Omoide Poro-poro

[ Children in Ooka-mura do a rain dance ]

I'm hopeless. Sitting at home with an electronic dictionary in one hand and a cup noodle in the other watching Studio Ghibli's Omoide Poro-poro (The Tears of Memory) in Japanese *only* because I can. And then, of course, because this always happens when I watch a Miyazaki film, I get all nostalgic and start to cry. But it's a good cry, though rather strange one, because the Japan I'm yearning for is a Japan I've never been to-- the early postwar countryside.

The Japan of manufactured modern nostalgia. It's like craving the childhood innocence that you never had. I don't think anyone can disagree that modern Japanese culture is intertwined with a nostalgia for the 40s, 50s and 60s inaka (countryside), and that that nostalgia has saturated every visual media.

I did a brief project/ presentation on Japanese nostalgia during my Spring semester at Waseda, which gave me a little elucidation toward the mindset, at least to why the older generation feels nostalgic for their childhood "summer homes," but I never really grasped how that nostalgia was passed to the younger generations, who don't share the same history. And what *really* puzzles me is how that nostalgia was passed to foreigners, like me, for whom that "innocent" Japan is entirely out of reach.

It makes sense but it doesn't at the same time. I do love those nostalgic Ghibli movies though.