This episode Scot explores being in Japan for the opening of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) in 1997, and trying to see it again before it was available in the US. Mononoke Hime was Scot’s introduction to the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki and began a life-long appreciation for his work and films.
Special thanks to Ben Reburn for being on this episode briefly.
Music from this episode from:
Mononoke Hime Theme and Vocal
Lyrics by - Hayao Miyazaki
Music by - Joe Hisaishi
Vocal by - Yoshikazu Mera
Gui Moraes - https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes
Dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
Desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
AI-Generated Transcript:
Speaker 1: 0:21
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppin, and this is a podcast where I catalog some of the perfect pieces of life, one by one. Hey, there, right at the top, I want to say this episode may sound a little bit different audio wise, and that's because I'm trying something new today. Usually you hear me talking from within a small room at Morena Studios, but this episode has a lot to do with Japan and nature, so I thought it would be a good excuse to try out recording at a location. So all that is to say that right now I'm sitting in the Shenzhen Japanese Friendship Garden, outside of Fresno, california. The sounds you might be hearing are either geese or peacocks. There are many of them wandering about, and I'm sitting over by a waterfall and overlooking a pond, a koi pond, with a really cool curved bridge up over the top. Nice setting for an episode. So there are these buildings that I drive by. Sometimes they aren't particularly remarkable, but every time I pass them I get a feeling. In Japanese, there are many words that don't have direct, clean translations. One of those words is natsukashi. I often see it translated as reminiscent or sentimental, which I think are sort of clunky terms because we don't use them the same way that Japanese people use natsukashi. I would describe it as an adjective that is part deja vu, part positive recollection and part ah, the good old days. Whenever I see these buildings I get a feeling of natsukashi. Like I said, they aren't remarkable by themselves A couple of nondescript apartment buildings visible from the highway, probably 20ish stories all, but they are positioned right next to a small wooded area. A tiny forest appears to have popped up and partially engulfed one of the buildings. From the angle I get on my drive, it looks like one building is at the edge of the woods and another is just sprouting up from within them, where only the top third or half is visible above the canopy. In the cities around the bay area here I'm used to seeing the two extremes the heavily developed areas with very little nature and the spots set aside for nature but with very little development. To me, these buildings in their forest exist in a perfect balance between those two extremes, equal parts human and nature, and I realized the natsukashi feeling I had when I saw them wasn't really even for a real world location. These buildings specifically remind me of the balance and themes of the movies of Japanese animation master director Hayao Miyazaki, the care he takes to depict humans, nature and the balance between them. Recently I was driving past with my friend Ben in the car and I had my recorder with me, okay. So here we go. There's this big clump of woods over here and then there's some buildings coming out of there. As we turn toward them, I kind of get this weird Miyazaki sense of the specific buildings here that are just coming out of the trees. See what I'm saying at all, or am I kind of just making that a little? This clump right here, yeah, okay, yeah, I can see that it feels very much like just the hillside and then the I don't know something about it. Dense small houses, vegetation, the hillside. I just kind of want to investigate these couple buildings, sometimes Just go in there. Sometimes I have no idea what I would find. I don't know what it is. They look like just normal apartments, partly complex. That's probably what I would find and it would probably be a nonissue, but it is something that I've wanted to do for years. Yeah. It's not done because there's no real reason. Oh, look at this mural. This would get me a reason. Keep up alive. It's pretty cool. I'm using these buildings as a backdrop to talk about my first time encountering Hayami Izaki and his extraordinary work. Now, I've said before that I plan to make a number of Japan-centric episodes and this is the first one of those. I have these Japan experiences because after college I lived and worked there for six years and many things from that time will be the subjects of later episodes. But before college I also lived in Japan for three weeks during high school on a home stay in the summer of 1997. It was through the Rotary Club of Olathe Kansas, the city where I grew up. Oh, remember Dan from episode 4 about the Perfect Road. It was actually his mom who saw the notice in the paper, cut it out and passed it to me because she knew I was taking Japanese classes. So through that clipping I applied, interviewed and got a spot in the group of five teens going over from Olathe Kansas to Maybashi, japan. I remember it being that it was like a sister city sort of association. But when I try to look it up now it shows me that Maybashi is officially sister cities with Birmingham, alabama, and that started in 2017. And I don't see anything about Kansas before that, but