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IEAS Film Club Podcast #02: Kimi no Na wa

The moderator of the Film Club screening, Visnyei Petra is joined by Pájer Máté to have a conversation about the film and about Japan. Give it a listen! You can also read Petra’s thoughts on the film below.

 

“Mitsuha, you’re not touching your boobs today”

Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 Kimi no Na wa (Your Name) tells the story of two teenagers, namely, of Mitsuha Miyamizu, a girl from an eventless village in rural Japan and Taki Tachibana, a boy from the busy city of Tokyo. The teens start out as complete strangers, however, triggered by a seemingly unknown reason, they start to wake up in each other’s body, and have to get around to managing the other’s life. The body-swapping phenomenon continues until a split piece of a comet hits Mitsuha’s village – turns out, they were in fact switching places in separate timelines. Taki manages to go back in time and save Mitsuha and other residents, after which both forget about the other, only to meet again a few years later, depicted in a lachrymose final scene.

The movie was a box office hit in Japan and is globally popular to the present day. The main reason behind its popularity lies in the animation. Intricate hand-drawn sequences featuring even most everyday objects, such as filaments of thread, steaming cups of tea or branches of trees are carried out with meticulous detail and care. The film starts with a breathtakingly beautiful scenario, as split fragments of a comet are falling from above a layer of clouds and piercing through them, illuminated by colourful rays of the setting sun, ranging from deep blue to faded orange through subtle hues of pink, to a yellowish white gleam of sunshine glistening for mere seconds. The attention to detail is so great, that some real life locations and buildings that appear in the movie actually became popular places of pilgrimage for Your Name fans, as the animated versions of said premises are so uncannily alike to the actual, tactile ones.

Another reason behind the dominating success is the authentic depiction of both rural and urban Japan: Mitsuha desperately yearns to leave her village, Itomori, and live her life as a handsome boy in the vivid city of Tokyo, which is an understandable and legit wish, since there are decisively more opportunities in the big cities, especially for young aspiring men, as women are expected to work around the household, rather than the labour market. In Itomori, Mitsuha’s future is decided by her family, as her ancestors dedicated their lives to the local shrine – her mother’s lineage, the Miyamizu family, has been taking care of the shrine and implementing sacred ceremonies for generations. Thus, the girl is expected to follow the family traditions, whereas, in Tokyo she could feel liberated and be a trailblazer figure for all the villagers who are stuck in the village because they have no courage to leap for something new. Mitsuha and her little sister are introduced living with their grandmother; later throughout the movie, it is revealed that after their mother’s death, the girls’ father chose to abandon not only the shrine but to a certain extent, his daughters, to pursue a political career. The fact that the figure of the father cuts ties with religious traditions and leaves the task of maintaining the shrine to the remaining female members of his family further accentuates the gendered variability as presented in the film. I have had numerous lengthy conversations about how one should see the gender binary in the context of Japan with Máté Pájer, as he was fortunate enough to spend a year in the country. Taking into account both what Máté has told me and what is depicted in the movie, it can be concluded that, even though contemporary Japan is trying to keep its roots with cherishing and reserving most of the ancient traditions and, at the same time, to modernize its society in terms of equality, despite all the efforts, the country can still be regarded as a heavily patriarchal society up to this day.

Most of the humour and innuendos of the story come from the protagonists’ living in the body of the opposite gender: Mitsuha, having to manage Taki’s life, brings forward the boy’s supposed feminine side, while Taki, struggling with sitting in a skirt with legs closed, inflicts Mitsuha with confident, careless, so-called masculine characteristics. The movie is loaded with heavy symbolism, with the girl-boy swap phenomenon coming from ancient Japanese traditions, and with standing as a tribute to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Taking into account that five years passed between the catastrophe and the film, it is evident that Kimi no Na wa is an important denotation, standing as a tangible mark of time needed for the processing of trauma in the context of the isolated island of Japan and its inhabitants.

Albeit a young adult romance, the movie incorporates a certain consciousness about the impact of eco-disasters and the importance of awareness regarding such events. Because, with Japan being an island, having earthquakes and other natural disasters is nothing uncommon, yet the biggest problem lies in the unpreparedness of the people. Kimi no Na wa reflects on this problem through a scene, in which, after an explosion which shuts down the electricity in most of Itomori, the inhabitants of the village are alarmed that there is a chance of a forest fire spreading, and thus, they should gather at the appointed shelter. Albeit in supposed danger, the people are shockingly calm and hesitant to seek shelter. The people of Japan are so used to smaller scale earthquakes that they do not have a sense of fear regarding natural disasters, and, back then, at the time of 2011, they did not take the warning signs seriously enough, which resulted in a horrible disaster. Fortunately, since then, preventive measures were taken and people are finally starting to realize that they are not safe at all, and that any warning sign should be taken way more seriously.

Even though a widely successful hit, the movie has its flaws: the plot has some inconsistencies, which is understandable to a certain extent, since we are talking about a paradoxical sci-fi fantasy that even manages to touch upon the massiveness of natural disasters and the significance of preparedness for such events. It should be noted, however, that the filmmakers ran short on production time and, consequently, the storyline is a bit hard to follow – I believe this gives a significant amount of Your Name‘s charm. The viewer is taken on a journey through a hazy, dreamy narrative puzzle that somehow works, and manages to stay entertaining.