From Up on Poppy Hill

This is certainly one of the more underrated of the Studio Ghibli films. Like most of their films, its themes are family, place, nature, custom -- all those wonderful neglected things. Hayao Miyazaki may often be described as a left-winger, but if that's true he is one of the most conservative left-wingers around. Miyazaki a thoughtful man who finds much to hold onto from the past but equally does not shy away from criticising his nation's history. Neither does he fall into the modern trap of being enamoured with the glitzy hi-tech present; he knows what he would like to change (and often change back).

Poppy Hill, however, is much more about resisting change. Interestingly, those resisting change -- some horrible modern building supposed to replace a charming old university building -- are students. These students are not at all like the students (or young people generally) in modern British society. They are all impeccably polite and deferential, but without ever loosening their principles. They position themselves as custodians of the past against ruthless, cultureless modernity.

Miyazaki's vision is interesting because Japan not merely has an especially vicious imperial past, but moreover a vicious imperial past that ended in catastrophic defeat. One would think it would be hard for anyone to the left of Yukio Mishima to defend the past, yet Japan, even taking into account its astonishing modernisation and westernisation, seems less embarrassed of its history than most of the victorious end-of-history West.

Japan had the good sense after the war not to do away with millennia of tradition. Could the West learn from Japan? We have never had a more uneasy relationship with our past than we do in this century. I think the success of the Studio Ghibli films in the West -- which are truly great animated films unlike the wretched superficiality of modern Disney films -- shows an immutable longing for a world of mystery, tradition, continuity, wonder and goodness. These all can be readily found in British history, no less than in Japanese culture, and they can still be found in their most elemental form in the woods and forests of these islands, if only we would discover them.