for some reason our exchange was with Maybashi. Okay, so Japan has 47 prefectures. They're kind of like states, also different than states, but for this example that's the best analogy and so each one has their own prefectural governments and capitals. Gunma is one of those prefectures and Maybashi is the capital city of Gunma-ken. Maybashi's population is about 340,000, and it's an hour and a half northwest of Tokyo by car, nestled at the foot of Mount Akagi, smack dab in the center of Japan's main island Honshu. In this group of five, there were three boys and two girls, and we were all between 15 and 17 years old. The schedule had us in Japan for a little over three weeks, and then we would reverse the process with our host brothers or sisters at our places in Kansas. The trip had scheduled a few experiences where the whole group would get together and go to, like Tokyo, disney or the Niko Shrine, where the original Sinoeval, hironoeval, speaknoeval, monkey carvings are at, or to go make pottery with an old school master in the mountains. But for a vast majority of the trip, we were in our separate houses with our separate host families, having completely separate experiences. I stayed with the Chigita family, a family that ran a local hotel, the Chigita Hotel, and in the home were Mr and Mrs Chigita, their three children and Mr Chigita's mother and father. If I remember correctly, my host brother was Kazunori, the middle child of the family, and I got along well with his younger brother, hidenori, and older brother Akinori too. I stayed in a guest room at the Chigita house. It had a small TV in it and late at night, when everyone else had gone to bed, my jet lag and I would quietly check out what the mini channels of NHK had to offer. This was my first exposure to Japanese comedy, game shows and commercials. Speaking of discovering new anime on the TV in the summer of 1997, one of those commercials was for an animated something that was coming. I couldn't actually tell if it was a movie, a TV show or something else entirely, but I knew immediately I wanted to see it. As the commercial continued to come on, I would click into the song first, which is haunting, ethereal and beautiful. Then I would lock into the beautiful landscapes and scenery I was seeing and, finally, the wonderfully rendered characters. The movie was Princess Mononoke, or Mononoke Hime, as I heard it advertised. I'll probably flip back and forth from time to time with how I refer to it, but Mononoke is a 1997 movie from writer-director Hayao Miyazaki of Japan's famous Studio Ghibli. The Studio Ghibli started in 1985 by Miyazaki, isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki. It's often likened to Disney as the easiest comparison for its success, esteem and track record in Japan. But I knew none of that. I had never heard of Miyazaki or Ghibli, but something about this commercial just had me hooked. I mean, the animation was obviously lush and gorgeous, but it was more than just that. The commercial ended with a lot of Japanese writing and then the date of 7.15. I needed to know more. Was July 15th, a TV air date? A movie opening? How could I see it? I went to Kazuhide and Aki for more information, but with no idea how to ask. I must have seemed quite odd, trying to describe the clips I'd seen with my limited Japanese and whatever hand gestures I thought would do the job. But one night the commercial came on the TV in the family room and I rushed to show someone before it was over. I think I grabbed Hide and we finally hit that point of mutual understanding. He explained to me, it was a new movie coming out the July 15th. That's the opening date and it was only a few days before I had to leave, which meant there might be a chance that I could actually go see it before I flew home. That settled it. I needed to find a way to see Mononoke before leaving Japan. I think the hardest part about getting Mrs Chigoda on board was that the only time we had left was mostly booked, at least for the Chigitas. That meant if I went, none of the Chigita family would be able to go with me. I think it was probably a situation where everyone had school activities to either attend or drop off and pick up at, and in fact that's almost certainly it. I would have had limited time left before leaving and they would have had limited free time on that Saturday because of after-school club activities. In Japan there is a whole world of after-school sports and clubs and extracurricular activities that are really enriching but also really demanding, and Japanese kids often have lots of responsibilities for them. It would have been the middle of the school year there. Japan's school starts in April and the first term usually ends sometime in late June, so we were coming right up on that. So I bet all three sons were locked into after-school club obligations that I wouldn't have had, leaving me as the only one for you to go see Mononoke. So on that day my host mother drove me to the mall where the theater was and dropped me off out front. We got there a little late, but there wasn't enough time to wait for the next show or away from me to contact my host mother and attempt to adjust any plans. So I bought my ticket to the showing that had just started and went inside amongst the throngs of Japanese moviegoers. The theater was mid-sized, small compared to giant American multiplex theaters, but it still seated a good number of viewers Like maybe 200? Hard to estimate, but every chair was full. There were also people sitting on the floor and standing in the hall. That led to