Studio Ghibli tends to create stories that are fantastical and really out of this world. However, some of their greatest work comes from their historical fiction works, and despite how underrated they are, this category includes some of the best in their repertoire. 

 

From Up on Poppy Hill is a beautiful story about people trying to come to terms with their pasts, both personally and within the culture and history of their country, in the face of their present lives and the futures that they want to live. 

 

Every detail of this movie—every character’s design, every fashion choice—serves to hit home this motif, subtly and masterfully creating a view of the past that feels realistic and lived in, despite its light and stylized animation style. For this essay, I want to talk specifically about how the setting is animated, and how the design of every location in the movie has just as much meaning as the characters themselves.

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But first, let’s begin with some historical context. The original manga series the movie is based on was created in 1989, however the director, Goro Miyazaki, and the scriptwriter, Hayao Miyazaki, chose to change the year the story takes place to 1963, and changed the setting to Yokohama.

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This is important both within the cultural and historical context. Throughout its history, Yokohama has been the most important port city for Japan, and even though it is no longer the most industrial port in Japan, it is still viewed as the port by many of Japan’s citizens, as well as the hub for imports and sea trade. It’s the metaphorical gateway to the world at large outside of Japan, and has been since the Dutch first began trading with them in the 1609. It has also been a hub for foreign relations, and was the representative Japanese city mentioned in the famous novel Around the World in Eighty Days. In this way, Yokohama represents the place where the tradition and culture of Japan clashes with the modern new world outside of Japan’s borders.

 

1963 is important for three major reasons: first, it is one year away from the 1964 Olympics. This isn’t some small detail that only select viewers would pick up on, and in fact the movie setting is filled with posters for the upcoming event, on buildings, banners, billboards, everywhere. This is important because the 1964 Olympics were going to be held in Japan that year, symbolizing forgiveness and acceptance from the western countries of the world. It was also going to be televised to the whole of the world, so Japanese citizens were being encouraged en mass to clean up their country for the cameras, throw out the old and replace it with the new, to showcase how “civilized” and beautiful their country had become.

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A lot of this forgiveness and acceptance was important politically, because it meant putting the recent past away and forgetting it. It wasn’t nearly nineteen years before 1963 that Japan had been savagely defeated at the end of World War Two, as one of the three fascist countries that made up the Axis Powers. After that it was occupied by American forces until 1952, but even after the occupation was ended Japan was still under American influence, and many Japanese sailors and freight ships were lost in the struggle of the Korean war, not ten years before the events of the movie. Forgiveness was necessary, and many people wanted it, but that didn’t mean everyone was happy about forgetting the hardships they’d suffered, both under the American government and their own. 

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But this isn’t a history essay. This is about architecture.

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I wanted to start with the most important piece of architecture in this film, which is Umi’s Grandmother’s house. This is the titular house up on Poppy Hill. The house is located in the well-to-do neighborhood of Yamate. In real life, this neighborhood is known for utilizing more western style architecture in the houses. This is because, as Yokohama was the open gateway for the rest of the world, many foreign ambassadors or representatives lived in this area, and when they built houses to live in they used styles and techniques that were at home to them, sometimes mixed in with Japanese styles.

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Umi’s grandmother's house has two parts. The older of the two is an annex, completely done in the traditional Japanese style: washi paper sliding doors, woven straw tatami mat flooring, low tables and seat cushions for chairs, and a Zen garden with a view of the sea. It’s likely that this part of the house is the first and oldest area, which could have stood for nearly a hundred years or more before the movie’s story takes place. The other half of the house, the most prominent part, is a green, western-style building with three floors, white painted windows, and a small balcony facing out onto a flower garden, where Umi’s flagpole sits. (The flagpole is essential for the plot of the story and understanding the characters, but not for the themes explored here.) From a far-away view, the house looks pleasant, as well as exceptionally modern. But inside the house, there are hints of the buildings history. Sliding wood doors and tatami mats are combined with electric lights and modern pluming. A wood carving made by Umi’s great-great grandfather sits above a second story door way, deceptively new-looking and well looked after. All of the history in the house, the records that show its past as a hospital, then a home, then a boarding house, are neatly kept in the office, along with the family portraits and Umi’s mothers medical textbooks.

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The kitchen is where most of the characters gather to be together to eat in the morning and to sit together and talk at the end of a long day. Here, also, is where the period styles blend together the best. The cooking area is new and clean, but still noticeably Japanese: there is a specific drawer under the counter with a square wooden scoop for the rice, and the stove has a permanent spot on the stove made to fit the rice pot. The tile is bright new, and the sink faucet is shining metal, but the sink tub is shallow, designed to chill fish in water before they can be cooked or fried, and there are special pull doors in the floor to get to the vegetable compartment. The furniture is modern too, all silver chrome and red plastic cushions, but the layout is still traditionally set, and the way the characters sit to eat still has traditions behind it.

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The entire house is filled with history: while the house looks clean and acceptably modern on the outside, every story and artifact is preserved, either by the maintenance and cleaning Umi does or by the records in the office. In this way, a little bit of every era of time the house has lived through is preserved as well, and every layer of time blends together to create the foundations for the present, as well as the future.

