to mostly leave citizens alone to get on with their daily life. Where is the pervasive fear of being the next victim of arbitrary state violence? Where is the secret police? The real fascist states were also very inefficient (and I know that's not the common pop history view of the 3rd Reich, but my understanding is that they rather inherited a rich legacy of competence and organization, which they degraded at amazing speed). If FMA was true to the historical facts, I would have expected to see mountains of corruption, competing organisations with overlapping areas of responsibility, muddled chains of command, bureaucratic in-fighting, and lots of incompetent idiots in charge because they had better contacts in the party, or had done favors for the right bigwig. Where is the fervent anti-intellectualism? That was _crucial_ to their ideology in the real world. Where is the idolization of a largely invented glorious past, and the "Hooray for war!!!" propaganda? Where is the constant witchhunt rhetoric against imaginary internal enemies, and the brutalization of political discourse? Where is the obsessive anti-semitism? It is true that Amestris organized a holocaust a couple of years back, but they don't exactly brag about having "solved the Ishbal problem" do they? Instead the official story is that they intervened in a civil war and pacified a region plagued by terrorists. (To me this looks a lot more like japanese warfare in mainland China in the 30s.) Also, there's no hint of continent-wide war against peer opponents, so no WW2. If you think that King Bradley and Amestris are accurate and insightful representations of historical European fascism, I'd like to hear your arguments. What aspects does FMA reproduce faithfully? (I mean, apart from the aesthetics, which are chef's kiss.) How do you figure that? Because, well ... I don't see it. Finally, I want to restate that I freaking love FMA. I think that its portrayal of living with a hidden legacy of atrocity is subtle, nuanced and deeply moving. I think that both its world building and magic is amazing. I just think that Arakawa made up most of the awesome stuff on her own, rather than take it from the books I have read. This is not a criticism against her, quite the opposite. Possibly, probably, she's also influenced by japanese history, mythology and culture, but although I'm fascinated by the Meiji restauration, I'm not as versed in that as in European stuff, so I can't talk intelligently about that aspect of the show. I don't even know if the parallells to Imperial Japan are intentional or accidental. Long post, but I'm interested in the subject. Cheers!
Also, I do believe that many of the "mysterious" or un-naned illnesses through out many anime depicts the lasting generation effects of radiation poisoning. Ive read about that quite a bit that after seeing Grave of Fireflies. . It poisons the land, the water, the wild life... Look also at the film "When the wind Blows." It is also a bout a bomb going off.
More than two decades ago, when I was a young child, I've seen a documentary on nuclear bombing of Japan with many quotes from survivors, some of them, I'm sure, you also read during your video. I remember how this documentary haunted me, I was convinced that this feeling of horror would never leave me. And yet, without forgetting the event, we end up neglecting the sheer horror of its human consequences and seeing it only through the prism of its repercussions on WW2. Today, more than two decades later, you've plunged me back into that state of horror and rekindled some of the emotions that make humans social animals, leaving me shaking with uncontrollable tears. I never forgot how to cry. And for that, I thank you.
I really love the Nausicaa manga. It is explicit in its messaging about humans ruining the planet and messing with things they should not. Nausicaa is a pacifist, but she’s not stupid. She will fight to defend herself and achieve her goals. It is my favorite sci fi story, and I highly recommend it to everyone. The movie only runs about 1/6th of the length of the manga btw
studio ghibli has always had a special place in my heart. i'll get that out of the way first. now, i want to say, that human nature is to form a foundation of other humans and to use that to assure survival. and, i think that war is one of the things that, while horrific and cruel and utterly unnecessary, taps into this instinct, in some twisted way. the instinct to put other groups aside for your own, or to put others in general aside for yourself, is something that every living thing possesses, to an extent. what makes us human, in my opinion, is our ability to overcome this selfish instinct. it makes us human to know how to cry. to know how to cry for those we don't know. it makes us human to know how to cry for those we do not know, for those we will never know. and it makes us human to know that we can. war.... war makes us forget. war makes us forget how to cry. it makes us forget that we ever knew how. at least, for a little while. and studio ghibli films, i think, capture this concept to a T.
![On Writing: Revenge! [ John Wick | Gone Girl | V for Vendetta ]](/img/n.gif)
We must not forget how to cry.
~ Tim
When you get older, it gets harder to let the tears flow out.
Higher order analysis
;_;
Never
This video falls into the pitfall of equating weapons to the suffering, ignorant of how weapons save lives - and how lives could have been ended by weaker ones as well (i. e. Ukraine).
Besides, a video essay covering art should not be too confident about geopolitics.
*Edit: historically, pacifism has never lead to peace
Hayao Miyazaki was born into the times of war, and witnessed a lot of it in his childhood, he saw the bombings and the attacks that affected many, many people around him. His father was also an aircraft designer for war and military. So you could truly say that it shaped the person who he now is, and it did. We can see it reflected all throughout his films, and his loving cursed passion for planes
This makes sense for my understanding of nausicaa
@@spritemon98 Yeah truly… Miyazaki once advised if you want to make films, you must observe the world around you in your life. And I guess his experiences are truly reflected in his films
@@behindthemaestrosdesk makes sense
Well rounded video... remember unit 431 and their plans.
He was born in 1941 which means he was 3-4 years old when the war ended. So realistically he probably has little true memories of any of that stuff… don’t lie
I object to calling Godzilla 'Reimagined' as nuclear fallout - Godzilla has always been about the Bomb.
Shows how ignorant this guy is of history. He sees some emotional argument from some breadtuber, or some historically ignorant hippy dippy art house critic and he runs with it.
Not really, godzilla is not an analoge to the bombings, it's about the testings around bikini atoll, the creeping, indestinct and still so very real effects of those. It's is not about the bombings themselfs, it's about the fear of it might happen again. Watch the first movie. Godzilla is not bombastic unmissable as a detonation, it's creeping horror vrom the sea
@@SingingSealRianaThat’s true, but the full quote from the video is “reimagined as nuclear fallout,” which _is_ incorrect. Godzilla _has_ always been nuclear fallout, just not from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
@@rock21611
Nope!
Godzilla is literally the Nuclear Bomb incarnate as well the vengeance against Japan for causing World War 2 (according to Dr. Kyohei Yamane and Dr. Daisuke Serizawa).
Godzilla Minus One (November 2023) will be more controversial since it will be set 1 year after the Hiroshima & Nagaski Bombings AND be related to the War than the nuclear horror aspect.
@@whathell6tcontroversial or not I can’t friggin wait for Goji -1! Regardless of his shifting purpose, he always plays some interceding role between humans and the Earth (and/or humans themselves). He is that final mystery that remains out of our control, all we can do as humans is react-which is what counts in the end, how we decide to act in the face of unstoppable change.
Fullmetal Alchemist has an interesting perspective on this. Though it's framed from Japan's perception of a Western country (I doubt anyone would ever let Arakawa publish if it weren't), it's characters are constantly grappling with the fact that they and their military were responsible for pointless atrocities. The most determined characters work to build a world were they would be prosecuted as war criminals.
So many fans miss this most crucial point of the whole show. It's incredibly nuanced narrative I've never seen successfully pulled off before or after.
As subversive as Fullmetal Alchemist is with its portrayal of war, I feel Attack on Titan takes it a few steps further. (Spoilers down below)
At the end of S3, and most of the final season, we look at Marley as the villains. Even as our favorites commit atrocities, Marley is still the bad guy in our eyes for starting this conflict.
Until S4 ep21 (or chapter 122 of the manga), where we see that Eldia, the ancestors of all our favorites from Paradis, were indeed, as vile and barbaric as Marley and the rest of the world say they were. Maybe even worse. Eldia really did plunge the rest of the world into hell. One that lasted nearly 2000 years. Before one guy had enough. And instead of making amends and atonement, he just pulled a giant "Ight, I'mma head out" and erased the memories of the subjects he took with him. Not to mention he left behind many more, dooming them to a life of discrimination, suffering, and hatred, both for themselves, and their fellow Eldians across the sea.
Just like Japan, Paradis lives in denial of its bloody history. Literally, since their memories were stolen. Even after learning about it at the end of S3, the majority of them still play the victim. The Yeagerists are hell-bent on reviving that same empire, with even the regular citizens supporting them. By the time the Rumbling is unleashed, Paradis became a full-on perpetrator. Yet, people still defend Paradis, in-universe, and out, even though they are no longer victims. In fact, you could make the case that they are now worse than they have ever been.
Attack on Titan shows a war where every side is guilty of horrific sin. Everyone is both victim and perpetrator. The only thing that separates the Alliance from everyone else is their open admission and eventual acceptance of their roles as both. And after everything, after all the bloodshed, anguish, pain, and sacrifice, peace still isn't a guarantee. There is no telling if the future will be better. We're exhausted, battered, and left wondering if any of it was worth it. And all of this combine to make Attack on Titan, at least in my eyes, the 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙛𝙚𝙘𝙩 anti-war story (for better or for worse).
@@CrimsonCharan While I don't agree that it's the most "perfect" anti war story or that if it's even actually an anti war story, ngl, this is definitely one of the most unique takes ive read about AoT considering nearly every fan I've encountered just more or less glorifies and/or romanticizes Eren and/or his genocide, without even considering the consequences of his actions, especially to Paradis and the Eldians AFTER the Rumbling.
With Paradis being one of the few surviving "healthy" nations, they're left with a world that's more or less just an ocean of gore and blood, diseases would very likely spread from all the corpses, a number animal species will die off, and Paradis is led by the Yeagerists who (ironically like a lot of aot's fans) glorify and romanticize Eren's atrocities, thus likely once again shape Paradis into the same empire that made the world hate the Eldians to begin with (that is, if they actually live long enough to create one).
In an almost amusing and sad sort of way, Eren never really ended the wheel of hate and vengeance that's plagued AoT's world for thousands of years by destroying said "wheel" via trampling everything beyond Paradis. The Rumbling only made the wheel go on further, and now, with everything more or less dead, the wheel now turns its focus on the tiny little island called Paradis, whose people desperately seek freedom the most just like their "savior", and much like him, have now tragically become the slaves to its very ideal.
@@CrimsonCharan yes to this. Without history we are in the dark and at the will of our overlords.
@@CrimsonCharan bro Marley ARE the villains. You don't get to do a holocaust because you were wronged by an ethnic group in the past. Besides, AOT is all over with the metaphors for various historical events, without an actual philosophical through line, which kind of ruined the series for me.
An example here is Marley doing a holocaust, therefore we interpret Eldians as the Jews of the universe. Except in this universe the Eldians (Jews) really WERE the monsters that the Marleyans (Nazis) portrayed them to be. What kind of implication do those parallels carry?
Oh yeah, also Paradis does not live in denial. They are A) ignorant to their history, with only the royal family knowing the truth and B) preoccupied with being eaten alive (which is another theme that just fucking disappears into thin air halfway through the show).
My point being AOT was a fun show, but it isn't the bastion of intelligent writing people make it out to be.
