Interwar · Film · 2013
The Wind Rises
風立ちぬ
A nearsighted boy who dreams of flight grows up to design aircraft for Mitsubishi, chasing beauty in the sky while Japan heads toward war.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 5 places.
Stop 1: Tokyo Imperial University
Key location
On a train to Tokyo, engineering student Jiro helps a young girl and her injured maid through the chaos of a great earthquake.
Stop 2: Mitsubishi works, Nagoya
Hired by Mitsubishi, Jiro and his friend Honjo design fighters for a country whose aviation lags decades behind the West.
Stop 3: Junkers works, Dessau
Sent to Germany, Jiro admires Hugo Junkers's giant all-metal aircraft and sees how far behind Japan really is.
Stop 4: Karuizawa
At a mountain resort, Jiro meets Nahoko again, and a paper plane starts a love story while a German guest warns of coming war.
Stop 5: Nagoya
Back in Nagoya, Jiro pours everything into a new fighter while Nahoko's illness grows worse.
What really happened
Jiro Horikoshi was a real engineer who joined Mitsubishi in 1927, studied aviation in Germany and the United States, and designed the A5M carrier fighter, first flown in 1935, and later the A6M Zero, the Imperial Navy's main fighter in the Pacific War. Interwar Japan was racing to catch up with Western aviation, buying licences and sending engineers abroad.
Miyazaki blends Horikoshi's life with Tatsuo Hori's 1937 novel The Wind Has Risen, from which the romance with Nahoko, who has tuberculosis, is taken. The film shows the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, the Depression and the rise of the secret police, and it drew debate in Japan and abroad over how it treats a man whose planes went to war.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- 風立ちぬ
- Directed by
- Hayao Miyazaki
- Countries
- Japan
- Languages
- Japanese
- Released
- 2013
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- China & Southeast Asia, Western Europe
- Themes
- Animation
- Biography
- Air war
- Romance
