The Valley of the Wind, High Harbor, and Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Upon comparing the folly of the Tolmekians to the wisdom of the people of the Valley of the Wind.. one of the people from the valley speculates, and I paraphrase,

"Fire can destroy a forest in a day, while it takes a century for water and wind to create one. We prefer the ways of the water and the wind."

It fits well within the action of the film, but this sentiment is as old as the Tao Te Ching, and has been present in the Tao-influenced "far east" flavors of Buddhism. The iconic image of a monk contemplating the metaphor of of a stream of water is powerful (i.e. Siddartha). Fire, dynamite, the atomic bomb.. can achieve quite a lot in a short amount of time. But if you don't rush, lie low, remain steady, sure, flexible, humble, you can achieve far more greatness over time and your efforts are more effective and you minimize the risk of your efforts blowing up in your face in unexpected and horrible ways.

Thusly the valley fended off the earth's hostility against them by slowly, calmly, and methodically disposing of any toxins that encroached upon them. The Tolmekians and Pejites on the other hand, succumbed to the folly of power and brute force symbolized in the giant apocalyptic monster.

There's an interesting parallel to Future Boy Conan, I'm up to episode 23 out of 26.. But even in the first episode there's an interesting exchange wherein Monsley lashes out in anger and resentment towards Conan's grandfather for being a part of the generation that created the apocalypse. For the viewer the irony is clear.. she's the one still operating under the destructive memes - but is utilizing the past destruction she failed to learn from as justification for her misdeeds.

There's of course also a parallel between the wisdom of the Valley of the Wind and Conan's High Harbor. The people in High Harbor built a sustainable civilization in harmony with nature. The heros in Future Boy Conan were much like the heros in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind; both offered an alternative wiser future for humanity with enlightened peaceful calm methodical conservative memes.

But that exchange with Monsley and Grandpa I still think about. I can't help, if Miyazaki would forgive me, putting an imagined Miyazaki in Monsley's shoes. Miyazaki's father worked towards the Japanese war effort supplying rudders for aircraft. The war ended when he was still a toddler but his formative years coincided with the Allied/US occupation of Japan. I can't help but imagine Monsley's misguided anger and later redemption (oddly enough through a little boy's naive trust) as being autobiographical? What sort of resentment towards their fathers generation might have burdened Miyazaki's generation? Or in lieu of resentment, what potential lies in Miyazaki's generation for greater understanding, redemption, and growth beyond the errors of their fathers?

Being educated in typical K-12 public schools in California, my overall sense of the atomic bombs was that the Japanese were victims of an unjustifiable crime against humanity.. Yet what I found at the peace memorial in Hiroshima really moved me and stood in poignant contrast to that mode of thought. There wasn't a hint of victimhood anywhere. In fact, there was a sense of Japanese culpability. Written beside the monument that protectively sheltered the names of the victims was the sentiment, "rest in peace, for we will never repeat the error." Nearby was a beautiful Korean drum. As Korea had suffered "cultural genocide" under Japanese rule, the drum really showed a commitment towards real peace.. Here they were celebrating Koreanness at the site of unimaginable Japanese pain - as though they bandaged their deep wound with the virtues of their old enemy - the same virtues they once sought to dominate or destroy. It really seemed that the Japanese had grown in a way that other societies hadn't in the wake of WWII (Japanese supercomputers simulate the weather - our supercomputers simulate weaponry)... it's as though they realized the victim mentality just begats more violence... true peace requires an unprecedented shift in public consciousness. An almost superhuman ability to see a bigger truth or justice... Nausicaa was regrettably drawn to kill operating under traditional memes of justice and revenge. One might also extend some sympathy for the Pejites.. who were luring the omu into The Valley in retaliation for the brutality they suffered under the Tolmekians... a crime born out of victimhood.

We followed 9/11 with two wars that continue today. The war drum was beat. Americans felt victimized and justified in pursuing a vague, elusive "war on terrorism." Anybody that spent a moment wondering if there was room for US culpability was regarded as unpatriotic, almost monstrous. Yet some intelligence experts believe that US response has just stirred up more anti-US sentiment making us even less secure than we were in 2001 from terrorism. Not only that, but the subsequent conflicts have surely resulted in far more death and suffering among innocent people than the event that sparked them. I posit that the US foreign policy in the middle east could benefit from a shift from the ways of fire to that of water and wind.

*****Wisdom from 6th century BC

Why NOT anime?

In reading the first two chapters of both Napier and Kelts I found the question of why on earth would anime, of all things, become a subculture bordering on the mainstream in America to be interesting and thought provoking yet somewhat misrepresentative of my own relationship with anime. Rather, for me the more suitable question might be "why not Anime?"

After all, what nation could better embody the title of America's younger sister than that of Japan? No other nation quite parallels America's young enormous industrial and technological history/success? When I think of market-dominating multinational conglomerate companies that impact my day to day life, the first that pop into my mind are American and Japanese.