This brought back some memories long forgotten. I am half Japanese, half Romanian and growing up, the topic of WW2 was very difficult for me, even if I've never been directly affected by it. I don't even know how to put this into words. I remember when my brother broke down crying while trying to read about Pearl Harbor, and how he refused to hear anything about the atomic bombs. I was always taught that Japan was THE victim of WW2, and that Americans and Japanese people are enemies. I was scared when my city was visited by American military because I thought if they figure out I'm half Japanese, they might hate me, or even hurt me. Obviously, nothing happened and I was left confused. Idk what conclusion I'm coming to. It's just just something from my childhood that I haven't really sat down with for a long time. Along with your video about Unit 731 (and the other Units like it), I'm thankful for your videos about Japan and WW2.
The government and emperor of Japan were not victims, but the people of Japan overwhelmingly were. They were indoctrinated for over a generation leading up to the war. The leadership since the Shogunate era had suppressed foreign ideologies such as democracy. Japanese children were taught about their own supremacy and how if they didn’t take China and the rest of east Asia that either the West or Soviets would, and then resource-poor Japan would be next. The small cluster of the wealthy and military elites controlled the media and fed Japan’s people nothing but paranoia and lies to whip up support for an aggressive war in China. And the government conscripted its people to send to kill or be killed there, while continuing to suppress any dissenters. And years later, after the war turned and Japan failed to negotiate a settlement to keep the US out of the war, it faced the wrath of the largest industrial powerhouse to have ever existed at that point. And yet the leadership were overwhelmingly spared the horrors of the war while the people suffered.
However, despite this double victim status, we must also acknowledge the complicity or even support of many Japanese atrocities, especially in China. Newspapers reported on competitions between soldiers to cut heads off of the Chinese as if they were describing yesterday’s soccer match. Bayonet practice in the Japanese army was on live targets, either political prisoners (see the suppression of foreign ideologies above) or Chinese prisoners, sometimes civilian. Infrastructure was built by the impressed labor of Koreans and southeast Asians. And Japanese educational systems do not teach this and the right wing government that dominated Japan for the last several decades created monuments to war criminals. And this is why the only commonality between many otherwise rival Asian nations is a dislike of Japan.
My general stance has Jewish is that ww2 for Japan and Germany are crimes that has nations they can never outlive but the general people aren’t responsible for what their ancestors did but has people it is their responsibility to prevent something like that from ever happening and both to some extent seem to get it even if Japan like to be more ignorant of their crimes but that my two cents has a Jewish
@@mrr9636Japan has the issue of not being able to admit their ancestors fucked up.
Germany apologized and over time it is not a burden on public relations.
Japan didn't apologize, enshrined the warcriminals and then had a Abe (descendent of a major warcriminal) deny Japanese warcrimes.
It's like they're trying to piss off the Koreans. I'd be pissed too.
Everyone sees the group they identify with as the victim of the war and in a way they are right, cause there is no wining in war, we all only lose though it making pretty mich everyone involved it's victim. But still it's also pretty much always the case, that all sides are doing wrong, who is victimised is not above victimising others and war is so much more complicated then one is the aggressor and one the victim, one is doing wrong and one is doing right.... But that's a bitter pill to swallow and it is so much easyer to make excuses and blame the other side.....
For example with germany, they where decided upon as the instigator of wwI for that was convinient since they lost and all and how that aftermath was handled had a massiv influence on what followed, paving the way for ww2. Hitler would not have had a fraction of the impact and appeal if it had not been for the pretty unfair treatment and actions coming from the allied forces leading up to it. That's in no way an excuse, at all, but it is an explanation, shows the fault does not all lie at one side. Just like what the Nazis did did not negate many germans being against it, many germans trying to hide and help those persecuted and many many german civilians getting raped and murdered by the allied forces both during the war and in its aftermath..
Two wrongs never make it right and we all have very bitter parts in our countries or ancestors history we have to aknowlage, try to understand how it could happen and try everything from preventing a repitition.....
Many many people like to forget that japan allied itself with germany while everyone even 99.99% of germans agree on germany having been the one at fault for ww2! That does not make the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima any less horrifying and terrible, even inexcusable in my eyes, but I am of the opinion, that there is never an excuse or justification for war.
The having done wrong too does not take away from their trauma!
I know as a human Tim is right: we need to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wish never to use nuclear weapons again. Yet to criticize Tibbets and Truman as men who forgot to cry misses what was going on with the war. Tibbets was one of a handful of men who fought in both Europe and Asia and Truman was a WWI vet. No doubt both men had shed a lot of tears and Tibbets had cited Japan's atrocities. Heck I may not be writing this if it weren't for the atomic bombs. According to my family Japanese soldiers had arrested my grandfather and he would have died if it weren't for the atom bombs ending the war and my dad was born after the war.
Japanese perception of the war is very interesting. Even immediately postwar, it was conceptualized as something done to them rather than something done by them. It was seen as something akin to a natural disaster or a hurricane. So they saw themselves as the victims of a war started and perpetuated by their own government, in the same way that someone can't be blamed for a hurricane hitting them
Kind of like how Americans see 9/11 as a random attack and not something caused by their own governments actions
You think the average farmer or dentist cared in the slightest about a war in a foreign land? Of course not! Their government wanted to expand while thier neighbors' allies were occupied, and didn't care who died for it. Same thing that's happened all over the world for millennia. Part of it was the effectiveness of an amazing propaganda machine on isolated people, part was a draft for every man (and eventually every woman) between 17 and 40. People who WANT to be part of the war don't usually need to be drafted. Being forced against your will to fight and kill and die sounds like a victim to me. Being tricked and lied to by propaganda does as well, though less so.
And even past that, the US even admitted at the time, outside thier propaganda of course, that they really just wanted to field test their new bomb. There was no need, they'd spent too much time and money and needed to rush it out there before it'd be breaking a treaty.
Still no excuse for continuing to deny the horrors they did, in the same way there's no excuse for any country to do it. The governments were absolutely at fault, everyone else varying degrees of "less so" or "not."
"Forget how to cry"? The Japanese were TAUGHT how to cry by firebombings and nukes. After their diseased ambitions and lunatic "samurai" ideals made them a plague on Asia and LITERALLY enemies of mankind. Poets who grew after the sick dreams and their dreamers were gone now weep on the graves of THEIR fallen and philosophize. let us learn and not forget. Those weeping are the heirs of butchers who reaped what they sowed, after they taught others to forget how to weep.
According to Japanese history textbooks, they defeated Russia in 1905, then nothing at all happened for 40 years, after which America nuked them for some reason....
Which is ironic considering they committed war crimes arguably worse by every metric except sheer numbers to the Holocaust
34:41 Since you already made the comparison to Tolkien, this makes me of my two favorite Gandalf lines.
"Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love."
And in response to Frodo's "I wish it need not have happened in my time." : “So do I. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
31:39 Having now watched Oppenheimer, the film depicts the atom bomb as a sort of Pandora’s box. While scientifically magnificent, it’s framed as the power it could potentially unleash may bring death to us all. Once Oppenheimer sees the bomb go off, the rest of the film he assumes a “dear god what I have unleashed” attitude. The film does not position this bomb as a symbol of pride for the US, like how Ghibli frames the Zero Fighter as a symbol of pride for Japan, but rather as a symbol of fear and death, and something we will forever live with the consequences of.
That movie made me shake with emotion. Certain scenes were just gut-punching and excellently done.
The one that stick out to me most is when he's 'congratulating' the scientists but all he hears is the silence followed by the deafening blast and the scenes of people's skin melting, the blackened corpse he stepped through. All of it really nailed home the point that nuclear weapons are almost eldritch in their power and horror. Theres no excuse for it ever being created, none. And the flim shows that so many people surfing its development KNEW that from outset. Its chilling...
So we should have just done nothing and let Hitler and Stalin get the bomb first?
@@penultimateh766It was already evidently clear that the germans, irregardless of the efforts of their scientists, would have been unable to produce an atomic bomb. Its true that they discovered nuclear fission but they could not have made a weapon. Many people even argued, including Heisenberg himself, that the German scientists involved were morally opposed to it and therefore made attempts to secretly sabotage it. Now, whether that is true or not is up for debate. The fact of the matter is the scientists, including Heisenberg, convinced themselves and the Nazi government that materials required to make the weapon were enormous, and they also managed to convince themselves that the US would also abandon any attempts to build a bomb.
@@penultimateh766Shouldn't have used it should have dismantled it.
@@penultimateh766hitler wouldn't have because he considered it "Jewish science" and the Nazis were never going to win the war even with nukes. the soviets only increased efforts after the US used the bomb and largely had their project on the back burner.
Regardless, that still doesn't justify the usage of the bomb. Most of the myths the US uses to justify the bombs usage are bullshit. Japan was already evaluating terms of surrender before the first bomb even dropped.
i’m so glad you covered japan’s role in perpetuating the horrors of world war 2. i’m filipino and the atrocities such as the death march and the colonial influence of japan had on my country, i feel, are never talked about enough - this extends to others countries that are often not talked about when WW2 is brought up. it fills me with so much anger and sadness when i hear about these stories that for all the anti-war sentiment countries like Japan share, they’re still hesitant to own up to their own part in the cycle of violence. which is not to say anything anyone went through is less horrific than the other (frankly those drawings do their job perfectly when depicting the fires/bombings) but i mean to say that there are still topics/facets of history away from western/g20 country perspectives that are overlooked and deserve to be talked about in order to achieve the peace we strive for. even in today’s world there are still so many voices and stories left unheard because only those in power really get to tell their own story. i absolutely adore ghibli and i’m so glad you brought this topic up with pieces of art that are so wildly acclaimed. i think it adds further depth to what’s already there in Miyazaki’s works . I love your videos so much, this one was amazing.
My Japanese-American grandmother was born and raised in Japan. She was born in 1936 and lived near Tokyo so she experienced the fire bombing constantly. Too this day she still won’t talk to me about her experience growing up in the war and I completely understand, even if I do want to know her story and her childhood. I hate that she had to go through such a horrific and traumatizing experience, especially when she was just a child.
9 years old when the war ended? The innocent suffer in wars, don't they?
There is a very horrifying anime about the nuclear bombing called "Barefoot Gen." My mother watched this anime in her childhood. We live in Russia, and her childhood was during the times of the Soviet Union, so on TV, they mostly showed authentic Soviet cartoons. But this anime was very different from anything ever shown on TV. It was about the horrors that followed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a damn scary anime. I'm not afraid of any horrors, but this anime scares the hell out of me.
I got to see Barefoot Gen at a private screening for anti-nuclear activists during the late 80s. It was riveting.
I read the manga when I was about 12. It was terrifying, and formative.
I watched it with a friend one night and neither of us knew before hand what the movie was about. We spent the rest of the night sobbing and I have never been the same since. I think everyone should watch it at least once
That film still haunts me.
In America, we have such amnesia about the Cold War. We are now in such denial about the current dangers… it’s as if all the warnings & accounts have just made us better at compartmentalising all the horrors.
I watched it at about 13 and it really formed my opinions on war and the disgraces we bring on each other. It’s terrifying and sad and is a must watch for those who want to learn more about WW2 and the aftermath.
