Forum - View topicINTEREST: Critic Calls Out The Wind Rises For Perpetuating Historical Revisionism
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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Fair enough.
Because he can only save them by helping them kill their enemies. He is forced to choose between saving (some) of the enemies of Japan and saving some of the Japanese. Ideally he could save them all but since he can't the right thing to do is to save the one being attacked, not the aggressor.
Action versus inaction is one of the trickier distinctions to explain in morality but I'm inclined to think it is one we need to accept. Simply too much of our common sense morality rides on it. Of course, that is not to say inaction is automatically okay. But all else the same, a morally wrong action will be worse than failing through inaction to prevent a morally wrong action.
Well as with inaction, I do think one can also be held responsible for things that stem from ignorance, although generally it will be a lesser offense than deliberate, knowing acts. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5846 Location: Virginia, United States |
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War is hell, and so is a soldier's lot in a war.
Yeah, it is so easy to say, just desert your nation's armed forces, run away to another country, or be an ardent objector. But that ignores the very real reprecussions that will follow. Execution and imprisonment have been punishments for such actions, and what about the family you will leave behind. Each of us have to live with our decisions, and the tide of history can be a relentless taskmaster. Personally, on the battlefield, I think you and your fellow soldiers, should put down those soldiers that think terror, rape, and child murder are cool things to do. Put them down outside of prying eyes. That's why our leaders on the actual battlefield, need to be strong willed good people. Otherwise we get platoons, like the one in "Casualties of War". |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23831 |
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I get where the original critic cited in this article is coming from, but it didn't prevent me from enjoying the movie on its own terms. I think this is because the film avoids issues more than it whitewashes them. Sure, the movie isn't a heartfelt apologia for Japan's heinous war record, but I don't feel it portrays Japan as a victim of the war, either, as the critic contends. For example, Kang indicates that by demonstrating the racism and suspicion that the Japanese characters faced from their German allies (which comprises a small part of the film) that somehow Miyazaki was positing that the Japanese were "morally superior" to the Nazis. I didn't get that feeling at all. To me, it simply reflected the reality I'm sure the Japanese engineers faced when dealing with people with Aryan beliefs.
And while it was obviously true that Germany and Japan were WWII allies, they weren't always friendly. A few years before WWI, Kaiser Wilhhelm II gave a notorious interview to the Daily Telegraph. His intent was to try and calm English fears over Germany's accelerated Naval construction program and he said that the Brits shouldn't assume the build-up was aimed at them: "Germany looks ahead. Her horizons stretch far away. She must be prepared for any eventualities in the Far East...Look at the accomplished rise of Japan...It may even be that England herself will be glad that Germany has a fleet..." Needless to say that sentiment caused quite a bit of consternation in Japan. So Jiro's childhood dream of German planes bombing Japan needn't necessarily be viewed as some kind of attempt to whitewash history. |
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zaphdash
 Posts: 620 Location: Brooklyn |
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It's a forum, they can see what I wrote as well as you can. Without digging through eight pages of posts to see who specifically was arguing what, I will say my general assumption in this thread is that, unless people state otherwise, they haven't actually seen the movie yet, since it has only been released in Japan and had limited screenings elsewhere (I myself caught it during its Oscar-eligibility run in New York last month). I'm less concerned about somebody who isn't ripping into a movie they haven't even seen yet, even if they're blindly defending it on the wrong grounds.