Given America and Japan's economics, free market capitalism, technological innovation and refinement - it almost makes the rest of the world's contributions seem expendable in comparison. It's true that still nobody builds a car quite like the Germans, and we all love our Beatles and Monty Python - but overall Europe feels a bit like yesterday's news. If Japan is America's younger sister, Europe seems like an aging, less relevant, less agile, less vivacious grandparent.

Americana infiltrated Japan in a large part thanks to our post-war occupation. We flooded Japan with pro-American propaganda, we imparted our values and they absorbed much of them. We might have been the innovators of video games with Atari, but few would contest that the Japanese had perfected the video game in the 80's and 90's. When Nintendo reached our side of the Pacific, the decontextualizing was already present in the games.. what kid glued in front of the TV with an NES controller in hand would have figured out on his own that the working class Italian he was navigating through baddies and over deadly pits was a Japanese creation? The fact that it was indeed Japanese was irrelevant. Merit alone won the hearts and minds of America's youth. And it was through the video game medium that I got my first taste of Anime.

Final Fantasy III (1994) was, and may still be, the pinnacle of the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) which was very anime-esque. An epic apocalyptic event separates the first half of the game from its dystopian post-apocalyptic second half.. The entire world is blown up and shattered. It also features an iconic Opera House scene that pushed 16 bit gameplay to elegiac depths one might not have previously thought possible.

In other words, it was Japan's dominance in video game excellence that slipped anime in through the back door for me any many of my peers as kids. At some point we became aware that the games we were playing were Japanese, and at some point we became aware that there were Japanese cartoons being stocked at art-house video rental stores if not Blockbuster's shelves. It's only natural that having been dazzled by Japanese entertainment in one form that we'd venture to give the animation a shot. And from there it's all down hill. What adolescent couldn't fall in love with the likes of Ranma 1/2? I'd dare to say it's universally appealing, I've never seen a young person give it a fare shake and not enjoy it. Bias might have kept American adults disinterested, but kids don't really have bias and cartoons were still age appropriate anyway.

Other acclaimed animes became available. The quality was high. It delivered entertainment that was just plain good and addicting in the case of TV series. So why anime? For me it was "why not anime?" John Lasseter has said that "Quality is the best business plan." And it's hard to not see quality bursting out of every inch of the screen in Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and the other anime classics. Sheer quality brought Japanese video games to the top in the 80's and 90's, so why can't the same simple fact be true for anime?

I also question the notion that Anime is all that different or weird from already present mainstream tastes as Napier seems to assert. The highest grossing (thus presumably most universally appealing) American film of all time is brimming with anime's signatures. The apocalyptic, the elegiac, the festival, and even the relentlessly dis-assuring. I don't speak of Avatar or Titanic, though perhaps a case could be mode for those films as well, but I speak, of course, for the prevailing giant after adjusting for inflation: Gone With The Wind.

Gable's Rhett is unmistakably carnivalesque in the first half of the film. The instant the Yankees were invading and his confederate countrymen were heroically fighting to the death, Rhett was spending some quality time at a whore house; how do you not love this guy?

Then there's the aftermath of the post-war Georgia. Leigh's Scarlett suffers through famine, uncertainty of the fate of her precious childhood home, at one point she's even drawn to murder out of necessity. This is very much apocalyptic and dystopian on the screen. There's also an elegiac element at play with the tension between Scarlett and the man she thinks she loves, but perhaps loves more as a proxy to her idyllic adolescence.

Finally, while Scarlett is too old for the shoujo role in most of the film, she definitely is burdened with not just the charms and vulnerabilities of an uncommonly beautiful young woman, but also the frailties one would usually attribute to a man.. losing her humanity through capitalist ambition and losing love through insecurity and masking her true self. This drama feels fresh to us as Scarlett transcends her gender box. She's incredibly complex, most viewers will both hate her and still feel empathy for her as the film ends with a bitter false hope of somehow gaining the strength to win back her squandered love by venturing back to her hometown. A rather elegiac and dis-assuring ending.

This rambling about Gone With The Wind was to wager that some of the elements intrinsic in anime's appeal was already wildly successful and became a timeless classic in America even before Osamu Tezuka, an anime pioneer, first put pen to paper copying Disney's films.

This is why I question the notion that it took such an emotionally potent image as 9/11 to make anime more appealing to Americans. 3000 did tragically die on 9/11, but America knows greater loss: 600,000 died in the American civil war, 60,000 died in Vietnam... heck, over 2000 Japanese-Americans died in Hiroshima in August of '45.

Indeed 9/11, or not, Anime is growing and would have grown because it's good and fans are continuing to wake up to that fact. It almost seems too simple. We just like good entertainment. Why not Anime? Especially in the days when Hollywood seems to be losing its way many of us are turning to more thoughtful or novel foreign offerings anyway, and anime scratches that itch quite well. The bias against cartoons was a generational thing.. It's now gone, young adults no longer have that bias. They play video games, they appreciate the Japanese anime aesthetic and artistry... in some ways it just seems an inevitable change between the pre and post videogame generations.