While Ghibli films were a big and wonderful part of my childhood that I wouldn't switch out for anything, they did give me a crippling fear of war as a child. It got so bad at one point that I felt the need to tell my parents I loved them every time a plane passed overhead, because I was so sure it was going to drop a bomb on us. Now, living in Russia and seeing the horror and suffering "my" government has brought into the lives of Ukrainian people, I can only hope that this hell won't last for years. And that it won't come to _this._
Thank you for presenting this topic in such a mindful and lyrical way. It truly is terrifying what forgetting the horrors of war can lead to.
In a way the films did their job and in a way they did not, for they reached the wrong people to prevent another war....
I wish you the best and hope with you, that it will be over soon. There is nothing to win in war that justifies the loss on both sides....
A crippling fear of war may be better than a gluttonous love of it.
@@SingingSealRianaThose with power can not be reached by the same methods those without power can be reached. They have structures enforcing and reinforcing their actions, separating them from normal people, and deafening them to the cries of pain.
@@brookejon3695 not just those in power, as soon as you are invested in something, pretty much all humans have the ability to shut of empathy
Love to you, and everyone affected by this useless war! May God have mercy on you and us and grant us peace soon again!
You know, the way Miyazaki is about White Rose kinda reminds me of how he speaks of his son. He's too much of a perfectionist and is unable to understand certain aspects of the human experience because, to his mind, there is no practice or experimentation. There is only doing something perfectly or failing completely.
Great point!
Miyazaki represents the "Toxic Bushido" cultural mentality pretty well, a kind of thinking that encourages perfectionism. It's why being part of the working class as an adult in Japan is very dehumanizing and the ruling class apathetic, and probably why we often see Japan's near-obsession with youthfulness in their media and children/teen characters changing the world.
Japan's processing of the atomic bombs has always been fascinating, if quite morbid. OSP video on Godzilla is pretty good on it too.
the US is yet to start processing it, morbid or otherwise.
Honestly has Jewish it sometimes feels like how we process the holocaust
@@tatianar9429we saved the world from people much wprse then us many times over we dont meed to
colonial powers nazis
@@tatianar9429 That's because the US government did its DAMNEST to control this kind of information from reaching their public at the time--I wonder why.
@@tatianar9429 there are some of us who do.
The true destructive capability is near impossible to fathom unless you've seen it first hand. It's difficult to comprehend in a practical way what a kiloton or megaton are, although Nukemap by Globalsecurity does an interesting job. I was taking a history class and when we got to WWII we were discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The professor allowed me to present to the class using it. Instead of centering the blast abroad, I made our college campus ground zero. The people who were previously cheering the use of the weapons quickly became gravely quiet. When the last war that was fought on American soil ended 158 years ago and was fought with black-powder weapons, getting people to imagine the destructive power of war is not very effective.
Part of the problem with Japanese understanding of the war and war responsibility, comparative to Germany, is that in Germany there was a very surface-level clear origin point for that kind of mood and rampant nationalism out of which Naziism grew. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goring, Rohm, etc were all very public figures with very well understood philosophies and beliefs, and it became very easy to associate the Nazi movement and German war efforts and crimes in the context of those figures. Whether or not you ascribe to the belief that Germany was led by those men, or that those men were led by Germany, Germany itself certainly took the former approach, and has never really grappled in a meaningful way with the idea that the common people have just as much responsibility, not really helped by how the Nuremberg Trials were prosecuted. (There is the idea of Kollektivschuld, but that's always seemed to me more of an academic thing touted in intellectual circles rather than something really internalized by the common civilian population. And there's certainly a good argument to be made that that 'guilt' only came about when there was a public consciousness that Germany as a nation was going to be held accountable to what they'd done. You can find polls conducted by sociologists in post-war Germany where many Germans, even a majority, still believed Naziism was a good idea beneficial to the German people. But that's all a topic for another day I suppose.)
Comparatively, Japan never had that point of focus. Japan's war and its war crimes were, in many respects, not really the act of individuals or done on the direction of individuals, but were things done by the motivations of everyday soldiers, corporate executives, low-level officers, and even civilians (with some glaring exceptions of course). That leads to a sort of distinguishment where Germany abides by the 'Great Man' idea of history, which is nearly impossible to also attribute to Japan no matter how some historians like to pinpoint Tojo, which is certainly inaccurate by timeline if nothing else. That makes it very hard to grapple with the war, because in order to do so, it requires acknowledging that Japan was fighting a peoples' war, in the sense that every level of society was bought into those ideals. It requires serious introspection into culture, and how they came to that point that they considered it morally permissible to do the things they did as an entire society, not just as a passive, powerless observer as the Germans sometimes like to frame their civilian population, but as participants. There really was just never any serious protest against the Japanese prosecution of its war efforts, and the public was fully in support in nearly all respects. German society was too, right, but again they have the 'Great Man' theory of history to fall back on and deflect through.
As an example, many, many aspects of Japanese power at that time were actually centered in the junior officer corp who acted independently of the higher command structure, and often contradictory to what that higher command structure wanted at any given time. Or the feuds between the army and the navy, or between the military and the corporations, or between the corporations and the civilian government, and so on. Japan didn't have central figures to blame, so instead of really tackling those problems, as a society they just... Gave up discussing it at all, at least in mass media.
This isn't intended to be a condemnation really, not of either Germany nor Japan's modern thought on the conflict. All things being equal I think Germany has handled it as well as might be expected, and certainly better than many other nations, and I think Japan's pacifism, whether it originated out of a victim-mentality, or a sense of introspection largely serves the same purpose (though how the modern government has gone since the Abe administration is a different matter.) I think no nation is good at understanding collective responsibility as a society, least of all the large colonial powers. Just look at discussions of slavery in the United States or the Native American purges and wars, or the U.K.'s responsibility in India, or the Dutch in Indonesia, and how fractious those conversation can be. But it is something interesting to study and I think vital to the study of the topic in particular if you want to discuss it meaningfully in an academic setting.
This, exactly this.
I think the largest difference in the German and Japanese mindset of the war and the way we look at it is how we think of citizens. The more democratic a nation the more they tend to judge the citizens of other nations as responsible. Germany, as a democracy at the time, has to reflect on the actions of the nation as at least partially their own fault. Japan being a monarchy, the citizens get a bit of an out since they didn't put the government in power. But as a Democracy Americans tend to have a very "citizens are liable for their government" mindset.
European Enlightenment ideology gave us the idea that the government exists at the consent of the governed. That wasn't (and still isn't) universal in WWII.
@@codybaker1150 Japan of the time was not really a monarchy. They had a monarch, but they were a constitutional democracy with elected officials just the same as any other nation. The Taisho period had Japan as the strongest democratic force in Asia. It was the populist militarist movement that moved it from there to a corporatist oligarchic-dictatorship, but it certainly didn't start there, and was not destined to end there either.
@@codybaker1150Japan was really more of a military dictatorship than a monarchy. The monarch still had ultimate power, but he largely left the military leaders alone and allowed them to make Decisions with his passive approval.
It was kind of a similar situation to fascist Italy actually.
@@pennyforyourthots I agree that is more accurate, but it's more the idea of the "Power is derived from God" idea from the monarchy era than "power is derived from the consent of the governed" that I am referring to. Even if their government was every bit as complex as a western constitutional monarchy
Odd that Miyazaki feels that way about the White Rose, a group of students who did nothing more than distribute leaflets. The only thing that would remotely describe them as fanatical would be the unflinching courage with which they went to their deaths.
Maybe he laments that they died so young. It's not that different from the position that the sacrifices of every young soldier to ever die for their country is ultimately a pointless and unconscionable waste of life. There is no doubt that they were brave; but in either case was the fight really worth dying for?
The dead obviously can't defend their position, so their choices can only be judged from the perspective of those they leave behind. We will never know the answer.
Seems strange to me, too. The White Rose in Germany wasn't about violent resistance or "support killing or beeing killed".
Maybe a mistranslation, or another "white rose society"? There was a quite old and influential movement in China called White Lotus that led to violent uprisings in the 19. century, and there are certainly thousands of other resistance groups in Japanese or East Asian history that I've never heard of...
the man is a living contradiction, if you watched documentaries about him you will see how much of a nihilist he is sometimes, how he really hates his work at times even if he can't stop producing it. Even how bad of a husband or father he is. People are complex and rarely wholly virtuous, especially if they grew up during war time on the wrong side in a family that profited from the wat itself.
I feel like Miazaki was more concerned about choosing a path which most likely ends in early death instead of a path of trying to be as much human as the system allows you so that you don’t endanger yourself while not being more cruel than absolutely necessary.
But to me that seems more like a resignation. The reason the Nazis could become so strong is because people went along with it if it meant they themselves would stay safe, if it meant that the system wouldn’t turn on them.
But you can’t end a corrupted system if you always just try to maneuvre your own way through it. And you certainly can’t prevent it. You need to draw clear lines which should never be crossed and any crossing needs to have clear immediate consequences.
The Nazis didn’t start to kill right away. They went step by step. First raising anger, exploiting the poverty of the people and their worries, blaming certain groups, secluding them, one by one stripping away their rights until they were hardly viewed as human anymore. And when you stop seeing a human, you stop worrying about killing. When it all happens gradually, then where exactly is the line? When they start killing? No. It’s when you start to view them as even slightly lesser. When you forget that all human beings are equal in their rights and dignity.
As someone who went to a "Siblings-Scholl" school (named after the white rose's leaders) and who has read most of their works (I was always especially drawn to Sophie Scholl's texts, as her perspective was just a bit different from the rest, being the youngest and slightly sheltered at the beginning), I would absolutely call them fanatical. They absolutely didn't want to die, obviously, but they were very much understanding of the risks they took. I've heard a definition of fanatical as "being willing to kill and/or be killed for a belief" and while they were pacifists and would never kill, they absolutely fit that description.
It should be noted that cluster munitions were only banned by countries that don't really use Artillery as part of their doctrine, over 92% of all the world's artillery capacity belongs to nations that still use cluster munitions
Russia, India, China, Brazil and the US among them
The only countries which banned cluster munitions were the ones who barely if ever used them. It's a useful weapon, one which, while leaving behind dangerous unexploded ordnance, probably- and yes, I mean this- saves lives in the long run. If an enemy can be forced to see how a war cannot be won, they are much more likely to capitulate. Cluster bombs make it easier for them to see this. This is harsh, I know, but that's war.
Cluster munitions were design as area denial munitions, essentially to take down large formations of troops.
@@Aristocles22 should be said that it depends how unreliable they are too, american cluster munition is significantly more reliable than russian ones
@@Helperbot-2000 Very much so. Russian cluster bombs have a UXO ratio of upwards of 50%, the US less than 10%.
I remember watching Howl's Moving Castle for the first time. I remember I almost missed the scene where Howl and Sophie first meet because of the discomfort I felt watching the guards bother Sophie, to put it lightly. I wanted to leave the room. And frankly, I didn't know exactly why I didn't like the scene, I watched Graveyard of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke at this point, which had heavier scenes depicting much more graphic imagery of war. And even as I finished Howl's Moving Castle without much discomfort after that scene, and I loved it. I loved Studio Ghibli. I love these heavy, dark, but whimsical stories. It was hard to articulate back then but I think I can word it better now.
