Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]

The Wind Rises is custom-made for postwar Japan, a nation that has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the brutality of its imperial past. Nearly 70 years after Emperor Hirohito's surrender, the Japanese military and medical institutions' greatest evils, like the orchestration of mass rape, the use of slave labor, and experimentation on live and conscious human beings, remain absent from school textbooks.

I argued that, yes, one can read the film that way, but to do so you have to ignore some things which Miyazaki put in the film. I then point out some, but not all, of those things.

In offering her reading Kang said little about Horikoshi's relationship with Naoko Satomi, the woman who became his wife. One thing she did say, that their marriage was sexless, is wrong, which I explained (the obviously had sex on the wedding night: 01:46:13-01:46:47). But this got me thinking, once again, about that marriage.

A number of critics have remarked that Satomi is not the strong assertive female lead associated with Miyazaki; she's not like Nausicaä, Sheeta, Kiki, Fio, or Lady Eboshi, to name only the most obvious examples. She's an artist and she's dying of tuberculosis. While the real Horikoshi was married, his wife wasn't tubercular and didn't die before Japan began its war against America. Miyazaki based that aspect of his story on a short story, "The Wind Has Risen", by Tatsuo Hori [2].

Why did Miyazaki give his protagonist such a wife? As that's a question about Miyazaki's intentions, we need to reframe it, as we're not mind-readers - at any rate, I'm not. How does he use her in his story?

I've already pointed out how Miyazaki depicts the emergence of Hirokoshi's first successful airframe design as evolving from a dreamtime suggestion from Caproni through his initial courtship of Satomi [3]. Thus both an imagined father figure and whatever Satomi is, functionally considered (e.g. she's not a muse), are bound to the design of that plane. What other binding does Miyazaki accomplish through her? I'm interested, not so much in what she is to Horikoshi, but, in effect, what she becomes to us.

At least one critic - alas, I forget who - noted that this aspect of the film is pure melodrama: beautiful woman, love, coughing blood, doomed marriage. Miyazaki is going for the kind of sentiment measured in tear-drenched tissues. If this were the whole film, it would be cheap melodrama. As it is, it's cheap melodrama in service to something else.

Mount Fuji and Cherry Blossoms

About three-quarters of the way thought the film we have a brief scene set in the sanatorium where Satomi is staying. The scene opens with the shot of Mount Fuji that I stuck at the head of this post. It then pans down to the sanatorium:

As Mount Fuji is all but symbolic of Japan itself, Miyazaki is thus setting up an association between Japan and the woman who will become Horikoshi's wife a few scenes later.

Now let's zoom ahead to the final sequence in the film. That sequence begins with a scene I described in my 3QD post. It's late at night and Horikoshi and Honjo are walking from one building to another and talking about the vulnerability of the bomber Honjo has designed. That scene is intercut with shots of those bombers flying over China and being readily shot down by Chinese fighters. Horikoshi observes that Japan's imperial ambitions will destroy the nation ("Japan will explode").

As Honjo heads home, Horikoshi enters the office building and does a bit of work:

We cut to this, cherry blossoms:

And the camera pans down to a lovely morning shot where we see the room in which Satomi is sleeping (if you look carefully you can see her at the left edge of the open section of the wall):

Here's a portion of the Wikipedia gloss on the symbolism cherry blossoms:

In Japan, cherry blossoms symbolize clouds due to their nature of blooming en masse, besides being an enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life, an aspect of Japanese cultural tradition that is often associated with Buddhist influence, and which is embodied in the concept of mono no aware. [...] The transience of the blossoms, the extreme beauty and quick death, has often been associated with mortality [...] The flower is also represented on all manner of consumer goods in Japan, including kimono, stationery, and dishware.

Just at Mount Fuji is all but symbolic of Japan itself, so is the cherry blossom. The transience is, of course, apt for a dying woman.