the exit. Living in Japan for six years, I went to see movies in the theater many times, movies from Japan, america and elsewhere, big and small. I saw sold out shows for Hollywood special effects, blockbusters and superhero flicks, but none of them were like this. By the time I entered the theater, the previews were already over and it was about two minutes into the film itself. So I quietly squished in and found an empty spot in a clump of people sitting on the stairs next to the rows of real seats. It was hot, it was crowded and I didn't care one bit. I locked in Sitting there on the floor and the next two plus hours was mononoke. At this point in my Japanese language ability I had no hope of understanding the dialogue. I could pick up a word here or there, maybe, but doing so would make me lose the thread of the movie and then reorienting took so much time that I found it was much better to try to match the pace of the film and just take in everything I could via context, tone the visuals as much as I could and see if I could keep up with this film, more like a surfer riding a wave. So I wasn't going to catch much from the dialogue, but it didn't matter. For the very first time I was inhaling the intoxicating atmosphere of a Studio Ghibli movie made by Hayao Miyazaki's team of masters, and it was an extremely potent drug. Even without that full understanding, the movie was powerful, beautiful, haunting and amazing. I've never had a theater experience quite like it. I mean, I've been to other movies knowing very little before, maybe without seeing a trailer or knowing much at all, just going in and taking whatever gifts the experience has to give. But this experience, combined with the stranger in a strange land thing that I was having in my real life and the vivid Technicolor glow that everything at age 17 tends to have, this experience was singular. Moronoke Hime's themes are about the powerful ways that people in nature brush up against each other and the friction of the old ways budding up against the new and, if the two can never really coexist, that balance between man and nature that I was talking about earlier. Well, that's a theme you will find echoing through every Miyazaki film. In Moronoke Hime there are some complex plot and allegiance things going on that I did not clock on my first watch, but the main struggle of the people against the forest and the spirits that live in and protect it, that was very clear. I won't get into much of the story of Moronoke Hime there are other great articles and podcasts that do that far better than I could hope to here but briefly, the setting is Japan in the 1500s and it follows an exiled prince named Ashitaka who gets involved with the struggle between a town of people and the forest that surrounds them, trying to be the voice of reason on both sides. And then, midway through the movie, the song from the trailer plays, the one that had made me take notice of the commercial to begin with, the haunting melody that was so beautiful, so sad and so hopeful simultaneously. Everything I had been anticipating since discovering this film was all converging at once and it was perfect. The song is just called Princess Mononoke Vocal. The lyrics are written by Miyazaki and it's sung by countertenor Yoshikazu Meira, born in, interestingly enough, miyazaki Prefecture. Side note looking it up, for this was the first time I discovered that this song is sung by a male vocalist. I actually can't believe it took me this long to correct that misconception. The music is created by Joe Hisaishi, a longtime Miyazaki collaborator. They worked on five movies together before Mononoke and then five after, so a total of eleven films so far. They're great. Hisaishi has such range too. The scores go from pounding dramatic pieces to cute childish melodies and everything in between. I took in the rest of Mononoke Hime as it played. It's beautiful, it's ominous, it's amazing. I absorbed it the best I could, not knowing when or how I was going to be able to see it again. I wasn't ready to leave when the credits started rolling, so I stayed through them too, but so did the entire theater. I don't remember having to scoot aside for anyone. I think we were all in states of appreciation or maybe quiet contemplation. I mean, come on, come on. During the walkway on the way out some folding tables had been set up and theater employees were behind them selling merchandise for the bigger movies as you exit them. So I stopped and I ended up buying a CD of the soundtrack, a program like Booklet, with art from the film and a sheet of jiki, which is a sheet of plastic that you slide under the page when you're writing in a notebook so that it doesn't imprint whatever you're writing onto the pages underneath. I didn't even know that's what it was at the time, but it was in the price range of the yen I had left and it had a bunch of cool images from the film. I was sold, and then a few days later, I was on a plane with Kazunori and the ten of us were now headed from Tokyo to Japan all the way back to Kansas City. We had a good trip in the US side as well. But apart from my many listens to the soundtrack, this is really where my story with Mononoke ended. I poked around from time to time looking for Mononoke, but of course it wasn't available anywhere yet. Looking for it did help me find my way to Miyazaki's previous films, though this is where I met Miyazaki characters like Nausicaa, kiki and Totoro. By this point I was in my freshman year at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, living in a dorm room at Hashinger