Everyone gets to talk about how awful the bombings were and the devastation Japan went through during WWII. They're allowed to express this in a museum filled with paintings drawn by survivors, as gruesome as they may be. But we, Filipinos, we build one statue- one reminder of the women the Japanese captured and raped and tortured, and the Japanese government wants it removed.
I like that Tim brought this up, we really can't ignore what Japan has done during the war and their part in instigating it. I truly feel sorrow for the victims and survivors of the atomic bombs. I felt horrible at that scene of Howl's Moving Castle. And I still feel there's much to discuss about what to do now with these devastating super weapons. But Japan doesn't get to erase what they did during the war as well. I don't think they get to tell other countries that they were blameless victims nor dance around the fact that they've committed atrocities as well.
These stories will always be for the innocent people caught in the crossfire to tell.
And watching Sophie and Howl fall in love and save each other in spite of the curses placed on them and the war they find themselves in, it made me happy.
Also goddamn if a woman says to leave her alone you leave her the fuck alone.
(I love Studio Ghibli and Japan btw, I just wanted to get this out of my system because comfort women and their families and especially the survivors deserve to be heard too and I don't like what the Japanese government did here, not the country itself.)
"These stories will always be for the innocent people caught in the crossfire to tell."
Well said!
When it comes to entire peoples, you basically always have a mixture of innocent people, perpetrators of atrocities, and anybody inbetween.
Some Japanese people committed atrocities, some were victims of atrocities, and some were probably even both.
well said, and also keep in mind the only reason japan thinks it can still bully people these days is because it has the full support of the us for its bad behavior.
@@johannageisel5390 That's definitely an ethos that most of the Studio Ghibli films, especially those made by Miyazaki, seem to follow.
Military forces and personnel are near unanimously portrayed as antagonists who do nothing but pillage, kill and destroy blindly and indiscriminately. Films like Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises depict the army as a bunch of arrogant buffonishly destructive imbeciles. Princess Mononoke meanwhile has the invading warlords portrayed as a faceless bunch of bandits, in sharp contrast to the more sympathetic people of Iron Town. And Howl's Moving Castle has a mixture of the two depictions, the military force largely shown as a destructive presence, while the few representatives we see of said military (the King, the soldiers who harass Sophie at the beginning) are blustering idiots.
Meanwhile, the protagonists of the films tend to fall into either of the latter two categories. The protagonists in Castle in the Sky and Grave of the Fireflies are children who are victims of vast militaristic campaigns that they don't really understand. The central conflicts in Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke don't even directly concern the protagonists, who get dragged into the fighting against their will through random happenstance. In Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie has no real connection to the war that ultimately leads to the destruction of her hometown, while Umi's main story in From Up on Poppy Hill is directly connected to her father's death during the War.
And then there's other characters who aren't necessarily perpetrators of war, but nonetheless are not uninvolved with the central conflicts. Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso each look at how those who fight in wars ultimately lose their humanity, visually shown by the title characters in both films literally turning into animals. Princess Mononoke sees the otherwise decent residents of Iron Town turn into violent killers and industrialists in order to protect themselves from the invading warlords, and in the process turn the peaceful forest spirits against them. And then there's Jiro in The Wind Rises, whose passions and skills are co-opted by the Imperial Japanese military, in turn making him complicit in the horrific acts of violence that they inflict elsewhere.
Ultimately, I think Miyazaki does a fantastic job at depicting war in his films, and I think that's in large part because he knows to centre it around the people caught in its crossfire, whether it be the innocents who have no real part in the fighting, or those decent people who forsake their own morals and decency as a part of the banal nationalistic dogma fuelling the conflicts.
Small correction (11:10 in the video): The first atomic bomb wasn't dropped by a B-17 "flying fortress", but instead by a B-29 "superfortress". Great video though!
Was just about to say. Thanks for clarifying.
Please don't post nuclear sub specs or some shit in discord, private.
Also came to see if someone noticed. Good on ya
We get it, you play warthunder
Hi Tim, small correction.
The problem with cluster munitions is not at all that they affect large areas, there are other comparatively capable stuff there. The real problem of cluster munitions - is that each one of hundreds smaller submunitions has a chance of not exploding and staying as a defacto mine for many years after the war ends.
DONT STOP HERE.
Some-More-News has a video on War and multiple on F-scism,
and the Term Solarpunk is waitig for you to explore it.
!!
As a youtuber who's specialized in Miyazaki, and also very very influenced by your content Tim - I am touched watching this. Thank you for making this video.
The scene that stuck with me in regards to Miyazaki's particular colour of horror was the bombs, and especially the sound of a breath that precedes them (what a wonderful narrative choice!) in The Wind Rises. Something about that scene, with the ground being pushed like a liquid, being at the start of a journey that, beautiful as it was, would also bring death to others - there's something about that that feels utterly beautiful and terribly sad to me.
Thank you for the research, thank you for the care you put into this.
Yeah the sound design in The Wind Rises is truly exceptional.
It is an art in itself to present such horror in an excessable, yeah down right beautiful way without taking away from how terrifying it is!!!
I watched Oppenheimer when it came out. It offhandedly mentions the destruction a few times but does focus heavily at times on the hubris and aftermath of the bombings. What was unknown to me was that there was a list of 12 cities in Japan, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as potential targets. Another target was Kyoto which was stricken from the list by the US’s Secretary of War at the time because he had honeymooned there. Early in the film Oppenheimer and some of his students celebrate the scientific discovery of splitting the atom only to immediately realize the horrific military implications of the process. The movie ends with Oppenheimer admitting that he believes his work has lead to the destruction of the world, not immediately, but eventually.
Which, let's be honest, will indeed happen when the wrong people continue to be in power.
At about the 13 minute mark, you are talking about having distance between us and the violence.
I served in the U.S. Army from 2004 to 2017. During that time, I was deployed twice as an artilleryman. In my first deployment, I spent most of my time in the turret of a humvee. In my second tour, I was doing artillery. I had, and still have a front row seat to having killed at range. When I fired the howitzer, all I saw were numbers in the sight, and when I pulled the firing mechanism, to the cheers of my fellow Soldiers, I knew that I had done a grave thing.
The responsibility of killing at a distance is a strange thing. It's sterile; it is devoid of immediate consequence.
I used to advocate for the stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. It took becoming a Soldier and seeing war first hand to fully realize its horror.
Thank you for allowing me to comment, and thank you for keeping this story alive. It is especially relevant with nuclear war rearing its ugly head.
Thank you for your service and perspective.
I hadn’t heard of (nor considered) getting rid of aircraft in war before this video, but it makes sense. The more impersonal war is, the easier it becomes.
@@eos_aurora aircraft are as much a part of war as the meat grinder of bodies and minds.
From my perspective, the aircraft are not evil, or dangerous, in and of themselves, it's how they're employed. During my third, and final, deployment I was riding a medevac helicopter in the Tagab Valley not far from Bagram Air Base. That flight saved an Afghan soldier's life.
There's a lot wrong with war, but if you're careful, you can find more humanity in a war zone than you might think.
I am shocked that Miyazaki would disparage the White Rose like that. Certainly not everyone is cut out to resist in that way and there is value in trying to be as humane as possible to others in a given situation but I think it's also wrong to condemn more proactive resistance than that.
To call that "condemnation" seems excessive. He just said he disliked their approach, and preferred a different one. I read that as "it's not for me."
You can heal cancer with chemotherapy but some people think reiki is enough
I paused the video to come to the comments as soon as he read that. White Rose as fanatic? They were active resistance instead of resistance by omission. Pamphlets don't strike me as fanatic. I agree it's really odd
I'm guessing he see's that type of resistance as ineffective. A flashy stand against the bad but one that has no real impact.
@@ASpaceOstrich To be fair, I don't think Miyazaki was talking about the "impact" of such actions. The White Rose society might have not been all that impactful at the time, but what kind of impact would a Nazi soldier keeping his humanity have on the war at large? I think we would need to read the whole thing instead of judging by the little extract in this video, I am sure there is some context we are missing here.
Oppenheimer has an interesting perspective on the atom bomb. It doesn't necessarily take a side on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it presents everyone's reasons for being for or against the bombings in a mostly neutral context.
What it does make a bigger statement about is the atom bomb as a concept, it portrays it as a Pandora's box which could lead to a massive escalation in weapons of mass destruction.
There's a section earlier in the movie where (spoilers I guess) one of the scientists theorizes that it's possible for the fission reaction to continue spreading out indefinitely, setting the air on fire and causing a chain reaction that would end the world, they eventually crunch the numbers and realize that the chance of this happening is zero-adjacent, and lo and behold the Trinity Test goes of without setting the planet on fire. At the very end of the movie (years later in universe) Oppenheimer says that after realizing the destruction that these weapons are capable of inflicting, he fears that the atom bomb may have set off a chain reaction to end the world after all.
yeah but you get how being "neutral" quote unquote is itself an insanely ideological position to take in context? Like a "neutral" depiction of the holocaust or american slavery? That claims to be neutral because it depicts some of the perpetrators restling with their counscounce? but you know doesn't even think to depict things from the perspectives of the victims?
choosing not to condemn something on that scale is just as much a radical choice as outright supporting or opposing it.
the movie seemed far more interested in following petty power plays between high level bureaucrats, that occurred after the fact, which to me was far less interesting and really seemed to miss the larger issue.
also you know its kind of bullshit, because it wasn't even really "neutral" at all, there wasn't a single Japanese character in the movie and none of the fallout was even actually literally depicted, just alluded to in the hallucination scene. Like if you just depict someone with their skin sloughing off without commentary, as japanese media often did, it would be tough to call it "neutral" but it would be just as accurate.
@@chriss780 The atomic bombings were a lot more morally complex than the holocaust and slavery. Nobody knew if Japan would surrender or not, and if they didn't it was believed that the only alternative would be a full on invasion of Japan (which would obviously have caused many more deaths on both sides)
I still disagree with dropping the bombs, since Japan was already loosing on all fronts and would have very likely surrendered, but comparing it to the holocaust is, frankly, silly.
@@chriss780 It's ultimately a movie about Oppenheimer, not about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I disagree about the mostly neutral context OP claims there is- it depicts everyone's reasons for being for or against the bombings through the lenses of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's own views on the bomb change as the development and the war goes on- he sees it as noble and a race against the clock to beat the Nazi tyrants to the most destructive weapon on the planet. Then, as Hitler dies and dissent grows, he shows clear conflict between going against the usage of it and going with the usage of it, but ultimately settles on the 'necessity' of it to (possibly) avoid the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Finally, when the usage of the bomb finally comes to bear, the reality settles and it crushes his soul. The reason why none of the fallout was actually depicted or why there were no Japanese characters was because Oppenheimer never met these people- Oppenheimer never saw the destruction his own creation wrought upon the Japanese people. He could only guess- hence the hallucination scene. And ultimately, the larger issue that Oppenheimer is trying to sell is not the fact that 226,000 people died in the bombings, but that the development and usage of nuclear bombs set into motion a chain of events that could very well lead to the destruction of life on Earth as we know it.