But the cherry blossom has a more specific association, one highly pertinent to the film. Wikipedia continues:

The Sakurakai or Cherry Blossom Society was the name chosen by young officers within the Imperial Japanese Army in September 1930 for their secret society established with the goal of reorganizing the state along totalitarian militaristic lines, via a military coup d'état if necessary.

During World War II, the cherry blossom was used to motivate the Japanese people, to stoke nationalism and militarism among the populace. [...] Japanese pilots would paint them on the sides of their planes before embarking on a suicide mission, or even take branches of the trees with them on their missions. A cherry blossom painted on the side of the bomber symbolized the intensity and ephemerality of life; in this way, the aesthetic association was altered such that falling cherry petals came to represent the sacrifice of youth in suicide missions to honor the emperor.

Cherry blossoms are thus specifically associated with pilots and warplanes. Is Miyazaki thus binding that symbolism to this dying woman, a woman dying, not in glorious battle for the glory of Japan and the Emperor, but of tuberculosis and for no reason at all? I don't know, but I will observe that, if you don't know the specific associations of cherry blossoms, you can't experience the film that way. But you can still respond to this woman's dying. Though I've long known generally of the Japanese affection for cherry blossoms, I didn't know that specific association until I began writing this post. But those nationalists that Inkoo Kang worries about, they're likely to be quite familiar with that symbolism.

Let's return to the film. Horikoshi enters the room:

His wife awakens. He lies down beside her and tells her that the design is finished. He'll probably have to spend the next few days at the test field. As he falls asleep she extends the covers over him:

We cut to a scene of the oxen hauling the plane out to the test site. We've seen this before, along with a lament that Japan is so poor and primitive that they have to use oxen to haul the planes out.

We cut back to the house. Horikoshi leaves for the test site. This is the last time he'll see his wife.

The test goes well. Notice the cherry blossoms along the riverbanks:

Moments later Horikoshi senses that his wife has died:

Hats are tossed in the air in elation at how well the test has gone. The pilot thanks Horikoshi for designing such a wonderful plane. The camera zooms up for a high aerial view of the plane and the jubilant men (except, of course, for Horikoshi) and then it pans right to reveal the aerial bombardment of Japan at the end of the war (how much time did Miyazaki traverse in that pan?):

The film is now over except for the final dreamtime scene in which Horikoshi will meet Caproni and then his wife.

A question: The sadness one feels at Satomi's death, how far does it extend along the trails of symbolic meaning - Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, and the plane - extending through her? I don't know. I can see what's in the film; I can explicate connections. That's one thing. But the question I ask is about what happens in the hearts and minds of people who see the film. It's an empirical question, and one I don't know how to answer.

I assume the answer will vary from person to person. I'm particularly interested in those nationalists who still cling to Japan's imperial past. What I'm wondering is whether or not The Wind Rises might, by virtue of its web of affective associations, help them to grieve for the Japan that lost World War II. If they can grieve, maybe they can let it go. Just why I think that, well, I'm going on intuition at the moment.

My intuition on this particular matter comes from work I did on a trilogy of manga by Osamu Tezuka: Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld. They were published in the post war period (1948-1951) and represent an attempt to rethink Japan's position in the world: "How did Tezuka allow the old, Imperial "Japan" to die in his mind so that he could create a new Japan to replace it? How did he restore a sense of order and meaning to the world?" [5]. The process is both conceptual and emotional, and necessarily entails large regions of a person's psyche.

The network of beliefs and affect that constitute one's attachment to one's nation are not tightly compartmentalized so that one can change them as easily as swapping out a defective processor or memory bank in a PC and replacing it with a new one. It is difficult and painstaking affective and conceptual work. It takes time. Perhaps even generations - think of those Americans who are still fighting the Civil War.

We see that process in its early stages in Tezuka's trilogy. Six decades later it's still ongoing in The Wind Rises. That, I argue, is how Miyazaki deploys Horikoshi's love for a consumptive woman. As one grieves for her one grieves for ... Imperial Japan, contemporary Japan, another nation (the one to which you are attached), for humankind? It all depends on who you are and what you need.