Studio Ghibli’s ‘Only Yesterday’ And What It Means To Me Today
Living with my parents for the past year in the town I grew up in has been a mixed experience. The differences in acquired tastes, the generation gap, and perspectives have caused a lot of bitterness between us. But, at the same time, being with them amid a raging pandemic has been warm, comforting, and has helped me bond with them after a long time.
Biking one evening around the town and visiting familiar landmarks and spots which I used to frequent as a teenager, I have emotionally connected with the memories of growing up, the dreams I had, and the little tragedies that happened along the way. All these flashbacks entirely consumed me, and it felt as if a movie was playing inside my head. I felt exactly like Taeko on her train journey to the countryside in Only Yesterday.
Only Yesterday is an intimate drama by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, which follows the story of Taeko across two dimensions. Taeko, in 1982, is a woman in her late 20s working an office job in Tokyo. She escapes the chaos of the city and incessant demands of settling down for the countryside to pick safflower seeds at her sister’s in-laws’ place. On the journey, she is immersed in memories of her 10-year-old self from 1966. She vividly starts recalling the troubles from school and home. These memories break into her present, often in the middle of a thought or speech, and trigger realizations in her adult mind.
Even though this 1991 film is not one of the more popular Ghibli films filled with magic, fantasy, and modern renditions of Japanese folklore and histories, it is a very progressive film narrating the tale of finding oneself in a fast-moving world. Isao Takahata and his animation team create impeccable stylistic and purposeful art. The 1982 scenes are realistic with minute details and a sense of real life. The expressions are also more nuanced. However, the scenes from the memories of 1966 are washed-out colors with simple and minimalistic designs and incomplete backgrounds.
A significant section of the film revolves around ecology and human interactions with nature over decades and centuries. It compares and contrasts urban life with that in the countryside. It also delves into the history of the safflower-rouge production and the historical class and gender inequalities. Moreover, it is pretty persistent in portraying a critical opinion on organic farming, the mechanization of agriculture, and the corporate onslaught on food production.
However, the illustration of the most mundane and ignored things of life and growing up impresses the most about the film. For instance, Taeko’s initial excitement when her family buys a pineapple for the first time and her eventual disappointment when she does not like its taste. Other scenes like the one where Taeko as a child, cannot figure out how fractions work or where her mother shuts down her innocent dream of becoming an actress out of social courtesy are sensitive and thoughtful depictions. I could empathize with them at a very personal level.
Riding back home through the same old dimly lit streets, I could not stop thinking about Taeko’s childhood learnings, and realizations informed her adult self her decision about her life and her choice to spend time in nature. Gradually, my thoughts got invested in searching for a pattern, a macrostructure of why Taeko experienced what she had, and the eerie similarities with my experiences in a different country, culture, and decade.
I started wondering if it partially had to do with middle-class anxieties in a rapidly growing consumerist economy, as Japan was in the 1960s. And it was hardly different from what I lived through in the early 2000s in South Asia- school life, shutting down of aspirations, pop culture, social status, parental pressure, consumer habits, experimenting with new concoctions of global goods, etc. Maybe it was, perhaps it wasn’t.
As I parked my bike in the garage, I saw the last ray of sunlight fading into the darkness of the sky, and I asked myself if it was time to learn from Taeko, embrace my childhood, keep those memories close to my heart, and move ahead in life.