Hall. I was majoring in illustration, but was also taking Japanese language classes, and in one of those classes I heard about an upcoming screening of Mononoke. This would have been 1998. Wikipedia says there was a Japanese VHS and Laserdisc release in 1998, so I'm guessing that we saw the Laserdisc projected on a small screen in a room in the student union. This Laserdisc version would have been in Japanese without subtitles, just like in my Bashi, but this time at least I'd have a seat. I'd also have the help of something else I found on the internet. Using my old laptop and an Ethernet cable, I found a text document with the full Japanese script for the movie and also a line by line fan translation into English. I printed it out at the computer center and read through it days before straining to replay the movie from 18 months earlier. As I read the lines, I also managed to talk to my friend, josiah into seeing it with me. Josiah and I were really good friends in high school and now we were both at KU. We had some art classes together, but Josiah wasn't learning Japanese. Regardless, he had been on the receiving end of me telling about my first time watching Mononoke countless times and when the chance came to see it on campus for free, he was all in. His experience would have been similar to mine in the movie itself, but we both had access to the script this time, which we dove into before and then again after the film. I took it in for a second time and even without the dark theater or booming sound, the movie held up and I was thrilled to take it in with a level of plot understanding that I didn't have the first time. Josiah was blown away. It was fun experiencing it through someone else's first time and seeing his wide eyes. Afterward I had made a convert and now there were two of us with our ears peaked for chances to see it again, whenever that next chance might be, and that next chance came about a year later. In the meantime, film studio Miramax had acquired the rights to distribute Mononoke Hime in the US, now titled Princess Mononoke. I think it's meant to imply that she's Princess of the Mononoke or the vengeful forest spirits, not that her name is Mononoke. So Miramax wanted to trim the movie down from 133 minutes to 90. Then comes the infamous story of how Miyazaki and his people sent a samurai sword to the producers with an engraved message no cuts. The film remained 133 minutes. It was released on October 29, 1999 in only eight theaters and then it was rolled out slowly, week after week, to more and more screens, from 8 to 38 to 48 and reaching a peak in theaters numbering in the 120s. Outside of major cities and maybe in them too. It was shown primarily at smaller theaters like indie or art house places. I knew at the start I couldn't go to LA, toronto or New York where it opened in the first week, but I kept watch and one of the weeks it expanded to one theater in St Louis, missouri. The first was about a four to five hour drive from KU, but growing up in the Midwest that sort of road trip felt okay to do on a whim. So one day after class we printed out a map. I know. And I rode with Josiah and possibly Danny in my car down to try and make the last showing of Princess Mononoke at the one theater in St Louis where it was showing. I was caravaning with another carload of friends and we were cutting it close. We pulled into the parking garage but as it turns out we had also parked in the lot on the opposite side of the mall from the theater, further complicating our timeline Cut to the six of us running full speed through the empty mall, past shuttered stores, as they were closing everything down except the theater. I'm not going to say much about the English dub of this film. It is what it is. I am definitely not a fan of some of the choices that were made. Okay, I'll say one thing I'm not a fan of the billies here. What up or Bob Thornton I? I really just don't think of the English dub as my version of Mononoke at all. But the other guys didn't have that package and they were all awestruck. It was a great night. After the movie was nearly midnight and being four hours away, the group split up into two camps. Most of the guys stayed to crash for the night in a cheap motel room, but I had class early the next morning and so did Josiah, prompting the two of us to hit the road and drive back to Lawrence in the middle of the night. I'm sure I was probably worthless the next day in my classes and at my job, but sometimes you got to sacrifice a day of being a fully functioning human for the sake of Mononoke. As of this recording, mononoke is available, along with most Miyazaki's movies, on HBO Max streaming in Japanese or English. I made the mistake. I watched it a couple times, preparing for this. The first time I started in English and tried to switch to Japanese and it wouldn't let me. I don't have the Japanese version, but it is an option from the main menu so you can select it there. I don't think you can switch the audio mid-movie for some reason, but I would highly recommend the Japanese audio with the English subtitles, obviously. I've come back to Mononoke over the years pretty regularly and I continue to watch Miyazaki and Ghibli movies. Actually, that's pretty much the only anime I do make a point to watch, much to the chagrin of some of my more anime-centric friends. But nothing else is really top to Mononoke. For me, it's a one-of-a-kind movie experience. I feel that I was just in the right place at the right time when it swept through, and that's something I can only really relive in memories. But