@@zerolantern5794 No, he did see pictures of what it did to the victims, but the movie didn't actually show any of them. Just his reaction to the slideshow presentation. It was a missed opportunity, and apparently left such little impact on you that you forgot about the scene. If they actually showed one of those images he looked at (which could be recreated with actors), it would have been haunting and impactful and underscored why he changed his feelings so drastically.
@@joshuasgameplays9850 especially silly since japan killed twice as many only chinese civillians as the holocaust, and far far more counding the rest of south east asia, and they killed more people in nanking than the nukes, many of which they took their time to rape both before and after their deaths too
17:33 I had a similar experience when I was younger and got to go on a trip to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. Standing in the box car and seeing the piles and piles of shoes, then personal effects. It’s something you can’t unsee. The cruelty of it all.
I was in yad vashem and had a very similar experience just staring at the piles of shoes. It was a trip with other 15 year olds and the bus was basically silent when we left.
I think that's why the Ghibli stories hit so differently, you can somehow tell how much emotions and memories are worked into them.
A great video.
Thanks Tim.
Wow, you really unpacked a lot here, and this was beautifully done. I lived in Korea for two years, then I lived in Japan for 2 1/2 years. Because of my time in Korea, I knew how Koreans felt about Japan, about how in denial Japan was. In Japan, I experienced the denial first hand and was told it was 'Korean propaganda', and this was pretty upsetting to me. I am from Christchurch, and in Godley Heads/Awaroa, there is a coastal defence battery in preparation for world war two. The problem is that the Japanese education system brushes over their part in the war, so most have no idea that their country invaded others and committed many war crimes. I had one student in Japan that booked me for a one on one to talk about it, as he went to Indonesia and was shocked to see Japan had built buildings during their invasion; he had no idea Japan invaded other countries. We then compared Japan and Germany, how Germany is pretty self-reflective on their historical atrocities, and it's understandable why countries like Korea can't really move on when what happened to them isn't even genuinely acknowledged.
I missed out on visiting Hiroshima, so it was great to see some of the pictures. War is horrific, and Ghibli's take on humanity is interesting, and I love that flying was shown to be beautiful when it isn't used for violence.
Side note: does anyone else get Stormlight Archive vibes from those creatures in Nausicaa of the Valley?
You really need to read about Unit 731 and "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" to understand why OSS understood why using the Atomic Bomb was necessary.
Studio Ghibli could have made movies that showed what Imperial Japan did to the: Chinese, Koreans, Allied POW's & Civilians, etc etc...
'As Imperial Japan was so savage that members of the Third Reich who witnessed their barbarism wrote letters to Adolf Hitler on how fucking savage their Japanese Allies were to Chinese Civilians...
Personally, I would have handled the US assault on the home Islands differently had I been in a position of power back then:
As when Imperial Japan threatened to kill all Allied POW's & Civilians in their custody, I would have arranged for a thousand Japanese POW;s to be released wearing static line parachutes over Tokyo Imperial Palace, after their heads were removed.
The first Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Unit 731 in occupied China, with instructions to the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists on how to create an exclusion zone as that may have saved the lives of millions of Chinese from Unit 731's Weaponized Bubonic Plague, and other Bioweapons.
The second Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Tokyo Imperial Palace and the third on the greatest Military target left, probably the Japanese Navy.
And then I would have dropped leaflets on the Allied intentions for civilians explaining that without an unconditional surrender, that holy hell would would be dropped on Imperial Japan's remaining targets....
If you don't understand why my hard line approach, then you haven't considered what would have happened if "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" had been successful. Given that three suicide planes would have been launched from an I-400 class carrier submarine to drop Weaponized Bubonic Plague on San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland. This would have killed at least a quarter of the population on the West Coast at a minimum. More likely it would have spread & killed about a quarter of the world population...
The response by the Allied Powers & non-aligned Nations would have been making sure that the Nation of Japan & the Japanese People would only exist in history books and photos...
That is the ind of fanaticism that Studio Ghibli & other Japanese Media choose to ignore, as they made something worse than the Atomic Bomb and tried to us it because they believed that "Imperial Japan would rule the world for a time"....
This explains why I was so scared of Ghibli movies when I was younger. Even the ones that aren't strictly about war are influenced by this severe sadness and mourning of the horrors of war. You can see it even in the designs of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro. The younger me wasn't ready for the reality Ghibli was depicting, but now they are some of my favorite movies for that same sorrow infused with hope. What a great video, Tim.
personally I like the fact that Miazaki never went down the ''wo is us'' path with this stuff, a lot of his messages are equally applicable AGAINST japan for the horrific atrocity's they committed against Korea and China, atrocities that were so grievous that literally SS officer traveled to China to essentially ask the Japanese to chill the fuck out and stop murder fuck raping china.....
i love that his anti nuclear stuff has never been about demonizing any specific nation or people and more about warning against the weapons and war as a concept, in Nausicäa part of that movie is understanding and being at peace with both nature and one another, and showing how selfish warfare only brings EVRYONE down, and leaves the earth scarred and battered.
So much of anime is a direct response to this cultural trauma. From the early days of Godzilla and Astroboy all the way to Naruto and the tailed beasts being a direct representation of the atomic weapons held by super powers of the modern era.
There is an endless wellspring of cultural analysis here. I think you covered a very important chunk of it. You also did so very respectfully .Very cool.
Where you showed the pictures i shed a tear. It reminded me of my grandgrandmother who witnessed the firestorm of Dresden. It was not a nuclear bomb but that destruction from above she described that after the bombing of Dresden she said it was a grey mass after the died out. No blue sky no colour everything was a grey mass.
Aircrafts truly brought us a form of killing no other weapon ever could give us
You can also find these themes explored in the manga One Piece.
The Buster Call - the ultimate form of military attack used by the Marines.
"People can't be seen on a map. Without any emotion, they're just erasing one small island off the map. That's what a Buster Call is!!" - Nico Robin
Thanks! One of the best videos ive seen on YT ever
There's been a bunch of criticism of Oppenheimer about it not showing the Japanese view of the bomb to which the obvious answer is to watch Japanese stories that do talk about it in their own words, not ours
Not showing the Japanese side made the whole thing this American jingoistic inability to see the human toll of their "brilliance." They, and their allies, do it all the time; ISIS/ISIL was this collection of barbaric mongrels, black and brown refugees this mass of encroaching deadly parasites and diseases, North Koreans this nation of deluded cancers, Cuba this jealous unwanted rabid dog, China predator nipping at your heels, or even Russia as this unreasonable demon out to steak your soul.
Not showing the human toll of their "heroicism" is per the course when you know even the director (in this case creators of the bomb too) instinctively didn't see the humanity on the other side of their weapon of mass destruction. They pontificate about the wrongs they did, intellectually asses their shame in a self serving thought of nothing humane and then celebrate the devastation they caused.
Nobody can count on their viewers to "go watch Miyazaki films, cuz if you don't, my work will give you a biased and incomplete view of history"
@@Strogman25 No film, no matter how many hours long, will give you an unbiased and complete view of history. It's fair to demand that Nolan should have added more perspectives in, but just as fair that I don't think Nolan had any obligation to.
Even without that perspective, the movie, at least in my eyes, was able to effectively show the horrors of the bombs, and the guilt Oppenheimer had to live with.
Also, showing the aftermath of the bombs might border on gratuitous and disrespectful for some people.
A movie about Oppenheimer showing things from his Perspective. How Surprising. 😅
Considering atomic bomb is a sensitive topic for the Japanese, it’s impressive that Miyazaki brings it up so often.
How much of Miyazaki’s message got through, is uncertain.
One repeated and somewhat worrying recent trend in Japanese media is ‘protect’
You have heros perform all levels of atrocities and destruction under the justification of ‘protecting what’s important to them’
Almost like how Imperial Japan justifies the wars as ‘protecting the emperor’
Older generation creators like Miyazaki and Torino don’t usually do this.
I hope it’s just lazy writing of younger creators rather than some rabbit hole worth another one of Tim’s video.
Can you list examples of these heroes willing to do atrocities to protect what is important to them.
The most recent one I can think about is Attack on Titan. The main character literally commits g3nocid3 and even then the way story events are positioned. It's actually the most logical action because Paradis facing an existential threat from a World that sees them as the d3vil
You probably got the best example. The way Attack on Titan portray ‘there no other way’ is pretty much Imperial Japan’s justification of war.
Similar justification were seen in my favorite game Tales of Xillia, where the main characters become sympathetic then aided the invaders, who were dying from lack of resources. Again, similar to Imperial Japan’s narrative when they were starved off from vital resources due to western sanctions.
The earliest character I can think of where protecting goes off the rail is Char and Lalah from Gundam, which is portrayed in a less favorable way. The way they talk like Amuro should die because the two have to protect each other, still haunts me today.
Tomino Yoshiyuki seems to dislike this idea so much the characters in Space Runaway Ideon blow up the universe by trying to protect what’s dear to them.
Protect is simple and instinctive, just dehumanize the enemy as pure evil and exterminate with extreme prejudice.
It felt like works that tries to humanize enemies like Demon Slayer is a rarity now days. Where badass power fantasy heroes with cheating capabilities wiping out pure evil enemies is more of a norm now. Kirito is one of the few power fantasy heros I can think of that doesn’t do this...
But it literally takes a ‘New Type’ of human to be able to understand each other, is probably Tomino’s most cynical take on humanity.
The greatest similarity between Tomino and Miyazaki is their faith in children and (some extent adolescents), as they are still open to new experiences and ideas.
What genuinely hits me with the two is, even they have been through the darkest of humanity, they are still trying to make the world a slightly better brighter place, with their deeply humanizing stories.
Just like the characters in their works.
Fun fact, regardless of how often Tomino’s work gets dark, this guy still believes he’s making stories for 10 year olds :/
It’s about as sensitive to them as the concentration camp/Larg is to European to my understanding. Motives of a gigantic superweapon that wipes away innocent civilians shows up in Japanese media about as much as an Orwellian superstate in western stuff.
@@silverhawkscape2677 Regarding AOT, I think it is the fans who are wrong because many of them romanticise Eren's actions for fun.
The creators make it obviously clear that committing such horrible atrocities is wrong no matter the situation. Remember when the Scouts debate on whether to stop Eren, Hange furiously says "Genocide is wrong".
It also shows that nations tend to justify their horrible actions as "protection". Both Marley and Paradis do it in the show and Japan did this in real life. The show is critical of war and maybe even Japan's portrayal of it.
What I find most fascinating about Ghibli films, and thus the vision of their creators, is that they tackle such complex and heavy subject matter but are funny, hopeful, entertaining, inspiring, aspirational. They show us what is wrong with humanity, but also what is right about it. It is the vision of someone who grew up amongst destruction but did not let it consume them, as the violence of WW2 consumed so many others.
