That that that that that that that that

See to it, at that, that that that that ‘that’ that that man had written be more clearly expressed.  Write it as ‘this.’

See to it at that that that that that that that that man had written be more clearly expressed.  Write it as ‘this.’

Tu autem fac ut id quod illud ‘illud’ quod ille scripserat sit clarius. Id ‘hoc’ scribatur.

The Wind Rises

The movie is very misleading upon the first viewing, seeming, at least to me, to be a biographical picture about a renowned aeronautical engineer of national significance to Japan and of personal significance to Hayao Miyazaki, whose father’s company supplied parts for the Zero during the War. Perhaps, as I did, you saw the film at first as little more than a pet project to lionize a childhood hero while perhaps celebrating a national figure. And even if one is alerted to some higher objective than an entertaining biography by the epigraph by Valéry, the rather self-contained sequences of the movie's first half have the episodic feel of a biographical picture. Jiro is withal a pleasant, congenial fellow with not only talent but vision and love. He seems a child's hero, possessed of determination, love, vision, passion, decorum, and boyish innocence. But part of the genius of the movie is that the first half seems to be going steadily in a certain predictable direction, when the final third changes course, not radically, but enough to see the preceding scenes having been cast, so to speak, in a new light. Thus there is a coherent light shining forward bearing the biographical logic of the movie, and a light shining backward bearing what I should call the moral and aesthetic logic.

In the light of the end, what seemed biographical episodes—such as of his defending the young boy from bullies near the beginning, his heroics during the earthquake—, and those strange and even eerie parts near the end become part of a coherent unity. That unity is of Jiro not as an innocent and boyish engineer sadly deprived of his dream by the war, but as an idealist who is gradually induced to moral indifference, if not indeed to moral corruption.

However simplistic he may be, Jiro is neither stupid nor shallow. Rather, Hanjo, his friend, is our archetype of the unimaginative but competent engineer, and it is he who designs the unimaginative and serviceable, albeit deeply flawed, heavy bomber, the Betty, whose fuel-filled wings are wont to explode when strafed. It is he who laments Japan's backwardness, he who marries in a presumably arranged marriage, he who despairs of the future, and he who merely plods along. Morally and politically, he is cynically realistic, observing that the Japanese government could feed starving Japanese with mountains of sponge cake with the money being paid to the Germans for military technology.

Jiro on the other hand is, as you observed, sentimental, and is, I would venture, far more than that. Recall my observation of the Zero’s first appearance, in Jiro’s dream land---how embryonic, how organic, like a flower-bud or a pupal butterfly. Surely this lifelike design embodies a much higher and abstract level of thought than the rickety canvas planes of Caproni and the brutally metallic planes of Junkers. If from a mackerel bone Jiro could design a plane, then the Zero is a work of art, manifesting the nature's mathematical perfection. And that is what most defines Jiro: perfectionism. His sentimentality is merely part and parcel of his general absorption in the abstractions of engineering.

And it is in this behalf, of Jiro's perfectionism and idealism, that the film becomes quite depressing. Jiro is a perfectionist with vision, but he grows ever less able, or perhaps disposed, to match great vision with good deeds. We are shown time and again that that he is naturally benevolent, never wishing harm to anyone, but he is not always beneficent. In fact, I believe that his beneficence declines throughout the movie. Early on, he confronts the a clique of bullies and defends a small boy; after the earthquake, he saves Naoko and her servant; a little later, he tries to feed some starving children, but becomes depressed when they refuse his offer of sponge cake. He thenceforward becomes progressively less effective in his beneficence until at last he commits the horrendous crime of abandoning his terminally ill wife to perfect his warplane. Did you not wonder why in God's name was he smoking next to his consumptive wife? And why did he not insist upon her returning immediately to the sanatorium to recover, as his sister and Mr. Kurokawa, his boss, suggested?

Which elicits, to my mind, an interesting answer: Jiro was, however innocent his ultimate intentions, weak, and moreover, in so far as he paid attention to the outside world, fatalistic. He knew and lamented that his aeroplane would be used for war, and he even knew that Japan was doomed to lose, but he preferred to ignore the broader reality and to absorb himself in his plane; he knew Naoko was seriously ill, he knew he ought not smoke in her presence (his first inclination is still to go outside), but he preferred to have her with him. Even worse for him morally, he ultimately cared more for the plane than for her. He recognized his errors with the plane---that its engine was too weak, that it needed to be lighter and more aerodynamic---and he corrected them forthwith. He knew Naoko was ill, but he did not consider just how ill. His native benevolence, it seems, was simply overwhelmed by negligence. And Miyazaki is at pains to show that, even in Jiro's difficult situation as an engineer for an evil government, a government which had sicked its thought police against him, he need not so exert himself on their behalf. Junkers, we are told, is resisting the Nazi's, even if futilely, and Honjo does what is expected of him and no more.

