대중 문화에 나타난 일본 내셔널리즘 표현 구조 — 미야자키 하야오의 <바람이 분다> 재고 —

Abstract

There have been a variety of discussions in various countries all over Asia with regard to the historical and political meaning behind director Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. The present paper examines the characteristics of Japanese intellectual history underlying the foundation of The Wind Rises and considers it from a new perspective. The story focuses on the passion and immersion of Jiro’s obsession into ‘beautiful planes’, and the shadow of an aesthetic of romantic destruction can be discovered in the details which also combine the love story between a man and a woman facing death. Miyazaki acknowledges that he discovered in Jiro’s inescapable pursuit of his dangerous but meager-paying dream something of himself. Such an irony of destruction seeps out even in the scene cross-cutting between planes destroyed and Naoko dying, which is something akin to the conservative aesthetic sustaining postwar Japanese nationalism. Furthermore, the work conceals the violence of war and nationalism behind sentimentality by turning Jiro into the main character of a heartrending love story. Wartime authors used such sentimentality as a tremendous weapon to coax the people into cooperation, and thus, no matter how much the director defends his work, it’s difficult to escape from the responsibility of having glorified the Zero-sen and Jiro. The romantic feelings harbored by this work express the ideological trend that has continued to reveal itself since the advent of the Japanese romantic school and up to postwar conservatism. Therefore, an appreciation of culture in resistance to such an expressive structure is required even more so for audiences by recognizing how such a structure conveys nationalism in Japanese popular culture.