Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli produced many internationally celebrated and beloved animated films, including the award-wining Spirited Away. His farewell masterpiece, The Wind Rises, however, received mixed reactions from international audiences. Viewers who expected to see a fast-paced fantasy like other Miyazaki movies may have been disappointed, because The Wind Rises is a slow-paced historical film. It traces the life of Horikoshi Jiro, an aircraft engineer who invented the famous Zero fighter, which was used by the Japanese navy during WWII. And it chronicles the life of Jiro’s wife, Nahoko, a fictional character from Hori Tatsuo’s acclaimed novel, on which the film is loosely based. Miyazaki describes the tragic fate of the young couple in the maelstrom of prewar Japan.
The Wind Rises vividly depicts Taisho and Showa Japan from the economic hardships in the 1920s through the rise of militarism in the 1930s. Jiro encounters the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 on a locomotive to Tokyo. The magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook the entire metropolitan area, destroying 111,000 buildings. Moreover, since Japanese houses were mostly built of wood, fire spread rapidly, burning down 212,000 residences. As a result, 105,000 people perished, and Japan lost 47% of GNP. Despite Tokyo’s quick recovery, which surprised Jiro’s younger sister Kayo, the earthquake ushered in recurring economic crises. When Jiro arrives in Nagoya to work for an aviation company, he witnesses a run on a local bank, a common phenomenon during the Financial Crisis of 1927, when widespread hysteria precipitated the collapses of 37 banks throughout Japan. While we watch Jiro striving to produce a high-quality fighter aircraft for the army, the Showa Depression hits Japan in 1929. The worst depression in prewar Japan caused severe deflation, financial meltdown, and countless bankruptcies, leaving 2.5 million people unemployed. Meanwhile, thorugh Jiro’s eyes Miyazaki shows us the contradictions in Japan’s ambition to catch up with the West in modern military technology while its people were suffering from the excruciating poverty. “The fact is this poor country pays us [engineers] a lot of money,” Jiro’s colleague Honjo sneers at him, “Embrace the irony.”