Ongoing meme-creators may poke fun at legendary anime creator Hayao Miyazaki and his scorn of what the industry has become lately, but a recent discovery on Japanese billboard 2ch (via Kotaku Australia), provided by 2ch users who claim to own copies of that Image Board Collection, has finally given us some answers behind his latent hatred of the automobile, and maybe what influenced his earlier work.
The scans that were uploaded come from a sketch that Miyazaki-san did [Editor’s note: what year he originally did the sketch is unknown], which saw a publication in his 1983 Image Board Collection. Here’s the sketch in question:
So what does all of that mean? This is the translation:
“I dislike the United States that dropped the nuclear bombs and does not regret it, I’m anti-security council, I’m against neutral alliance, and against Americanization, so obviously, I had no interest in riding an automobile.
I hate people who are proud that cheap Japanese cars are popular in America, and I look at people who wear badges of the US Army and US Air Force that filled Vietnam with dioxins as enemies, so I’m against motorisation. So why did such a man come to ride in an automobile?
When my wife’s belly began to grow the young me believed that as a husband, it was my duty to carry the same weight. So I decided that even though I did not know if it was a boy or a girl (since it hadn’t been born yet), in order to take my child to nursery school, I would go to driving school, a place that still gives me shivers to remember. All driving schools should burn to the ground!
My wife went through quite an ordeal with a difficult birth, but it was an equally difficult birth for me-” [Editor’s note: the image is cut off at this point]
So clearly, Miyazaki wasn’t a fan of automobiles because they were predominantly viewed as an American invention first and foremost, which kept getting associated with America’s transgressions with Japan in World War II, in his eyes at least. This also reveals the fact that he forced himself to learn to drive, so that he could provide for his family.
This one bit of his doodle rant shows off a younger and angrier version of himself:
This particular bit of it shows a few very condemning statements from the intemperate, younger Miyazaki. Here, the young creator wrote lots of anti-Western things like “Anti-jeans, anti-bourbon, anti-burgers”, “Hooray for suteteko! (Japanese men’s underwear) Fuck briefs!”, “Anti-fried chicken, anti-cola, anti-American coffee”, “What’s ‘my car’ you moron!?”, and finally “Anti-New York, Anti-West Coast, Disneyland go back to America!”
Finally, the sketch on the lower left shows off a very angry Miyazaki, learning to drive with his instructor, while they both argue.
Miyazaki-san has mellowed out a lot since then, but it leaves us wondering, has he fully accepted America, and its culture, or does he still have misgivings with our forefathers? Was the younger Miyazaki a bit too harsh with his criticisms of the West?
