Weathering with You, the latest blockbuster from the director of Your Name – the highest grossing anime ever – has been hailed as an important and timely allegory for climate crisis. The film is set in modern-day Tokyo, where although it’s summer, rain has been pounding the city for days.
“I feel sorry for young people today, we had beautiful summers in my day,” bemoans one elderly passer-by traversing the rain-slicked streets. This reflects reality in the country – late last year, two massive typhoons brought record-breaking rainfall, strong winds and extensive flooding in Japan. In a fortuitous bit of meteorological marketing, the film opened during a heavy period of rainfall in Tokyo last summer.
The world depicted in Weathering with You at first seems to echo our own, but instead of car fumes and coal fire, the causes for this unusual weather are supernatural. Hina, one of the main characters, is a ‘sun girl’ – she can part the rain clouds and let the sun dazzle for brief periods of time at certain locations. When Hina, her sweetheart Hodaka and her little brother are forced to go on the run, temperatures in the city plummet and a blizzard begins swirling through Tokyo. But every time she summons the sun, her flesh becomes increasingly translucent. Eventually it transpires that she is the cause of the perpetual rain, and only she can stop it, by sacrificing herself to the cloud kingdom in the sky.
Aside from magicking away the true causes of climate change, the film also contains lines that sound like outright climate denialism. When someone mentions it’s been the rainiest period in history, a wise old shaman contests that recorded history spans a mere 100 years, and that the weather was far more changeable before that. Towards the end of the film someone comments, “The world’s always been crazy”, while referring to the weather. And when Hina and Hodaka decide their love is worth sacrificing Tokyo to the shroud of permanent rainclouds and steadily creeping floodwater, someone helpfully points out that Tokyo used to be covered in sea, and that it’s merely returning to its prior state.
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“We’ve always known climate change is happening, but it was always a faraway concept. But now, we can really feel it. Every summer, there’s heavy rainfall [in Japan] and a lot of water-related disasters, but climate change happened, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” the director Makoto Shinkai told Deadline. “The world has changed, so I wanted to depict young people, and how they live in this crazy world.”
This kind of defeatist attitude might grate on a global stage where climate activism – and the increasing sense of urgency it’s ushered in – has gained attention over the past couple of years. You can’t imagine Greta Thunberg, hailed as an icon of the movement and beyond, forfeiting a submerged Tokyo for a high-school crush like the two teen protagonists in Weathering with You. It’s an indulgent, individualist resolution, which doesn’t chime with wider conversations about restraint and sacrifice currently taking place – both at the global industrial and individual level.
But in Japan, this strain of climate defeatism isn’t so out of place. Recent articles in the Japan Times and the Tokyo Review have questioned why a greater number of young Japanese people didn’t turn out to attend the climate strikes that attracted 7.6 million people across 185 countries in September last year. About 5,000 people in Japan (a country of 165 million) took part, more than half of whom marched in Tokyo. In comparison, more than 1.5 million people took to the streets in Italy, and 1.4 million in Germany.
This relative lack of engagement is partly down to the stigmatisation of strikes and protests, which are seen as adjacent to criminal activity in the country. Japan’s organisers for the September climate strike even translated the action as a “climate march” rather than strike to appear less confrontational. But the lack of activism is indicative of a more pervasive climate apathy among young people too.
A 2016 Pew Research survey found that, contrary to other countries like the UK, it was older (75 per cent of those aged 50 and older), not younger Japanese citizens (59 per cent aged 18 to 34), who are the most worried about global warming.
“It starts from the classroom,” says Saki Mizoroki, a reporter at BuzzFeed Japan who is currently studying a PhD in media. “In Japan, students are not supposed to ask questions of the teacher. Some teachers get offended when they get questions from students because it disturbs the harmony in the classroom,” she says. Japan’s schooling system is recognised to encourage conformity and obedience above critical thinking and debate, she notes.
This can lead to an aversion towards political engagement in general. “Citizens here still don't really have the feeling that they can change the world – like they can really influence the big trends,” says Yosuke Buchmeier, a visiting scholar at Tokyo University who has researched climate crisis attitudes in Japan. “Of course, they know they can vote, but a lot of surveys and polls show that people here don't really feel they can have an effect on politics, or environmental issues, or the economy.”
Political activism is even somewhat demonised in certain spaces. While hashtags like #climatestrike help to pollinate sentiment across platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, in Japan, social media is relatively free from politics. In fact, you’re likely to be branded a kuuki yomenai (a weirdo) if you post this kind of content, says Mizoroki, adding that for young people, getting involved in this kind of political activism is seen as a “waste of time”.
The reluctance towards confrontation is compounded by the feeling that such action would achieve little of substance. Buchmeier puts this in part down to the gap between politicians and bureaucrats, and the people. Political power in Japan is often concentrated in political families and passed on from father to son. “It's more like a hereditary system than a system which would change by the active engagement of the citizens,” says Buchmeier. In Japan it’s sometimes known as the silver democracy – a system run by grey haired men for grey haired men.
All of this has conspired to put a dampener on climate activism in the country. However, there are signs things might be changing slowly. Japan’s Fridays For Future faction (the global movement started by Thunberg) may have attracted comparatively few demonstrators in September, but it was a huge increase since its first demonstration in March, which barely amassed 100 people. In Weathering with You, the protagonists decide that a Tokyo under several metres of water is a price worth paying – perhaps more young Japanese people are deciding that it’s not.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
