Turning Point: 1997-2008

MIYAZAKI: I think children have an instinctive perception of the problems of our time, of the problems that lie beneath the surface like a bass harmony. They feel uneasy that they are not blessed, or feel like they are left holding the joker in a game of Old Maid. Nor do the grown-ups give them any clear answers. All the grown-ups can say is things

It would be easy to solve the problems of human beings were we to label those who decimate forests and destroy nature as evil, base, and savage. On the contrary, the tragedy of human beings is that the people who try to push forward the most virtuous parts of humanity end up destroying nature. Unless we look at this aspect of the human experience,

At Studio Ghibli, the old main staff is departing, and those in their early thirties will form the new core group. I will also retire from Ghibli and participate from the outside. I’m looking forward to seeing how the staff will react to me as I meddle in their work.

For humanity in the modern age, the only way to establish one’s ego is by negation. We can only see our surroundings as the enemy. I don’t know if that is good or bad. After all, the modern ego only has a history of a few hundred years. It may be that, just as the modern nation-state is bound to disappear, the time will come when the modern ego wil

The manga format is so readily comprehended that it has become Japanese culture’s common denominator. That is the peril faced by Japanese culture.

MIYAZAKI: We hurry to teach young children how to write. This means we are teaching abstract thinking at an age when they learn things with their bodies. This is not good at all. We should wait.

UMEHARA: So you are saying the Jōmon folk engaged in commerce? AMINO: Obsidian for tools was collected under the premise that it would be bartered, and salt was also traded.

NAKAMURA: That is one of the points at issue. Behind the reason nature was preserved in the past was a certain sense of aesthetics, which was supported in major or minor ways by a sense of religion. Today, we live in an irreligious manner, so we have separated aesthetics from religion. This has weakened the status of beauty in our time.

Children these days have it tough. Yet they are told to live with hopes and dreams. When grown-ups themselves are doubtful whether a bright future exists, how can they insist that children have hope for the future?