27:06 don’t forget the Darwin air raids. 111 bombig runs over a 22 month period, but everyone focuses on their one attack on Pearl Harbour.
It's super commendable how much Ghibli is able to turn reality into fantasy 😮 Re-imagining our world into empathy brings us closer together. Thx HFM
You really need to read about Unit 731 and "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" to understand why OSS understood why using the Atomic Bomb was necessary.
Studio Ghibli could have made movies that showed what Imperial Japan did to the: Chinese, Koreans, Allied POW's & Civilians, etc etc...
'As Imperial Japan was so savage that members of the Third Reich who witnessed their barbarism wrote letters to Adolf Hitler on how fucking savage their Japanese Allies were to Chinese Civilians...
Personally, I would have handled the US assault on the home Islands differently had I been in a position of power back then:
As when Imperial Japan threatened to kill all Allied POW's & Civilians in their custody, I would have arranged for a thousand Japanese POW;s to be released wearing static line parachutes over Tokyo Imperial Palace, after their heads were removed.
The first Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Unit 731 in occupied China, with instructions to the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists on how to create an exclusion zone as that may have saved the lives of millions of Chinese from Unit 731's Weaponized Bubonic Plague, and other Bioweapons.
The second Atom Bomb would have been dropped on Tokyo Imperial Palace and the third on the greatest Military target left, probably the Japanese Navy.
And then I would have dropped leaflets on the Allied intentions for civilians explaining that without an unconditional surrender, that holy hell would would be dropped on Imperial Japan's remaining targets....
If you don't understand why my hard line approach, then you haven't considered what would have happened if "Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night" had been successful. Given that three suicide planes would have been launched from an I-400 class carrier submarine to drop Weaponized Bubonic Plague on San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland. This would have killed at least a quarter of the population on the West Coast at a minimum. More likely it would have spread & killed about a quarter of the world population...
The response by the Allied Powers & non-aligned Nations would have been making sure that the Nation of Japan & the Japanese People would only exist in history books and photos...
That is the ind of fanaticism that Studio Ghibli & other Japanese Media choose to ignore, as they made something worse than the Atomic Bomb and tried to us it because they believed that "Imperial Japan would rule the world for a time"....
I must admit, I had to skip a minute or two into the video because I can't deal with real injuries no matter how much violent media I consume. After that, I was glued to this video. I have things to do right now, but I'd love to finish watching this later.
I am not normally interested in this subject matter, but you've opened my eyes to a new layer of Miyazaki's work. Very well done.
After visiting the memorial museum in Hiroshima I stood by that famous building, below where the bomb was detonated. You could feel the weight of the act, the horrors that followed. It was oppressive, and dark...
Howls Moving Castle was the first Ghibli movie I fully watched and really nothing has surpassed that experience, the happy, colorful start of the movie compared with when the war comes home, the walls of fire, Howl struggling with his internal monster and that moment when he says to Sophie after she begs him to leave, “No, I’m done with running … Because I’ve finally found someone I want to protect” I was quite literally cries during the movie.
Having been raised in a very Nationalist and pro-war environment that movie truly shattered how I viewed the world and really helped me understand that people are people, no matter their nationality, religion or anything else.
Thank You Hayao Miyazaki and please continue to make amazing films like these.
DONT STOP HERE.
Some-More-News has a video on War and multiple on F-scism,
and the Term Solarpunk is waitig for you to explore it.
What’s interesting to me is that on the outside, Ghibli’s work is full of juxtapositions - for a contemporary American audience, the terror of war doesn’t belong in a kids movie. But for the generation that founded Ghibli (Miyazaki, Takahata and the rest), war was an integral part of their childhood; just as much as going outside and chasing grasshoppers or seeing mothers make food, or any other “wholesome” Ghibli tropes. They cannot be separated.
My 97 year old great uncle, who recently passed on, was twelve when a bomb landed just outside his childhood home. Maraculously everyone survived but in some of his final words to me, he described the war and its effects, he told me my great great grandfather used to have night terrors from his time fighting in Northern Africa as well as other things.
But one set of words stuck with me; "If there is an Hell on this earth, I have seen it.".
I think in the months before he died, he became excellent at showing his family how bad the war truly was with nothing but the tone of his voice and the careful use of words to describe what he had been through as a child. I hope he finally finds the answers to the questions he asked all his life, RIP.
I would highly recommend the film In This Corner of the World. It's a historical anime from 2016, mostly very sweet and small. But its depiction of firebombing and the nuclear war tore my heart out, even as it restored it in the end with how two broken souls find and complete each other. It doesn't get talked about, but it's final act is incredibly effective, particularly because of the smallness of the rest of the film.
The weird irony of this situation. A country that committed some of the if not the most unspeakable acts of violence, barbarism and depravity to their neighbors as well as Asia at large but never speaks about how awful they truly were. Only the force used to subjugate them.
Yep they had the same ethnocentric beliefs as the Nazis did and were effectively going thru their own genocide in Asia that the government still won’t acknowledge but they flew under the radar with the anti nuke stuff
This is why I have a respect for the Germans, they have come to understand and reflect on what their ancestors did and accepted the truth rather than deny it.
@@KaiHung-wv3ul Not particularly, look at the AFD recent electoral success.
@@chriss780 The AFD are sadly not going to replicate what the Nazis did. They are moderate conservatives, Germany is just that far left and the media that biased against them.
@@chriss780 Ah, yes, anything that isn't Left is automatically "nazis". Typical
This is an awesome video as always!
“At some point along the way, these people forgot how to cry”
This is so important. Crying is often seen as a sign of weakness. But crying reminds of us empathy, crying helps us connect. Crying is healthy.
Do not forget that none of this would have happened if Imperial Japan had not, in its all but boundless pride, believed itself entitled to rape, pillage and possess all the world it could reach. Pride, their terrible pride, set them on the path to this horror. I am glad to see this video didn’t forget that.
Honestly. I want someone to Subvert Miyazaki films and their ideas. Showing the horrors of war but instead show the supposed victims to be just as cruel as to be almost deserving. Like how Japan was Nuked but it was celebrated by the nation's they had invaded and pillaged.
@@silverhawkscape2677 nah I wouldn’t say deserved because these were mostly civilians, but it should be shown that actions have consequences, every action causes a equal or more powerful reaction, the fault of there predecessors and the men who decided to commit these atrocities in the name of there country and people
@@magpipe146 I don't agree that the people of a state are blameless when their government does evil things, because dictatorships cannot gain and keep power if the people oppose or even simply don't support them.
@@williamhenry8914 not really that simple in an imperialistic society, built on “honor” and national pride, any country is expected to fight for there own home team, and another note, the civilian population doesn’t have any power to declare or stop war in an EMPIRE.
@@magpipe146 The civilian population has *all* the power. People imagine incredible acts of bravery, but it's unnecessary. Enough people refusing or even just failing to do their jobs properly and no state can survive. You can kill a state stone dead with mere sloth, at close to no risk to yourself, if enough people join in.
Not afraid, nor ashamed, to say this made me cry and silently sob so I wouldn't have to explain to my coworkers why the tears WILL NOT STOP.... And God I never want them to.... I haven't cried like this in a long time. Thank you
The Bombing of Darwin, also known as the Battle of Darwin, on 19 February 1942 was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. On that day, 242 Japanese aircraft, in two separate raids, attacked the town, ships in Darwin Harbour and the town's two airfields in an attempt to prevent the Allies from using them as bases to contest the invasion of Timor and Java during World War II. - Wikipedia
The fighting on New Guinea was a huge turning point int Japan’s conquest, as stopping them there had prevented them from gaining a staging ground for an assault on Australia. Odd a Kiwi doesn’t know that. He’s pretty knowledgable. Though I suppose NZ is fairly out of the way and of less importance strategically.
thank you, this reminds me to meditate on my enemy/trauma. The beauty of the vehicle it came on and how profoundly it is required to create any semblance of relatable content. It is kinda hard to focus on the pain of beauty or the beauty of pain but it is a good story when the result is human humility.
As I have studied wars, ancient or otherwise, I noticed that it's the innocent that pays the greatest price..... always. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
M*A*S*H has perhaps the best quote. Hawkeye says to the Chaplain along the lines:
War isn't hell. Only people that deserve to be in Hell are there. War spared no one. Innocent, drafted, volunteer alike.
@@briangriffin9793 🍻 well put.
A xenophobic population that installs and tolerates an aggressive regime is not "innocent".
@@penultimateh766 this comment suggests that the people of Japan had any choice in the regime. I suggest that you read Japanese history to understand why the vast majority had no say, and that the Peace Faction was very, very weak.
@@briangriffin9793lol nice revision of history
Thank you Tim. For all the work and research you do. For bringing us these videos. For being you. ❤
i was so afraid of the giant warriors in rhe the valley of the wind as a child.i didn't understand what about them was so scary. i kept having nightmares about them and spent nights wide awake, hoping not to catch a glance of a towering crimson monster looming over a burning city.
something about being so small and meaningless infroof such a creature... how little control over I have over being crushed and how little it seemed to care fueled by my childhood imagination... my mother threw away the animation in the result. but as an adult looking back... children belive what they see... and those monsters have captured the concept and terror of war perfectly.
For the first half i was wondering if you were going to comment on how the framing of Japan as the victim is grossly wrong, and then you did. Thank you.
13:50 The song "Bomber" from the album "Carmen Miranda's Ghost" touches on these themes in the form of a scifi story about the pilots of a space bomber going on a mission to bomb some unspecified target on a planet down below, with lyrics such as:
"He just flies the bomber
He never sees their eyes when the hell comes down
He just flies the bomber"
and
"Now make the run, so quick it’s done, and death screams toward the ground
But moving fast, they're so far past, they never hear the sound
A final turn, as from the stern they watch the mushrooms grow
That fill the night with deadly light, and kill the world below"
i want to point out that in the Nausicaa manga series its a muuuch more developed environmental cautionary tale, and directly talks about the futility of war, use of wmds, the illusion of control over nature. similar to sheeta's message at the end of Laputa 22:30, the main plot point in nausicaa is that no matter what advanced technology is used, you cannot control nature, and war only leads to mutual destruction. the factions in the story experience this, as a large part of the story is around one of the nations using devastating bioweapons, triggering an apocalypse, and half of the land that was usable for humanity is destroyed (think the end of nausicaa with the ohmu but without the happy ending).
from the very beginning till the end its essentially a continuous demonstration of the misery and horror of war, the hubris of using technology for control and violence, for all the characters involved
You've been releasing some amazing video essays lately. This one hit hard.
I don’t know if any else has commented about it but the descriptive name Flying Fortress was used by the B-17 which was used against German, the B-29 was the Superfortress.
So that is something that I had never before considered, the zeitgeist of war among the people.
In North American and European stories that focus on war, the battle in the skies is almost always heroic. Death comes from above, especially in British shows, but there’s the underlying of perseverance there. However, a ground war, with columns of tanks and marauding infantry is presented as the terror. Even in Red Dawn, it was paratroopers and tanks that caused most of the problems because that was the devastation of war that we mostly understood. Our cultural memory of the of the Mud of the Great War and the grinding ground campaign of WWII gives us most of our horror of war. In Canada, our horrors of war are mostly the aftermath, the broken people who come home and the shattered families left behind by those who never returned. We, as a country, want to forget and move on, and our stories reflect that. The war is always far away, and the devastation purely in the minds of the veterans.
