Month: December 2016

On August 1st this year, my father’s ashes were interred at Punchbowl cemetery in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was a survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, and spent the first two years of the war on a destroyer in the Western Pacific before the Navy sent him to college in their V-12 officer training program. After…

I had occasion recently to view Shinkai Makoto’s 5 Centimeters per Second, an animated film put out by the man widely lauded as the next Miyazaki Hayao.  In my history of contemporary Japan course we discuss Hayazaki’s films as representative texts from the 1980s and 1990s in their nostalgic visions of a cleaner, simpler past. Shinkai’s animated…