Your Name: Japanese Hope and an American Audience
Hope that transcends the past, present, and borders.
In the chaotic and unending slog through life, one rarely goes without wishing that it would all be better if they were just someone else. Inspired by a classic Japanese story about body-swapping, Torikaebaya Monogatari, and a slew of other Japanese works, Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) follows the two lead characters, Taki and Mitsuha, who wake up one morning to find themselves in a body different from the one they fell asleep in. Throughout the film, both leads switch bodies multiple times, where they learn to perceive the world through one another’s eyes. Unfortunately, about half-way into the film, their connection is inexplicably disrupted by a cosmic event, leaving the characters longing for the connection they lost:
“Once in a while when I wake up, I find myself crying. The dream I must have had I can never recall. But the sensation that I’ve lost something lingers for a long time after I wake up. I’m always searching for something, for someone. This feeling has possessed me I think from that day when the stars came falling. It was almost as if a scene from a dream. Nothing more, nothing less than a beautiful view.”
The plot, while riveting and brain racking to initially understand, is not complete without the quality and vibrancy of life that the film actualized through the depiction of Shinto rituals in Mitsuha’s village, the diverging trains in the Tokyo metropolis that Taki lives in, and the near photographic beauty in which both settings of Japan are portrayed meet the expectations of a western audience that idealizes a Japan that the Japanese wish existed.
In addition, the original soundtrack created specifically for the film by RADWIMPS, a popular Japanese rock band that appeals to adolescents, helped convey and direct emotions of promise, longing, and connection between characters. The combination of the both the visual and audio arts certainly influenced its extremely positive reception from an increasingly anime receptive country.
Despite the suspenseful story pacing, masterful depictions of Japan, and chart-topping discography, what appealed to primarily adolescent Americans was the depiction of longing, loss, and the perseverance to move on with life. The great turning point in the film was inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, claiming nearly sixteen-thousand lives with many hundreds of thousands displaced, splitting people’s lives into a pre-event and post-event timeline.
In this regard, the movie spiritually appealed to the different lived experiences of Americans, whether it’s having lived through 9/11, endured the Great Recession, bore the loss of a loved one, reminisced about a relationship that was not meant to be, or come to question ones identity and place within society. The utilization of time and space by Your Name compliment the topics of loss and longing that many Americans of younger generations have endured, yet, within such a premise it still radiates a feeling of hope and beauty in the world, reflecting the human spirit to forge forward despite devastating loss and spiritual fragility, yet, it delivers to its audience a resonating message of the promise that the future is capable of delivering.
It would be an injustice to depict Shinkai’s work as if it were only a Japanese tale of star-crossed lovers, while a cosmic event does thwart the connection of Taki and Mitsuha by leveling Mitsuha’s rural town, Itomori, into debris, the manner in which Shinto religion and Japanese beliefs are used to expand upon the narrative and drive much of the events of the story is awe-inducing.
The most prevalent symbolism would be that of Mitsuha’s red thread, which she gives to Taki three years before they swap bodies. In traditional culture, the thread signifies destined lovers, but even more significantly the threads hold the history of Mitsuha, or as Mitzuha’s grandmother more succinctly puts:
“When you keep twining like that, emotions will eventually start flowing between you and the thread. One thousand years of Itomori’s history is etched into our braided cords.”
In that revelation, one can extrapolate and diffuse the differences between that of the rural Itomori and bustling Tokyo; one a village in decay with nothing left to keep it’s young people, as was stated in the eleventh minute of the film, and the other an attractive city of opportunity. In this regard, this consequential yet fleeting reference is appealing to many Americans, especially to the many adolescents who’ve grown up in decaying towns on the outskirts of metropolitan cities, subjected to continue practicing traditions just as Mitsuha was, and unable to escape.
Such a moment isn’t made any clearer than when Mitsuha, after performing her yearly duty at the Miyamizu Shrine, her family shrine, performing kuchikamizake or making mouth-chewed sake, is embarrassed after a few school peers see her performing the ritual, and subsequently wishes she were a boy in Tokyo. This points toward the more obvious relation of adolescents in America desiring to live in a place where they wouldn’t have to conform to traditions.
The more insightful and poignant points that many American viewers may have missed initially or if they just viewed the film once, are the important traditional practices that the disaster in the film is a catalyst for. To elucidate, the disaster has occurred, based on implied land formation of Itomori, at least twice, once for the lake formation, subsequently forming the crater in which the Miyamizu Shrine’s god is located and where Taki, in Mitsuha’s body, offers Mitsuha’s kuchikamizake the shrine god, Musubi, who’s associated the connecting of the interconnectedness of everything:
“In exchange for returning to this world, you must leave behind what is most important to you — the kuchikamizake. You’ll offer it inside the god’s body. It’s half of you.”
After the incident, Taki, worried about Mitsuha, who is still paired with the Mitsuha’s red thread sets out to find her, discovering that she had died three years earlier when a comet fragmented, and meteors came raining down on Itomori. Desperate to save her somehow, Taki travels to the location where he delivered Mitsuha’s kuchikamizake and drinks it, with the hopes of turning back time: “If time can really be turned back, give me one last chance…”
It’s in this capacity where Shinkai masterfully employs body swapping to cultivate an understanding of the power of connection, subverting the formal notion of getting to know someone’s name first and their private life after in order to capture the intangible nexuses that bind and compel people to struggle for one another.
More aptly put, Shinkai put most American viewers in Taki’s perspective, as we as well as he were not knowledgeable about the local traditions and practices of the Miyamizu family, however, we observed with cultural relativism, understanding the culture and practices as they were and not as we understood them.
This resonates with a more innate feeling within American adolescents; those who’ve experienced lost and have no community or traditions to fall back on, or those who’ve become increasing atomized despite the more globalized (Musubized) world we inhabit. It’s clear that this film touches upon many real world themes dealing with the transitory period of life in which people are looking hard and long for something or someone, searching for the missing piece that wrings their heart, and to that Shinkai answered with hope; the hope of a red string connecting the misery of the past to the happiness of the future, something that most viewers yearn.
The film was nothing more, nothing less than a beautiful view.
Alt, Matt. “”Your Name,” the Most Popular Anime of All Time, Comes to America.” The New Yorker. 7 Apr. 2017. Web. 28 Feb. 2021.
Rich, Motoko. The Anime Master of Missed Connections Makes Strong Contact in Japan. New York: New York Times Company, 2016. ProQuest. Web. 1 Mar. 2021.
Sohng, George. “Exploring the Visual Themes of Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name.”” Film Daze. 14 Jan. 2020. Web.