Having watched a little further in the video, you reference Tolkien, which brings to mind his use of AirPower in his books. Dragons brought indiscriminate death from the air, the eagles were ostensibly on the side of good but were ultimately of limited use in the wars. Everything important that happened, in a military perspective in those books, happened on the ground. Foot soldiers battling it out, a cavalry charge into death. His understanding of war was an infantry war with machines of death being the ultimate representation of destruction and terror. His wars reflected his experiences on the Western front, the horrors and bravery of the common infantryman in the trenches.
This is a truly fascinating discussion Tim and I wanted to say thank you for that. It is going to help my writing incredibly! In world-building, I have to determine how the people I’m writing about relate to war, what are the stories they tell about it and how does it affect their perception
13:15 That was the whole thing with why Jedi Knights use lightsabers too. So that they can alway see who they harm, always empathise with the enemy. The Sith use lightsabers as a statement to show how they have cast aside mercy.
23:50 Good on you. Covering both. You also covered Unit 731. In excruciating detail too.
I can recommend the film John Rabe. It's about the massacre of Nanjing (China), where Japanese soldiers commited unthinkable atrocities. John Rabe, a German diplomat and Nazi prevented many horrors. There is one scene in the film that also happened in reality that struck me the most. Chinese civilians hiding under a giant Nazi flag in the hope that Japanese Bombers would reckognize it and not bomb that area. That flag, which is a symbol of humanity at its worst, being used as a protection for civilians including children, something that is inherently good, that sticked with me.
Nobody would care or think about as if it never happened. Same thing with what happened to the Korean pleasure women and the Filipino.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie scared the crap out of me as child. More specifically “Goodbye Blue Sky”. The depiction of the beginning of the Blitz to rapid militarization of industry and the decline of humanity depicted in the people’s ragged & tattered close scurrying through rumble while the elongated gas mask became a permanent fixture. The crow swooping down to rip & tear at the ground revealing the whole world was bleeding. In any nation with a standing army the swords wants to be used. The multitude of clandestine units of every nation carrying out inhumane experiments. Answered more questions about humanity than we would ever ask outside of the banner of war.
“After all, He who must not be named did great things-terrible yes, but great.” People like Miyazaki have been fighting back their entire lives culturally using other forms of media & legend giving rise to Godzilla, manga, & anime. The world took away their weapons & they took up their pens.
I know this video is about Studio Ghibli’s connection to the wars and bombings. But when I was in Japan recently I visited the Hiroshima peace and memorial museum (I can’t remember the exact name) and the museum itself left a huge impression on me. The whole thing was dimly lit with artificial lighting to keep all the items from sun damage and aging. It was so quiet and the atmosphere was heavy. There items of clothing and other small things that people were wearing/caring when the bomb dropped. They even had the actual section of the steps with the shadow of the person on the steps. If you ever go to Japan I really recommend going there.
Miyazaki’s films are meant to ask the audience to be better. It’s asking the FUTURE generations - the ones who ARE remote from the violence - to keep choosing to live and never let war happen again.
Tim those strings at the end on top of the art work slides did me right in. Kite I *just* composed myself after the slides & the strings come along to shred my heart + run my mascara all over again.
Amazing work, thank you for bringing other points of view through this videos, and making such a good job in the content and the composition of the video. Thanks again for your work!
Love this type of video essay. 2 weeks ago, I visited a theme park in France, Puy Du Fou, all about live reenactment of awesome history of the musketeers, knights, roman gladiators and so on. It was very cool and interesting, but the experience that affected me most was a replication of the western front during ww1 in an attraction, for us to walk trough. Extremely loud sirens going off, bullets whizzing past my head all the time, earth shaking from bomb shells hitting the roof. Screams and machine gun fire. Even the green glow of lamps illuminating musterd gas and the corpses it caused, only to end with rows upon rows of graves draped in french flags... This was the experience my country, its allies and its enemies, went trough daily. It touched my very core and I still get goosebumps writing about it. Your story reminded my of that past, how we can still be foolhardily sent to war on such a horrific scale. Id love to see more of this!
Puy du fou is not an accurate historical representation. It's monarchist propaganda. Please do not fall for it.
Hearing about your visit to the museum in Hiroshima reminds me of the time I visited the Holocaust museum in D.C. That was a very chilling experience as well. Humanity has done some awful things in history I'm afraid, but we've also occasionally made marvels and done great things. Thank you for this video essay.
God be with you out there everybody. ✝️
As a chinese, now living overseas, depiction by japanese media on how they "suffered" in WW2 has always come across slightly tone-deaf. Especially when paired with their governments denials of war crimes and suffering dished out to others. As an adult now, I just find it hypocritical for them to depict japanese suffering without talking about suffering they brought onto asia as a whole.
While I would let my child watch ghibli and fully absorb the message that "war is bad". I would also teach them history. How women stick pig skin to their face to avoid being raped by japanese soldiers. How indiscriminate murder was made leisure activities. How the general japanese society failed during and after and till today, to criticise those atrocities.
It is rather notable that they are so averse to unpacking their past. As a German, the Japanese way of dealing with their history has always seemed rather daft to me, when compared with how my own nation handles the crimes of those who came before.
@@draochvar9646 I think germans need to be a bit less smug about their precious "Remembrance culture" as its mostly a myth, doesn't really meaningfully exist, it was US cold war propaganda based on exagerating a few successes of the german student movement in the 60s against open glorification of nazism, to make liberals less sqeemish about rearming a bunch of nazi generals in the bundeswahr as the cornerstone of nato. the success of the AFD in the last election show german anti-fascism was always skin deep.
West Germany was a nazi rump state from the start and historians will look back at the 1991 Anschluss and german reunification as a great historical tragedy and triumph for fascism.
@@chriss780 tell me you know nothing about German political discourse and historical culture without telling me. My god how much ignorance can you pack into a single comment.
@@draochvar9646 pathetic evasions, most germans just buy their own PR, and are eager to whitewash how deep fascism runs in the country to this day, because its more convenient and palatable narrative then facing the truth
When Germans start patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves on how "liberal" and civilized" they are, it makes me want to spit.
The second the economy contracts 0.002% or god forbid have to see a brown refuge germans throw away the masks and start electing ADF brownshirts in droves.
German "memory culture" is pathetic moralists drivel discarded the second there under the slightest discomfort. They never did shit to materially atone to their victems, that they weren't forced to, its all just worthless talk.
I despise how they've literally just unilaterally decided their reformed THEMSELVES and forgiven themselves without even bothering to ask their victims.
Tell me why is every major corporation in germany today descended from ones that got rich off slave labor in the holocaust? and most of the major families? Almost every major rich family?
God I hate german hypocrisy and self-righteousness so fucking much.
@@draochvar9646 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany_Must_Perish!
Great reading material by the way. Shame people didn't have the stomach to go through with it.
I appreciate how you address this because I usually see Japans roll brought up as a Well What Aboutism but this is nuance. I always enjoy your essays but this one really got me. It reframed Oppenheimer in an interesting way as well, because I had no intention of seeing it. Now I’m a bit curious. Mainly because I’m always interested in the competitive ways each nation views its own roll in history. Ever since the eye opening experience of visiting a WWII museum in China honoring the soviets liberating a city there from the Japanese. It was my first experience with world history from a pov other than a US class room.
23:57 The cloud behind him looks like a plan dropping a bomb
The creature from Nausicaa felt like more than just nuclear symbolism, the fact that it's a heavily damaged child from the Bad Old Days who is forced to commit the same atrocities (thereby destroying itself) could be seen as symbolism for attempts at instilling militant nationalism via fascist rhetoric in Japan following WW2.
You know, the stuff it turned out people like Shinzo Abe were fully behind. Just a thought.
I did a project in my senior year of hs that compared the art of survivors to those who have only heard accounts. The art of survivors is so visceral and real with this feeling of something utterly horrific and yet the art is beautifully ghastly. Just looking at a handful of these pieces, it’s eerie to see
I think it's also important to consider the themes of why Miyazaki has weapons reflect humanity. Technology is inherently neutral until a person enacts their will upon it. But as to what can lead to extreme violence and acts of desperation. Is usually, a very human sense of fear. The people in Nausicaa were so afraid of the toxic jungle, that they convinced themselves that they could take back control with a weapon. Which isn't too different from the real world, people will tear each other apart in horrific ways, in response to feelings of fear, sadness, or hatred. Which were all at insane complex heights during WW2. Leading to the creation of weapons, that even now, feel like they should have stayed in whatever science fiction we pulled them from.
you brought to light that I have an eerie connection to these films, Pocco Rosso and Howls moving Castle being my favourite Ghibli films... Since the age of 12 or 13, I have been fascinated by nuclear physics specifically nuclear power both fusion and fission and its ties to the atomic bomb.
Where once the Dutch took their knowledge, collected from all over the "west", to Japan, for them to learn. All those years later, it would see the full might of another path that knowledge would go.
I find it almost poetic how Nagasaki would end up being bombed of all places as it had always been the only place the outside world could see the whole country.
even more poetic that it was never the primary target, it was Kokura. The only reason they resorted to their secondary target, Nagasaki, was because too much cloud and smog and smoke from factories and previous fire bombing campaigns prevented accurate bombing.
Kyoto should have burned in Nagasaki’s place.
@@InquisitorXarius??????
@@InquisitorXariusdude. How can you watch this video and say something that heartless? Absolutely no one ever deserves to be the victim of nuclear weapons.
@@althelor You call it heartless I view it differently. The people of Nagasaki were largely innocent and to me represents what Japan could have been if not for the malevolent influence of the Imperial filth.
Kyoto is the heart of The Imperial Theocratic Autocracy that poisons and enslaves the minds, bodys, and souls of the peoples of Japanese Civilization.
Hiroshima was justly targeted, Nagasaki was not, for Kyoto is the heart of the evil that corrupts Japanese civilization, and Nagasaki to me represents a Japanese Civilization free of Imperial Evil.
26:48 THANK you. I’m glad this is increasingly brought to attention. I remember the times when kids in NewZealand would ask me what Korea is and I had to answer “it’s between China and Japan”. And all they knew about Japan was “cute characters”.
Incredible video! Going to Hiroshima was one of the most harrowing experiences in my life. You get a slice of this feeling through Miyazaki’s work along with all the contradicting emotions that come along with it
-Terrence
Your acknowledgment of Imperial Japan’s war crimes is important, which is why I find that samurai movies that criticize the warrior code act as veiled criticisms of Japan’s militarism during WWII.
Films like Harakiri (1962), The Sword of Doom (1966) Samurai Rebellion (1967), and Ran (1980) often show the absurdity of the shogunate and the follies of samurai honor.
I’m Japanese myself. My grandma could have very well died before my mom was born.
