Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#21

Post by smegel »

rosser wrote: post #15
delinka wrote: post #3

I'm disappointed that what could have been a review of an excellent film contained so much anti-"US Warmongering." War is terrible. Sanctions have negative effects. How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations? Asking nicely? "Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not 'collateral damage,' but a premeditated murder. [...] Of course elite war-br…

This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor. And that justifies the murder — yes, murder — of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants ... how, again ?

When an entire nation becomes a support system for a war machine ravaging an entire region and killing tens of millions of innocent people, the notion of "innocent civilians" becomes a bit tenuous.

Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes against humanity is a grotesque notion. The best way to show the Japanese people the horrific nature of war and occupation was to bring it to their doorstep. If they want to portray themselves of victims, it should be of their own leadership, not the countries that needed to defeat them.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#22

Post by ectoplasm »

smegel wrote: post #19
shadowmoses wrote: post #2

August 6th and 9th 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WWII; Thought this was an appropriate time to post this

How does portraying a criminal war aggressor as a victim support an anti-war message?

It's common enough to be both abuser and victim.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#23

Post by ectoplasm »

smegel wrote: post #21
rosser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor. And that justifies the murder — yes, murder — of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants ... how, again ?

When an entire nation becomes a support system for a war machine ravaging an entire region and killing tens of millions of innocent people, the notion of "innocent civilians" becomes a bit tenuous. Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes agai…

So like 9/11 was awesome then?

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#24

Post by hajile »

delinka wrote: post #3

I'm disappointed that what could have been a review of an excellent film contained so much anti-"US Warmongering." War is terrible. Sanctions have negative effects. How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations? Asking nicely? "Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not 'collateral damage,' but a premeditated murder. [...] Of course elite war-br…

There is much more to the story. The history of the United States is full of wilful violence against others. Everything from theft of the south-west from Mexico (a war the US instigated and started) because "God has given us a 'manifest destiny'" to the barbaric atrocities we unleashed during the Spanish-American and later Philippine-American wars (the US has tried very hard to whitewash the concentration camps, rape, and wholesale butchering of men, women, and children).

America forced Japan to open it's borders (because the US wanted to use their lower islands to establish a more efficient trans-Pacific trade route). At that point, Japan realized that the game in Asia and the South Pacific was colonize or be colonized. Had we not invaded Japan for US trade route profits, had we not been demonstrating that colonial imperialism was the way forward, then Japan would have been far less likely to be pressured to behave similarly (the actions of all sides leading to an inevitable war no matter who fired the first shot).

I have no rose-colored view of Japan's actions (my adoptive grandmother and her parents spent most of the war being terribly mistreated and starved in a Japanese concentration camp). At the end of the war, most of these men were executed for their crimes, but despite all the well-known American war crimes, not even one American soldier was charged for crimes committed and everything was hidden behind the American flag.

In 'Grave of the Fireflies' a war is occurring, but is not the focus. It didn't matter to those children who the 'enemy' was and it didn't matter who the 'friendlies' were (neither side was willing to help them when they were incapable of helping themselves). It didn't even matter that the war ended exactly one week before Setsuko died.

I agree with the author that it was premeditated murder, but the murderer was not the US or even Japan. It is every one of us who are unwilling to stop this from happening in the here and now. WW2 is a fading memory, but the innocent casualties of war are not.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#26

Post by bionsuba »

happyscrappy wrote: post #11
AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be down voted because it seems obvious the poster didn't read the whole article. There are later sections, for example those covering Jiro Horikoshi, that address how Japan brought much of their pain on themselves. Also, the comment missed the entire point of the article, as you established. Just because Japan attacked Pearl harbour doesn't mean an unnamed mother deserved to burn to death, nor that her chil…

The Japanese were in many ways more brutal and ruthless than the Nazis but have done a great job whitewashing their despicable past. Wiped away with mushroom clouds that they invited.

Your comment was going so well until that last sentence. Yes, the Japanese government committed atrocities. But I have a hard time seeing how that somehow justifies the US killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians that had nothing to do with it when Japan was basically begging to surrender. Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#27

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bionsuba wrote: post #26
happyscrappy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Japanese were in many ways more brutal and ruthless than the Nazis but have done a great job whitewashing their despicable past. Wiped away with mushroom clouds that they invited.

Your comment was going so well until that last sentence. Yes, the Japanese government committed atrocities. But I have a hard time seeing how that somehow justifies the US killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians that had nothing to do with it when Japan was basically begging to surrender. Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride…

> Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.

Arguably, the US was right. If I understand correctly, the US was determined to break Japan's militaristic social organization, to prevent another war. They needed unconditional surrender to do so. And, in fact, Japan has not been aggressive after World War II. They didn't re-arm and start another war, with hundreds of thousands of more (at least) casualties.

So the moral calculus is really not as simple as what you say.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#28

Post by hajile »

everyone wrote: post #18

MAJOR SPOILERS!!! wtf! no spoiler warning at all. Grave of the fireflies was one of the few Ghibli films I hadnt got around to seeing yet. Plot is totally spoiled in the first few sentences. fuck you author!!

For what it's worth, that "spoiler" is a known fact less than 2 minutes into the film. As with all Ghibli films, the greatness is in the watching.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#29

Post by JoshTriplett »

shadowmoses wrote: post #13
grownseed wrote: post #12

It makes me deeply happy to see this here. Miyazaki's mind is truly unique (and by extension most Ghibli films too), nothing else quite compares (and as the author points out, certainly not Disney & co. despite being Ghibli's distributors in the West). I've introduced many people to Ghibli, a lot of whom would have never even considered watching an animated film (even less so a foreign one), and most came away truly…

In his own words, “You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.”

> You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.

As a statement, it sounds poetic at first, and the first two sentences are absolutely perfect; however, there's something very wrong about the notion of "preserving the balance", and I've seen that notion show up elsewhere as well. Evil should not persist out of any sense of balance, and nothing goes horribly wrong with the world if evil ceases altogether.

Re: Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

#30

Post by rosser »

smegel wrote: post #21
rosser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor. And that justifies the murder — yes, murder — of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants ... how, again ?

When an entire nation becomes a support system for a war machine ravaging an entire region and killing tens of millions of innocent people, the notion of "innocent civilians" becomes a bit tenuous. Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes agai…

"Sipping tea in the garden" ⊕ "getting firebombed" is one hell of a false dichotomy.
Post reply on HN