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The second important building of this movie is the Latin Quarter, the building at Umi’s school that serves as the home for her school’s numerous clubs, and the focus of the b-plot of the film. Decades worth of students have had their clubs in this building, and it shows: every piece of history of the massive five-story building has been recorded in those beloved halls in the form of stacks of paper covered in dust, bugs crawling throughout the dirt, sometimes even broken glass. The building's foyer opens up into a large main room, where broken stair rails and dented walls have been patched up by hand and a series of pulleys brings buckets from the lower floor up to the top one. Every floor is loud and smelly, either from the predominately male students that use the building or the stray experiment gone wrong in the chemistry club, and the philosophy club doesn’t even have a room, just a one-person shed on a landing between the third and fourth floors.

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The entire building’s a mess. A horrible, beautiful mess. Because despite all the ugly, the building is thrumming with this vitality. The passion of each and every club member for their clubs and the building itself make it glow almost, despite the dust. If only the school board could see that: orders from the principal say that the building is scheduled to be torn down and erased forever. So, what do the students do?

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It’s Umi who gives the students the solution. Inspired partially by her own house and the way that her family's history has been preserved, she gathers a volunteer group of girls from the high school to come help the boys clean up the clubhouse, making it cleaned up and beautiful, as well as less intimidating for prospective girl club members, while also preserving much of the building’s and school’s history. With enough love and care over the next few months of this semester, they're able to renovate the house from its old, chipped paint surface into the beautiful building it once was, many years before. The banisters have been polished and sanded down, the torn away plaster has been smoothed over and repainted, and the inside glows. The outside of the building has been also repainted, in traditional Japanese shades of red, green, yellow and white, accentuating both the modern windows and the traditional Hyogo style roofing, towing the line of being bright, clean, shiny and modern, while still retaining most of its history.

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The final piece of architecture that I wanted to talk about has to deal with what we see of the city of Tokyo. Near the end of the film Umi, as well as her classmates Shun and Kazuma, go to Tokyo to meet with the chairman of the school board personally, in order to save the clubhouse from being demolished, and we get to see a lot of what Modern Tokyo (and, by metaphor, Modern Japan) is becoming. At the first look, the city looks completely devoid of anything distinctly Japanese. If it weren’t for the posters and banners hung everywhere, the streets of Tokyo would look like any other country, and even then, half of the posters are in English. The buildings are a towering jungle of grey concrete, and the roads are filled with foreign cars, chromium shining in shades of blue, yellow, red and silver, and where there’s space for people to walk they move nearly in a solid mass of (mostly) western dress. The chairman’s office building is also bleak and unfamiliar, with grey halls covered in advertisements, narrow benches, and incredulous stares, but eventually, after waiting for a very long time, the teenagers get to meet with the chairman.

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A note about the chairman, because he isn’t a building but he is an essential part of the city of Tokyo, and he is also drenched in subtle symbolism. He’s a man in his late middle-age, growing grey at the temples. Despite his power, or maybe because of it, everything he does is done with an air of perfect ease. He wears a suit and tie, but instead of a suit coat he wears a green canvas jacket, and his demeanor is casual, benevolent, and amused. Most important though are his earlobes, drawn slightly droopy, a trait usually only seen in Asian art and iconography when signifying the Buddha himself. The chairman is a god figure to our main characters, one that has been changed to suit a modern age. But he still remembers Japan’s past: despite daunting Olympics poster that hands in his office, almost looming over his scene, it’s Umi’s story about her father, who died on a supply ship during the Korean War, that persuades him to visit the Clubhouse and consider saving it. He empathizes with the kids, and remembers the past just as vividly as they do, and that fact gives the characters hope, for the clubhouse and for the future of Japan.

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Then, after getting this wonderful ray of hope, the kids leave the office building and come out onto a side street, one that wasn’t visible earlier in light of the day, where dozens of traditional food stalls and restaurants sit waiting for the post-shift rush. The entire alleyway is lit up with traditional paper lanterns and warm electric lights alike, and the people here bustle about a little slower than they did in the morning. Here we get to see how the modern Tokyo actually is: while on the surface it looks western-washed and uninviting, underneath it’s shell the same people live there, the same restaurants sell udon and dumplings and ramen to happy people, and the little bits of Old Japan are going to survive with it. 

 

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Bibliography

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From Up on Poppy Hill. Directed by Goro Miyazaki, written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, performances by Masami Nagasawa, Jun’ichi Okada, Nao Ômori. Studio Ghibli. Cinedigm Media. 2011.

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Cook, Haruko Taya. “Memories of Japan’s Lost War.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 11, no. 1/4, 2002, pp. 25–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23613061. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.

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Kawasaki, Ken’ichi. “Youth Culture in Japan.” Social Justice, vol. 21, no. 2 (56), 1994, pp. 185–203. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766814. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.

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Ochiai, Emiko, and Masako Kamimura. “The Modern Family and Japanese Culture: Exploring the Japanese Mother-Child Relationship.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 7–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42800959. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.