She wasn’t far form the site, the same day of her birthday.
Everytime i hear "grave of the fireflies" i cry. Just at the name. The movie sticks with you. Though animated, it's as painful as Schindler's List if not more so. It's so heartbreaking, i sobbed the whole way through, but its worth the watch, it's so well done. I cant watch it again, i watched it once and i dont think i could do it again. Studio Ghibli films are always my favorite, the world building is just incredible and the characters are lovable. There's always something to relate to or some message to take from the movies to build empathy.
What you said about what you saw in the Hiroshima Peace museum was just like what felt on my previous visit to the Nagasaki Peace museum and Park in 2015. it was haunting, but necessary for me
Very interesting analysis! I’ve always been intrigued by how obviously impacted Miyazaki was/is by the bombings of Japan, but have never looked further into it. Was very happy to come across this well put-together video comparing the real life influences to Ghibli films. Thanks!
1:51 3 of those movies are not technically Hayao Miyazaki. From Up On Poppy Hill and The Secret Life of Arietty are both co-written by him and not directed by him. Whisper of the Heart he wrote, but he did not direct it.
I included them because writing is a pretty important part of the creative process, but I guess if you discount them the point becomes even more stark.
~ Tim
This was such a great follow up to Unit 731. I love Anime, but thank you for bringing up the Anti-Accountability problem.
timezones ruin it but if I am right can we take a second to appricate that this video was released exactly when it happened
Incredible, breathtaking, and eye opening Hello Future Me was one of my favorite writers/ avatar UA-camrs. But now become one of my favorites entirely with what you did on Miyazaki and WW2 and unit 731 will open everyone’s eyes on what really happened during war. Thank you Tim.
@HelloFutureMe
Hey uhh just one itty bitty thing on nuclear weapons. Neither in the bombing of Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were residual radiation injuries sustained, there was initial radiation of course, that's just what happens if you get exposed to Neutron radiation and X-rays, but there was no fallout victims. Serious contamination was not present and both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are beautiful thriving cities today. The black rain was the ash and debris that got thrust into the air after the explosion
Both bombings were airbursts which made it so that there wasn't a whole chunk of irradiated dirt got thrown dispersing radioactive material, like in Atom Lake or Castle Bravo.
Between this video, the one before it, and your video on Japan's war crimes, I've loved what you've been putting out recently.
Thank you for your work.
My grandmother was born late 1938, only six years old when the war came back to Germany. Old enough to remember the bunkers and the aftermath after nights full of bombs. When I first watched "Grave of the fireflies" my grandmother sat with me. Just after a few minutes she stood up, in tears and wasn't able to continue the film. She hasn't watched it to this day. Too realistic and too many memories that would keep her up at night.
She thinks it's a great movie, even tough she hasn't watched it. Just for the heartbreaking feeling it gives you, a feel of how it really was back then. Or how is right now in all the other wars.
Wow. Great work. Thank you for that. I teared up even though I rarely ever cry and now I'm going to reflect hard on why. Thank you.
Good essay. Beautiful and moving.
Now I'm kinda waiting for a part III:
FullMetalAlchemist and dealing with being the heirs to old atrocities. Or "Wait, are we the baddies?"
Oh wow. You just made me completely recontextualize that series right there. I know the country of amestris was largely based off of Germany, but there is something to be said about the way that the country being founded on atrocities and human sacrifice could be a lense on Japan hiding their involvement in the horrible things they've done during war. (or the US brushing off the dark parts of our history or reframing it to make us look like the good guys)
@@althelor Hey, happy to help!
Now, of course the aesthetics in FMA are taken from European fascism. Serial numbers not so much filed off as barely covered with duct tape. Hiromu Arakawa also calls her magic system "alchemy" and names the main antagonists after the christian seven deadly sins.
But to be honest, I find these inspirations (or appropriations) shallow and superficial. I don't think she spent a lot of time researching them.
Don't get me wrong: I love FMA and I don't find _it_ to be shallow and derivative! I think it's more like, instead of stealing or reverse engineering a a grand piano, she painted a sheet like a grand piano and threw it over her own weird home constructed instrument. She's borrowing some trappings from european culture and history to tell a very unique and japanese story.
That's why I think it is safe to make this interpretation of FMA's "Are we the baddies?" theme.
@@danguillou713aaaaaaand you are frighteningly wrong. The Alchemy in FMA, to name only one aspect you brought up, is steeped in ties and connections to actual alchemical beliefs, systems and practices (there's a wonderful series of videos here on youtube going into that).
And then there's Amestris and ho boi, where do I even start with this one. As both a scholar of history and a native of Germany, it is eery how on the head FMA is to many aspects of Imperial Germany, the Weimarer Republik and the Nazi Regime. Now of course, a lot of these experiences are mirrored in Japanese history, the use of humans in horrific experimentation comes to mind, but then there are facets to the story that someone that only took the "trappings" of european history probably wouldn't have picked up on.
So, to say Arakawa's inspirations from European culture and history are shallow or superficial is either just ignorant or downright disrespectful.
@@draochvar9646 Interesting. I'd like to watch that series of vids: I don't think youtube likes hyperlinks in comments, but if you tell me the name of the channel I can find it.
For my part, having read up on the subject now and then over the years, I can say that I didn't see anything that reminded me of what I know about European alchemy, either historical or the jungian re-interpretation of it. Where is all the time spent in labs, boiling, mixing, burning, distilling stuff? Why do these "alchemists" use magical diagrams to throw spells? Fireballs and ice towers and stuff - that doesn't seem very alchemical to me. Where is the convoluted theories about subjects like: the four elements, if there is an aether, the role of astrology, why phlogiston has negative mass, or if spontaneous generation of life is a thing or not? And if you go jungian - where are the personal transformations into purer and purer versions of yourself, where is the male-female emperor/empress discussion? Maybe there's was a lot of things in the manga that didn't make it into the anime. (I have only watched the two anime shows FMA and FMA:Brotherhood, and haven't read the paper version, but I have read that first half of FMA and all of Brotherhood are pretty faithful.) All I can say is that in the shows I watched I didn't spot either practical details or underlying themes taken from what I think I know about western alchemy. But I might have missed something, let me watch those vids and if they change my mind I'll get back with a retraction.
I'm from Sweden, but I too think of myself as a history nerd. (Only one year at the university, but over three decades of recreational reading and about four meters of shelf space behind my back as I'm writing this.) So, disrespectfully, I disagree with you about the "on the head" thing. Amestris to mee looks like a generic fantasy military dictatorship with some actual details taken from Imperial Japan.
In real history, the dictators of the fascist states, the "führers", were buffoons. Hipkler was a weird and silly little man, and so was Mussolini. In the propaganda of course he was a hyper competent alpha male, not unlike King Bradley, but this isn't Starship Trooper, what we see in FMA is what is actually happening, not some meta in-world propaganda version of it.
The real fascist states inundated their subjects with incessant propaganda, all day, everywhere, but in the FMA dictatorship the state seem to mostly leave citizens alone to get on with their daily life.
Where is the pervasive fear of being the next victim of arbitrary state violence? Where is the secret police?
The real fascist states were also very inefficient (and I know that's not the common pop history view of the 3rd Reich, but my understanding is that they rather inherited a rich legacy of competence and organization, which they degraded at amazing speed). If FMA was true to the historical facts, I would have expected to see mountains of corruption, competing organisations with overlapping areas of responsibility, muddled chains of command, bureaucratic in-fighting, and lots of incompetent idiots in charge because they had better contacts in the party, or had done favors for the right bigwig.
Where is the fervent anti-intellectualism? That was _crucial_ to their ideology in the real world.
Where is the idolization of a largely invented glorious past, and the "Hooray for war!!!" propaganda?
Where is the constant witchhunt rhetoric against imaginary internal enemies, and the brutalization of political discourse?
Where is the obsessive anti-semitism? It is true that Amestris organized a holocaust a couple of years back, but they don't exactly brag about having "solved the Ishbal problem" do they? Instead the official story is that they intervened in a civil war and pacified a region plagued by terrorists. (To me this looks a lot more like japanese warfare in mainland China in the 30s.)
Also, there's no hint of continent-wide war against peer opponents, so no WW2.
If you think that King Bradley and Amestris are accurate and insightful representations of historical European fascism, I'd like to hear your arguments. What aspects does FMA reproduce faithfully? (I mean, apart from the aesthetics, which are chef's kiss.) How do you figure that? Because, well ... I don't see it.
Finally, I want to restate that I freaking love FMA. I think that its portrayal of living with a hidden legacy of atrocity is subtle, nuanced and deeply moving. I think that both its world building and magic is amazing. I just think that Arakawa made up most of the awesome stuff on her own, rather than take it from the books I have read. This is not a criticism against her, quite the opposite. Possibly, probably, she's also influenced by japanese history, mythology and culture, but although I'm fascinated by the Meiji restauration, I'm not as versed in that as in European stuff, so I can't talk intelligently about that aspect of the show. I don't even know if the parallells to Imperial Japan are intentional or accidental.
Long post, but I'm interested in the subject. Cheers!
Also, I do believe that many of the "mysterious" or un-naned illnesses through out many anime depicts the lasting generation effects of radiation poisoning. Ive read about that quite a bit that after seeing Grave of Fireflies. . It poisons the land, the water, the wild life... Look also at the film "When the wind Blows." It is also a bout a bomb going off.
More than two decades ago, when I was a young child, I've seen a documentary on nuclear bombing of Japan with many quotes from survivors, some of them, I'm sure, you also read during your video. I remember how this documentary haunted me, I was convinced that this feeling of horror would never leave me. And yet, without forgetting the event, we end up neglecting the sheer horror of its human consequences and seeing it only through the prism of its repercussions on WW2.
Today, more than two decades later, you've plunged me back into that state of horror and rekindled some of the emotions that make humans social animals, leaving me shaking with uncontrollable tears. I never forgot how to cry. And for that, I thank you.
I really love the Nausicaa manga. It is explicit in its messaging about humans ruining the planet and messing with things they should not.
Nausicaa is a pacifist, but she’s not stupid. She will fight to defend herself and achieve her goals.
It is my favorite sci fi story, and I highly recommend it to everyone.
The movie only runs about 1/6th of the length of the manga btw
Another beautiful and persuasive video essay. Thank you Tim, your videos truly are a gift.
studio ghibli has always had a special place in my heart. i'll get that out of the way first.
now, i want to say, that human nature is to form a foundation of other humans and to use that to assure survival. and, i think that war is one of the things that, while horrific and cruel and utterly unnecessary, taps into this instinct, in some twisted way.
the instinct to put other groups aside for your own, or to put others in general aside for yourself, is something that every living thing possesses, to an extent.
what makes us human, in my opinion, is our ability to overcome this selfish instinct. it makes us human to know how to cry. to know how to cry for those we don't know. it makes us human to know how to cry for those we do not know, for those we will never know. and it makes us human to know that we can.
war....
war makes us forget.
war makes us forget how to cry. it makes us forget that we ever knew how. at least, for a little while.
and studio ghibli films, i think, capture this concept to a T.