watching it again this week in the original Japanese, it brought me right back to being 17, sitting on the steps of that theater and watching a true master of their craft at work. It just it holds up, alright. What have we got? What is that? And then I used this episode as an excuse to do something that I've been wanting to do for a long time Dymel. So these buildings up here. I'm now driving up to them. I've gotten off the highway, I'm on a road I've never been on. Driving up to them, I got a small lav mic. Lav mic, I don't know how to say that, but I got a small mic so that I could hike around hands-free. And I went to finally go visit these buildings. That kicked off this whole idea for me, the ones I described at the beginning of this episode. One's perfectly placed at the edge of the forest, alright, so here I go, going into the woods area. So now I'm headed up. Hiking uphill is a rare thing for me. I'm also not exactly wearing hiking shoes. I'm wearing Chuck Taylor's, which are fine for walking around on the street level, but I don't think it's really meant for this. Okay. I don't think I'd be hiking. Actually I just thought I'd come and visit the bottom of the building. Oh no, that's pretty. So up here behind these buildings now Okay, I'm going to film it off Up here behind these buildings there's like a gap and through the gap I see some steam rising up. But I see through there I see Angel Island. It's really kind of a nice pocket view of the bay and I think, oh, I bet, I bet the apartments on the other side of this building are rented out at a higher rate, a much higher rate than the ones on this side. The ones with the view of that bay probably go. The ones with the view of that bay probably run way higher than the ones here on the back side. I don't know, I don't think this one was a success. Really, I'm not like a lot of these. I think I'll get up here and be like oh, and sort of gain a deeper understanding of the perfect thing I'm examining. But I have to be aware that that's not always going to be the case, certainly have to be open to that and not always be the case, and I think maybe this time it's one of those times where it's just not the case In Mononoke. The spirit of the forest is personified by the Shishigami, the deer god. It's this forest spirit that everyone in the movie is searching for or fighting over. At pivotal times in the film, this deer god appears in the woods and we can feel its magic and majesty. Alright, so I'm still walking. I've now hit up with some gutter and rebar. Here are some mistakes. I'm realizing One as I get into the shade of the building and the sun goes down further. I'm only wearing my sunglasses. They are prescription sunglasses so I need to be wearing them, but I did not bring my regular glasses. Glasses, oh, hello, do you hear that that's a deer that I'm about 30 feet away from? Maybe? I'm sorry, I just I'll go find that guy Girl, let's see if I can get a picture. I didn't recognize it fully at the time, but the forest was providing me with the most Mononoke ending I could have asked for. Oh, can you hear that that is the deer walking away? Alright, cool, cool, seeing you, alright. What I am now worried about are the things that chase and eat the deer. So I'm going to start walking back so that I don't end up running into dinner time for the mountain life. I don't think they get that big, especially not out here, and I'm a pretty big thing. I don't think they would really want to come at me, but I've heard of mountain lions doing that before, so I'm not wanting to find out exactly how much they do or don't dig it. Well, let's get out of here. I don't know that there's much more to gain from this side of walking through these. Alright, so headed back down around where I came. So why don't I just get out of here? And with that Mononoke Hime, the Princess Mononoke becomes the next item entered in the Perfectorium, the Index of Perfect Things. Big thank yous to Josiah Durmire for talking to me about this episode and Ben Rayburn, whose voice you heard in the clip at the beginning of the show. You can find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes on this episode's webpage. Don't forget also that you can find a direct link to the Perfectorium now by going to perfectshowsiteperfectorium. This episode was recorded at the Shinsen Japanese Friendship Garden in Fresno, california, and it will be mixed back at Marina Studios in Oakland. Be sure to subscribe to get every episode and, if you're enjoying these and want to drop the Perfect Show, a perfect rating or review on Apple or whatever you're using, go right ahead. It's the easiest way to support the show. Once again, the Perfect Show site is at perfectshowsite. That's S-I-T-E. Email any comments, music or other things to perfectshowshowcom and connect on Twitter, instagram and YouTube to username PerfectShowShow. And remember, if you have to end up with some demon curse running rampant through your body and slowly killing you, at least try to make sure it's one that gives you super strength and makes it so. When you fire arrows they fly hard enough to just pop people's body parts off them like plastic action figures. I mean, this movie shows a lot of animal blood and I mean a lot, but body parts for humans just fly off in battle, and there couldn't be a cleaner, drier depiction. Ashitaka rules San rules. Lady Ebochi rules Yakul. The red elk that Ashitaka rides rules. This movie rules. It's just so good. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppin and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.
