Introduction

From Up On Poppy Hill 『コクリコ坂から』 was released in 2011 as Miyazaki Gorô’s 宮崎吾朗 (born 1967) second animation movie after Tales from the Earthsea 『ゲド戦記』 (2006). It is based on the 1980s serialized eponymous Japanese comics in the category of shôjo manga (namely, comics targeted at female teenagers) illustrated by Takahashi Chizuru 高橋千鶴 (unknown birth-year) and written by Sayama Tetsurô 佐山 哲郎 (born 1948). The plot is set in 1964 in Yokohama: the 1960s are a highly symbolical period of time in postwar-Japan, as they saw an escalating increase in student activism and campus revolts in Japan as well as in other parts of the world against wars and the prevalent patriarchal social order. Miyazaki Gorô adheres to this ideology, a soft reminder of the main tropos of his previous animation movie Tales from the Earthsea, by swiftly building the story-line of From Up On Poppy Hill on the premise of paternal absences: in the animation movie, the main female character Matsuzaki Umi’s 松崎海 father was killed when his supply ship was sunk by mines in the Korean War (1950-1953);the male character Kazama Shun’s 風間俊 biological father died aboard a repatriation vessel after the end of the Second World War.

Instead of historically faithfully depicting the details of the city of Yokohama by mid-1960s, Miyazaki Gorô insisted on the emotional realization that simply re-enacting something in its time is not real enough, and additionally would not be necessarily beautiful, so that he decided to show the location as “shimmering and bustling with life” from the viewpoint of the characters involved in the story. In accordance with this directorial vision, the design and the architecture of the Quartier Latin is an amalgamation of clutter and dirt in the house’s many rooms; it is supposed to serve as a remembrance of one’s own college years. The clutter and filthiness naturally accompany such an age, and are uniquely associated with the enthusiasm and vitality of those years: their dreams, their joys, their unlimited faith in life and the universe. It is precisely this pure-hearted, melodramatic atmosphere of From Up On Poppy Hill as a youth (animated) movie, full of period details which bring that era into a nostalgic, but realistic foreground, that makes viewers wonder at their own disenchanted attitude towards existence and society and question the passage of time as well as their perspective on the world, on self and on others. From Up On Poppy Hill functions somewhat like a time-machine, displaying dreams of a not-so-distant past; it is a sweet and honestly sentimental story, with the Quartier Latin appearing as an almost fantastic entity: the respect and politeness among characters, even among teenage-protagonists, is a far cry from what goes on in schools and on college-campuses in this day and age (particularly, since the 1990s).

Plot Overview

The plot follows the daily life of Matsuzaki Umi, a sixteen-year-old student attending Isogo High-School and living in ‘Coquelicot Manor’, a boarding house overlooking the port of Yokohama. Her mother, Ryôko, is a medical professor studying abroad in the United States of America. Umi runs the house and looks after her younger siblings, Sora and Riku, and her grandmother, Hana. College student Hirokôji Sachiko and doctor-in-training Hokuto Miki also live there. Each morning, Umi raises a set of signal flags with the message “I pray for safe voyages”. One day, a poem about the flags being raised is published in the school newspaper by Kazama Shun, a member of the journalism club, who had been witnessing the flags from sea as he was riding his father’s tugboat to school. At Isogo High-School, Umi meets Shun when he participates in a daredevil stunt for the newspaper, leaving Umi with a negative first impression. Umi later accompanies Sora to obtain Shun’s autograph at the Quartier Latin, an old and dilapidated building housing Isogo High-School’s clubs for extracurricular activities. Umi learns that Shun publishes the school newspaper, along with Mizunuma Shirô, Isogo High-School’s student government president, and eventually she ends up helping on the newspaper. Later on, Shun convinces the other students to renovate the building after a debate on the future of the Quartier Latin, which may be demolished, and at Umi’s suggestion, the female student body cooperates with the other students. Subsequently, the plot unfolds as a typical high-school drama reminiscent of the 1990’s nostalgia: students unite for a greater good despite individual differences. On this background, personal stories and conflicts arise and develop, with a particularly bitter-sweet denouement: the power of friendship and of an honest, open attitude towards life’s challenges.