The hardest part of the movie is understanding the relation between Jiro's love for aviation and his love for Naoko. The two seem very closely intertwined, visually and thematically. Naoko and the plane both are closely associated with the wind; and remember that it is Naoko who inspires, or is at least the first to witness, the initial realization of Jiro's future Zero, as the paper airplane that he throws to her at the Magic Mountain-like resort. She thus witnesses the birth of his plane. Remember, too, that near the film's end, on the very day of the completed Zero's first successful flight, amid the rejoicing of his victory, he alone is of a sudden enveloped in a rather chilling silence, and he looks to the mountains, I suspect sensing that Naoko has just died.

Thus Naoko and the Zero are closely related in Jiro's mind, but while the ultimate nature of his love for them both is unclear, the tendencies of the two loves are somewhat clearer. His love for the Zero is that of a perfectionist, and thus inhuman and uncompassionate. The more he tends toward this ethereal ideal, the farther he strays from compassion, and hence the decline in his benevolence and beneficence. The Zero dehumanizes the love which Jiro so quickly displayed as a boy and a young man, and it turns what should be compassion and charity into the pursuit of mechanical perfection. Naoko, I think, was Jiro's chance to humanize this love with compassion. Howsoever it was, she seemed to possess for Jiro the same fascination as aviation, so I think we may speculate that, without the War, he might have chosen his wife over his plane. As it happened, though, the demands of the fascist government pressed him toward the plane. Still, he chose not only to meet the Navy's demand for a carrier plane, but to exceed them.

Such devotion hardly recommends Jiro's morality, for shifting the focus of his love from the Zero to Naoko would in no way have been a perversion or adulteration of his perfectionism. He and Naoko shared what can hardly be thought a vulgar physical love. Had he given his love wholly to her (and it seems all his love had to be put in one place) he might have attained a more transcendent and purer perfection. The Zero was a perfection of sorts, but in the end it was both futile, as Japan could only lose the war, and it was reduced to blackened wreckage on the ground. In a sense, of course, Jiro was doomed whichever he chose, for that Naoko, while she may have lived longer had she been more prudent, could hardly be expected to live long with tuberculosis. Even still, Jiro chose the easiest option, to enjoy her love for him as an ancillary to his perfectionism. He is surely guilty of that.

I should stress that I do not think that Miyazaki would have us censure Jiro as a totally unfeeling monster, but I do think that we are meant to mark his moral decline. Indeed, two parallel scenes rather neatly summarize this decline: Did you notice that the shot of Tokyo burning after the earthquake and the shot at the film's end of Tokyo burning after the firebombing were almost identical? The two scenes together show the progress of Jiro's twin inclinations, of flight (or the inhuman ideal) and of compassion (the human ideal). At the earthquake, his first instinct is heroism, but the aeronautical inclination is there, as we see when he looks up to the sky and imagines for a moment that he sees Caproni's planes among the airborne cinders of burning Tokyo. The final sequence introduces burning Tokyo in almost exactly the same way, with the crown of a billowing smoke cloud, then panning down to show us people on the hillside watching their city burn. The difference now is that there are actual planes in the sky, planes which Jiro himself designed, which are shooting down an American bomber. In the last instant before they move off-screen we see one of the Zeroes burst into flames, too. It is a futile struggle. I said before that the the wrecked planes on the ground were Japanese and American, but upon review I see that only two planes are represented in all the wreckage, both Japanese, being Jiro's and Honjo's.

I might add that the allusions to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain seem meaningful, too. Although the character Hans Castorp, the anti-Nazi German, shares his name with the protagonist of The Magic Mountain, the better parallel is certainly between The Magic Mountain's Hans Castorp and Jiro. Both are simple-minded but not in the least stupid, and both are generally benevolent, and both become diseased with a poisonous but very tempting idea. In The Magic Mountain, Castorp is more or less induced to become sick and stay at the sanatorium for years, during which time actual disease sets in and weakens him physically and morally before he ultimately decides to leave the sanatorium to fight in the Great War, in which he presumably dies. And it occurred to me also that Winterreise, which Jiro remarks upon while out for a walk in Berlin, tells the story of a young but utterly disappointed romantic.

In sum, while The Wind Rises is too well made to be unambiguous and to have any one obvious message, I see at least four reasons to feel pessimistic:

1. Beautiful dreams can be made the tools of destruction and evil, and are perhaps especially prone to such misuse.
2. An object of perfection or beauty may be an instrument of death and destruction. Perfection is amoral.
3. The benevolent and innocent may be moved by their dreams to moral indifference.
4. The way to highest beauty was neglected, and the way to corrupted beauty taken instead.