Post By: Michael Remington
“From Up on Poppy Hill” is an animated film, that on the surface is about
a young boy and girl who fall in love, but has the deeper meaning of the
cultural preservation of the Japanese identity visualized by the juxtaposition
of the modern school building and the old clubhouse of the students. To the
students the clubhouse represents their own cultural identity and they oppose
the old being ripped down in favor of a more modern building that the school
district has already volunteered to build. This relationship between the
students and their clubhouse is not just a representation of the students’
identity, but the cultural identity of a “young” Japan trying to hold onto its
cultural past while facing a rapidly changing modern future.
As summaries go it is important to mix the narrative and the summary, as
no discussion regarding this film will really be understood without many of the
details of the film. This summary is a little longer than normal, but the
narrative is also critical here. It is by far one of the best and most powerful
messages that Miyazaki has been able to put into film.
The film opens on a scene of Umi Matsuzaki raising flags over the
boarding house where she lives in Yokohama. Every day she raises the signals to
say “I pray for safe voyages.” Umi’s mother is a professor of medicine studying
in America. Umi’s father has already passed away when the film opens. She lives
with her grandmother at the boarding house and runs the house for her. She does
all the cooking and takes care of her younger siblings and the people boarding
in the house.
A poem appears in the school newspaper by Shun Kazama who sees the flags
everyday on his tugboat ride to school. It is discovered that Umi’s flags are a
way to hold on to her past. Her father told here that those flags guided him
home. After a negative first impression of Shun due to his daredevil stunt,
they become close friends when Umi and her sister go to get an autograph from
Shun. That is the first time they set foot in “The Latin Quarter” where all the
clubs of the school are housed. Shun and one of his friends are in charge of
the school newspaper and Umi ends up helping them produce it.
The students debate whether they should allow the clubhouse to be ripped
down. Umi suggests to Shun that they just cleanup and renovate the building.
Shun and the boys like the idea and Umi gets the girls to help clean. They hope
that cleaning up the building will teach the students how important their
cultural heritage is. Many of the students argue that the new Japan must be
built upon the ruins of the old. They discuss their heritage as something dead
and broken. However, Shun gets up to argue that they cannot really progress
without remembering who they are. This is the critical conflict in the film.
How valuable is it to the future to preserve our past?
Shun visits Umi’s home and sees a photograph of three naval officers, one
of is Umi’s deceased father who died in the Korean War. Shun is shocked because
he has the same photo. After questioning his father he learns that his parents
had a baby die and shortly thereafter Umi’s father showed up with a baby boy
and gave him to them. Shun is troubled, but Umi says she doesn’t care if they
are siblings.
While this is happening the school board president decides to demolish
the clubhouse despite renovations. Umi, Shun and the student president make a
trip to meet with the school board president to petition that they not demolish
the building. The school board president agrees to come see the clubhouse.
During his visit Umi and Shun are taken to see a sea captain who was another of
the sailors in the picture, the only one still alive.
They learn that Shun is the father of the third man in the picture. To
the sea captain, meeting the children is like being reunited with his old
friends. To him the new generation is the way that the old generation lives on.
They also serve as a connection to his past that he had all but lost during the
wars. That is the key part is that both of the fathers die due to wars. War is
what had virtually wiped out the Japanese traditions and forced them to feel as
though they had to abandon their past to modernize for the future.
After concluding his tour and observing the students efforts to preserve
their history. The school board president decides that the old building should
be preserved, as he states “How can we educate our children if we forget our
past.” The other benefit of their new revelations, the road block of being
siblings is removed, allowing Umi and Shun are able to continue their
relationship, one that had almost been destroyed by war, much like Japan’s
relationship with its past.
In terms of its formal elements one of the most effective techniques
employed by this film is establishing shots. Typically establishing shots are
used to set the setting for the viewer. However in “From up on Poppy Hill”
establishing shots are employed to show a traditional Japan still living in the
midst of a modernizing Japan. One of the prime examples of this is when Shun is
riding his bike to school. The hillside is shown with many traditional Japanese
houses and narrow streets. People are bustling and traffic is heavy. From the
hillside many ships are visible in the harbor. This is a big change from the
formerly isolationist Japan. Yokohama is one of the prime trading ports of
Japan and it was the port through which Admiral Perry entered Japan to end the
isolationist policy of the shogunate. A busy harbor full of foreign ships is a
powerful representation of Japan’s departure from its past. This quickly
establishes the setting as Japan during the postwar period.
Another of the powerful establishing shots is when the children go to
Tokyo. As they walk through the old streets and neighborhoods that now have
trains cutting through them, posters of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics can be seen on
walls everywhere. The Olympics were really Japan’s first opportunity to show to
the world the progress they had made after the war. This sets the story in that
important phase in Japanese history as they are struggling to recover and to
gain international recognition.
One of the last establishing shots that really stands out is when they
show the modern school building juxtaposed with the old “Latin Quarter”
clubhouse. It is a powerful representation of the old and the new coexisting
side by side. To the children the old clubhouse is a representation of their
past. They don’t want to let the clubhouse go because it would mean letting go
of their past and who they are. The clubhouse represents an old Japan that his
thick with dust and clutter from its past that it has yet to resolve. However,
the student clean the old building and remodel it to prove the value of history
going forward. They are able to clean and restore what had once been built over
the course of many years.
One of the important relationships in the movie is that of Umi and
Shun’s. The relationship starts off as a strong and effective relationship that
helps Umi recover from the tragedy of her father’s death. In a way she is like
Japan. As a child she had a loving family but lost her father to war, just as
Japan’s identity was nearly destroyed by World War II. Shun is the memory of
her father’s friend, her cultural heritage in a way. It is Shun who is able to
overcome her past and look forward to her future. The past is what enables us
to face the future, not letting go of our past. In that way Umi and Shun’s
relationship, in many ways, represents Japan’s effort to bridge the gap of its
pre and post war identities.
The message of the film is that Japan should not throw away and burn its
cultural heritage, but that they need only restore it to its former glory.
Their history is integral to who they are as a people. The war has not left
their society in ruins as the building in the film appeared. Their culture was
actually buried under years of neglect as attempts to modernize were heaped on
their past burying who they are as Japanese beneath a layer of dust. However,
if they were willing to scrub as one people they would once again realize what
it means to be Japanese.
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