You have pretty much completely misunderstood Vietnam here. Vietnam began as a war of independence against French colonial control. When Japanese occupation ended in 1945, Vietnam declared its independence, led by Ho Chi Minh, but France quickly moved to reassert its control over its former colonies and occupied Hanoi. In broad strokes, US involvement began in the form of assistance to France. As the tide shifted and France gradually backed out, the US in turn gradually inserted itself further and further. Under the doctrine of containment, because we feared the bogus "domino theory" (actually, proponents of domino theory will claim that it came to pass -- China, then Vietnam, then Laos and Cambodia, then...well, then the dominoes stopped falling and luckily American democracy was spared), we essentially became embroiled in our ally's colonial dispute. When France pulled out, we instead set to installing and propping up a friendly (and most certainly not democratic) government in South Vietnam and sought to unify the country under its rule, which the North and its allies (China, USSR, etc) weren't terribly amenable to doing. Put very simply, the Vietnam War may never have happened at all if Western powers (first France, then America) hadn't shown up*. Ho Chi Minh actually, bless his heart, thought that because he was fighting for independence and self-government, America would have his back. He quoted liberally from the Declaration of Independence and other American revolutionary documents. Charmingly naive. To characterize the communists as "aggressors/insurgents" assumes that the colonial administration was proper and defensible and that protecting it was justified. The Viet Cong weren't a small minority violently rising up against a duly elected representative government, they were fighting for independence from foreign rule. The war certainly was ethically justified, but not from the American side. *This is, of course, a very simplified explanation of what happened; conflict may very well still have erupted with the involvement of eg China. The decade or so between the end of WW2 and the start of the Vietnam War in earnest was a chaotic period with a lot going on. This doesn't really bear on the main point I'm trying to make here, though.
Notwithstanding the fact that I think Kang is wrong about this movie in particular, I cannot more strongly disagree with this sentiment. "Every little wrong"? Korea was a Japanese colonial possession until the end of the war. One complaint that's been made about this movie's supposed whitewashing is that it never acknowledges (except perhaps obliquely, in the pyramid line) that many of Jiro's planes were built in factories manned by Korean slaves. In instances when Japan does try to whitewash its brutal history, its Asian neighbors, and Korea in particular, have every right to express their outrage. This is not some tiff over a minor slight. Kang's mistake is not to be angry about a movie that whitewashes Japan's crimes, it's merely to believe that she sees that whitewashing in this particular movie. If you go to Japan, you'll find that it's actually surprisingly forthright about its bloody history...sometimes. The Hiroshima Peace Park, for instance, has a special memorial dedicated specifically to Korean victims of the bomb, and the museum as well bluntly acknowledges that thousands of Korean slaves were killed when the bomb exploded. Yasukuni Shrine, on the other hand, has a monument to Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who was the only member of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to vote to acquit all the war crime indictees. Acting like Koreans are embarrassing themselves by getting angry about this kind of stuff is like telling Jews to forget about the Holocaust or blacks to get over slavery (my bad, people actually do this one already). Where whitewashing occurs, it must be condemned. It just doesn't occur in this movie. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15335 |
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zaphdash: If Koreans care that much about slave labor, maybe they should actually shut down their sweatshops and, I dunno, overthrow Kim Jong Un already? Just saying.
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omoikane
Posts: 494 |
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You should realize that people who did see the movie will interpret the movie differently. I for one finds the way it engages it in very subtle ways expresses the point pretty well. I prefer it being a mirror, not an argument or a vehicle to express your point of view. For what it is worth, if you look at the story in the movie from the perspective of Miyazaki as a pacifist, it makes total sense. I'm not sure why you are going on as much as you are.
The Japanese made similar criticisms earlier in the year about the same issue, actually. But it's more like, "we should make this even more fake so people don't get confused" and that would come across as localizing it too extremely for such a sensitive topic. |
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zaphdash
Posts: 620 Location: Brooklyn |
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Cannot tell if this is facetious or not. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, unless you don't want it. |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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GATSU
Posts: 15335 |
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Mohawk:
No, I'm not.
No, they don't. http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/10/07/not-sweatshop-no-workers-heaven Edit: Also, since I'm going there, the Chinese government needs to apologize what it's been doing to its own people since Mao. Otherwise, it has no claim to any moral high ground against the Japanese. |
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The_Sentinel
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Hiya! If you haven't seen it, I'll try to be spoiler-free, but I think I can answer that question for you. At first I was confused, and then I saw it, and cried really hard, particularly at the ending. I think Miyazaki wanted to evoke an emotional response, and one of the best ways to do that is show a specific human's...erm well, death. But I guess I won't say who, just in case. Stalin is a douchebag (duh), but there's one quote by him I adore: "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." Miyazaki, I think, was trying to get the viewers upset, because it's easy to look at mass killings and thing "Oh, that's so sad..." and promptly forget. Of course, I'm biased, because I love Miyazaki.  But...Yeah. I personally really loved the film. 
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