Themes and Motifs

From Up On Poppy Hill is an impactful allegory for two reasons: firstly, it embeds what might be labeled “imagined nostalgia” in a thick structure of quotidian happenings and emotional configurations. Umi and Shun are not plainly high-school students coming-of-age in an era of socio-political reconstruction. They are symbolical individuals reminding audiences of past mistakes and the grievances resulted from those mistakes, as well as of the necessity to learn from mistakes and move forward. The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 had been an important sign of cooperation and forgiveness. The hope and faith connected to the gesture of assigning the first Asian Olympics to Japan were part of a larger historical attitude to employ the past as a repository of lessons to be learnt from, and to transcend the past into legacies for the future. From the disenchanted, hopeless Japan of early 2011, with its confusions and lack of orientation, the mid-1960s seemed even more a deep fountain of meaningfulness and insight into its own historical trajectory.

Secondly, From Up On Poppy Hill re-designs school-life as a preview of society. It has been often said that high-school backyards and college-campuses are clear, unmistaken previews of the upcoming society, as they contain the representative citizens of tomorrow in the process of becoming those very citizens, able – or not able – to contribute to their respective social environments. While this preview function of educational institutions has long been inadvertently filtered through overtly optimistic glasses, last decades have been proving that particularly negative aspects of school and college life are those which would become relevant within the society a few years down the road. In From Up On Poppy Hill, the idealization process is surpassed by a more realistic view, which focuses on the normality of the individuals, on their everyday existences, while pushing into the shadow their symbolical functions as representative for a specific social stratum or group. Both Umi and Shun are regular high-schoolers, with inevitable emotions and confusions, and are doing their best to come to terms with the requirements coming from those around them.

Overcoming the symbolism commonly attached to characters in artistic works with the simultaneous embedding of “imagined nostalgia“ within the conglomerate of the flow of history, these are the two major factors which turn From Up On Poppy Hill into a quiet masterpiece to display, both non-judgmentally and self-critically, an era of particular struggles, which would metamorphose later on into a site of ardent remembrance.

Critical Insights

In From Up On Poppy Hill, though, Miyazaki Gorô resists the almost compulsive tendency to idealize the past (as “imagined nostalgia”) through the automate comparison with present times within the process of ripping main characters of their common symbolical configurations. In Tales from the Earthsea, the science-fiction setting allowed him to move beyond any historical constraints and to create a world of desolate scarcity in which humans – or human-like entities – pursued their battles for power and domination. In From Up On Poppy Hill, the clearly defined historical background “forces” him into specific narrative structures, with coherent characters’ inner architectures and transparent story-lines. Then again, his creative freedom as director allows him to re-create the original manga-work, and thus to deliver new levels of significance above the core-plot of a boy-meets-girl-story amidst Japan’s glorious postwar-recovery.

I would argue that precisely this “glorious postwar recovery” finds itself sliding at the center of Miyazaki Gorô’s animation movie, as well as its questioning in light of the realities of early 2010s and their heartbreaking challenges. Along several decades, the 1960s had been turning from an era of chaos and revolts against the patriarchal system of chained freedoms and submissive warfare into the memory of the fight for change and for the individual’s right to self-determination and self-fulfillment in themselves. Nonetheless, while the disenchanted 2010s debuted on a rather grave note of despair in face of corruption, incompetence and the repeatability of history, the relation to the 1960s had deepened, social actors trying increasingly harder to re-construct an idealized era in the face of apparently insurmountable adversities and self-induced delusions.

Conclusion

Miyazaki Gorô’s mastery appears in From Up On Poppy Hill less in the form of re-inventing the past, and rather as the effort to orchestrate the past as a highly individualized endeavour, without the usual nostalgic pretext: neither Umi nor Shun are symbols of their social class or of their age group. They live according to the historical time-frame in which they are born, and face similar problems and complications as millions of other teenagers throughout times and spaces. Simultaneously, though, they are highly individualized teenagers, which look for solutions to their highly individualized crises on the background of their very specific historic- geographical context (see Turner 1968:94-99). In doing so, in carefully avoiding the generalization so often so typical for such artistic works, Miyazaki Gorô allows for a straightforward narrative attitude, in which past, present and future flow into each other and contribute equally to the complementary consolidation of individual pathways in life, as such. I would say, this choice of individualization of human experiences on the background of highly idealized historical eras is what confers the animation movie From Up On Poppy Hill its particular charm and its power as a didactic tool to teach lessons about history and people who have lived in the past, in a manner which encourages curiosity, empathy and joy, instead of annihilating the emotional connection to those events which have, after all, pushed historical development towards what we have come to identify as our present.