Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism. In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were. Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories. Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events. The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers. In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside. What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture. In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan. Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese. This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese. It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture. As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.
The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms. As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1] According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture. We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism. Totoro works as nostalgia on this level. In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.
The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood. This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories. That frame of reference has to do with time. Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s. This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble. Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ’empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them. But the film is set in the 1950’s. The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house. The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose. There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door. It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s. To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey. The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s. For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.
These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside. The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling. But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside. The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film. The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down. It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2] The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited. The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters. All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside. They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters, and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.
In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization. Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region. But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar. Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin. As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine. Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3] Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt. For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched. That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.
These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood. As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world. Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film. The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it. First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood. In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia. Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.
Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside. I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie. Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother. The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child. The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro. This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood. This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.
In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers. For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda. Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4] When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories. Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories. These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching. They can be triggered by the situation on-screen. Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other. We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories. By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie. This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.
In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers. Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy. Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart. Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced. Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her. But she is also distinctly female. She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father. She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child. Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female. Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window. She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet. But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it. As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.
Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self. The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time. In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.
The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia. It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all. Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children – not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.
[1] Stewart, Kathleen. “Notalgia – a Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 229.
[2] Ryoko Toyama, trans. “Interview: Miyazaki on Sen to Chihiro No Kamikakushi.” Animage, no. May (2001).
[3] Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing : Modernity, Phantasm, Japan.Chicago:University ofChicago Press, 1995.
[4] Niskanen, Eija. “Untouched Nature, Mediated Animals, in Japanese Anime.” Wider Screen, no. 1 (2007), http://www.widerscreen.fi/2007/1/untouched_nature_mediated_animals_in_japanese_anime.htm.
