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Asia, explained.
Movie trailer: The Wind RisesMovie trailer: The Wind Rises
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
Topics
The Wind Rises has been a box office sensation in Japan, and this new trailer with English subtitles has just appeared.
The politics of this movie are fascinating. The Wind Rises is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, 'a fictional take on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the famed Japanese "Zero" fighter planes used in World War II.' But director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) says it's not a pro-war or pro-nationalist film:
“If I had been born a bit earlier, I would have been a gunkoku shonen (Militarist Youth),” Miyazaki writes...But instead, he grew up in a family in which his father went from building airplane components during the war to opening a jazz club to cater to American soldiers during the postwar occupation. Removed from the “hysteria” of the war years, Miyazaki writes, he “had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war’.”
Sam Roggeveen
