Ghibli and Happy Wistfulness

We visited the Ghibli Museum a couple of weeks ago. The building itself has a slightly cartoonish design on the exterior with it's pastel colors, but the interior is made to look like older European architecture mixed with the playfulness of the architecture of Hayao Miyuzuki's films.

For those that don't know, Hayao Miyuzuki is a very famous animator, director, producer, and screen writer in Japan. He is most famous for being one of the founders of Studio Ghibli (for which the museum is named), which has produced some of Japan's most iconic animated films of the last 30 years. Miyuzuki's name is the one that comes up first when speaking about Japan's world famous animation.

Walking into the museum was like walking into a child's dream. The different areas of the museum all served different purposes and displayed different aspects of Miyuzuki's work, but the museum as a whole has the ability to pull you into Miyuzuki's imagination and evoke pleasant, if not a bit bittersweet and wistful, feelings of wonder.

I'm not an expert on Japanese art or culture by any stretch of the imagination, nor have I seen as much anime, listened to as much Japanese music, or read as much Japanese literature as many people I know, but I've noticed that there is a dream-like wistfulness that pervades much of the Japanese writing, anime, and music that I've taken in. My impression is that this stems from the Japanese notion that life, like everything else, is transient. As far as I can tell, this sense of life's transience is something that is admired and and even celebrated in Japan - not something to fear or bemoan. This feeling is encapsulated in the untranslatable Japanese concept wabi sabi. According to Wikipedia, wabi sabi is an aesthetic "world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection". In their modern uses, wabi means "rustic simplicity, freshness, or quietness", while sabi refers to the "beauty or serenity that comes with old age". Objects that evoke feelings of "serene melancholy and a spiritual longing" are said to be wabi sabi.

Examples of this concept include Ise Jingu, Japan's most famous Shinto shrine, which is intentionally burned down and rebuilt to the same exact specifications every 20 years. This is partially to demonstrate the belief of "death and renewal of nature and the impermanence of all things", but there is also the practical reason that rebuilding it helps pass down traditional building skills from one generation to the next.

Another oft-cited example is sakura (cherry blossom trees), which bloom ever so briefly in the spring. Then, the blossoms fall and another cycle begins. Impermanence. Transience.

Despite the way that these transient feelings of wabi sabi are seemingly celebrated, or at least admired, in Japanese cutlure, there is still a certain "happy wistfulness" (or at least a "serene melancholy") that comes with this notion, and I don't think we have an accurate  way to concisely describe it in English. It seems comparable to the idea of being resigned to fate, which is definitely not a Western value. On the contrary, we are explicitly and implicitly told story after story in the West of people overcoming their fate: people born poor becoming successful, hero athletes starting from nothing and becoming champions, etc. These heroes of ours achieve a state of "perfection" by overcoming the odds stacked against them. We have a habit of brushing images of their old age and their failings underneath the rug.

However, the aforementioned feelings - happy wistfulness, nostalgia, and wabi sabi - overflow in the work of one of Japan's modern cultural icons: Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki's work has had a profound impact on Japanese culture, both within and outside of Japan. While most of his work often takes place in worlds that blend realism and fantasy (a sort of Japanese version of magical realism), the feeling of "happy wistfulness" and wabi sabi permeates itself throughout his work.

His work often features children or teenagers as the main characters with faults. The characters often  unwittingly enter into magically unreal situations where they have to overcome some sort of adversity in order to mature (essentially a Bildungsroman) and "become who they are", as Nietzche would say. The nostalgic/"happy wistfulness" factor comes into play double fold: the innocence of the characters and world of fantasy within which they are thrown. Everyone yearns for the simplicity and ease of being a child when they are older, but we less often yearn for the rich imaginations we had as children. Again, the idea of "happy wistfulness" through wabi sabi is constantly evoked in the characters and the fantastical situations they find themselves in.

A little sidenote here: what's interesting is that because these adversities take place in "magical unreal" situations, the characters never really lose their innocence as they do in a lot of Western Bildungsroman. That is, the characters don't really experience a sense of disillusionment. This may not be true of all of Miyazaki's films (I haven't seen all of them), but it seems to be true of the ones I've seen.

I think it's also interesting that a lot of Miyazaki's animation takes place in rural/agragrian settings that recall "simpler" times. I think this relates to the "wabi" of wabi sabi. This is another way in which people experience the nostalgia: by over-romanticizing the past which may or may not have existed. I think there is a lot of escapism in Japan through art and pop culture. I think that there is a palpable sense that life has stagnated for people on an individual scale, while the country as a whole continues to chug along economically since the stock market crash of the early 90s, and the subsequent Lost Decade. A book I read about the history of modern Japan called Bending Adversity detailed the struggle of Japan to find their place in the world both since World War II and the stock market crash. I think the rural/agragrian settings of Miyazaki's films bring people back to a time before the modernization of Japan, and therefore before their modern troubles.

Personally, I really connect to these feelings of "happy wistfulness" and wabi sabi. A lot of the art I'm attracted to embraces this "happy wistfulness" and it really reflects the way that I view life in general: there is an undercurrent of tragedy that runs through life because we all know that our lives our transient. Inevitably, we will have to face our own deaths. However, I think rather than have a demoralizing effect - rather than get too lost in the past or the inevitability of death - it helps drive me forward.