This episode Scot explores being in Japan for the opening of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) in 1997, and trying to see it again before it was available in the US. Mononoke Hime was Scot's introduction to the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki and began a life-long appreciation for his work and films.

Special thanks to Ben Reburn for being on this episode briefly.

Music from this episode from:

Mononoke Hime Theme and Vocal
Lyrics by - Hayao Miyazaki
Music by - Joe Hisaishi
Vocal by - Yoshikazu Mera

Gui Moraes - https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes
Dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
Desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: <time>0:21 </time>

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppin, and this is a podcast where I catalog some of the perfect pieces of life, one by one. Hey, there, right at the top, I want to say this episode may sound a little bit different audio wise, and that's because I'm trying something new today. Usually you hear me talking from within a small room at Morena Studios, but this episode has a lot to do with Japan and nature, so I thought it would be a good excuse to try out recording at a location. So all that is to say that right now I'm sitting in the Shenzhen Japanese Friendship Garden, outside of Fresno, california. The sounds you might be hearing are either geese or peacocks. There are many of them wandering about, and I'm sitting over by a waterfall and overlooking a pond, a koi pond, with a really cool curved bridge up over the top. Nice setting for an episode. So there are these buildings that I drive by. Sometimes they aren't particularly remarkable, but every time I pass them I get a feeling. In Japanese, there are many words that don't have direct, clean translations. One of those words is natsukashi. I often see it translated as reminiscent or sentimental, which I think are sort of clunky terms because we don't use them the same way that Japanese people use natsukashi. I would describe it as an adjective that is part deja vu, part positive recollection and part ah, the good old days. Whenever I see these buildings I get a feeling of natsukashi. Like I said, they aren't remarkable by themselves A couple of nondescript apartment buildings visible from the highway, probably 20ish stories all, but they are positioned right next to a small wooded area. A tiny forest appears to have popped up and partially engulfed one of the buildings. From the angle I get on my drive, it looks like one building is at the edge of the woods and another is just sprouting up from within them, where only the top third or half is visible above the canopy. In the cities around the bay area here I'm used to seeing the two extremes the heavily developed areas with very little nature and the spots set aside for nature but with very little development. To me, these buildings in their forest exist in a perfect balance between those two extremes, equal parts human and nature, and I realized the natsukashi feeling I had when I saw them wasn't really even for a real world location. These buildings specifically remind me of the balance and themes of the movies of Japanese animation master director Hayao Miyazaki, the care he takes to depict humans, nature and the balance between them. Recently I was driving past with my friend Ben in the car and I had my recorder with me, okay. So here we go. There's this big clump of woods over here and then there's some buildings coming out of there. As we turn toward them, I kind of get this weird Miyazaki sense of the specific buildings here that are just coming out of the trees. See what I'm saying at all, or am I kind of just making that a little? This clump right here, yeah, okay, yeah, I can see that it feels very much like just the hillside and then the I don't know something about it. Dense small houses, vegetation, the hillside. I just kind of want to investigate these couple buildings, sometimes Just go in there. Sometimes I have no idea what I would find. I don't know what it is. They look like just normal apartments, partly complex. That's probably what I would find and it would probably be a nonissue, but it is something that I've wanted to do for years. Yeah. It's not done because there's no real reason. Oh, look at this mural. This would get me a reason. Keep up alive. It's pretty cool. I'm using these buildings as a backdrop to talk about my first time encountering Hayami Izaki and his extraordinary work. Now, I've said before that I plan to make a number of Japan-centric episodes and this is the first one of those. I have these Japan experiences because after college I lived and worked there for six years and many things from that time will be the subjects of later episodes. But before college I also lived in Japan for three weeks during high school on a home stay in the summer of 1997. It was through the Rotary Club of Olathe Kansas, the city where I grew up. Oh, remember Dan from episode 4 about the Perfect Road. It was actually his mom who saw the notice in the paper, cut it out and passed it to me because she knew I was taking Japanese classes. So through that clipping I applied, interviewed and got a spot in the group of five teens going over from Olathe Kansas to Maybashi, japan. I remember it being that it was like a sister city sort of association. But when I try to look it up now it shows me that Maybashi is officially sister cities with Birmingham, alabama, and that started in 2017. And I don't see anything about Kansas before that, but for some reason our exchange was with Maybashi. Okay, so Japan has 47 prefectures. They're kind of like states, also different than states, but for this example that's the best analogy and so each one has their own prefectural governments and capitals. Gunma is one of those prefectures and Maybashi is the capital city of Gunma-ken. Maybashi's population is about 340,000, and it's an hour and a half northwest of Tokyo by car, nestled at the foot of Mount Akagi, smack dab in the center of Japan's main island Honshu. In this group of five, there were three boys and two girls, and we were all between 15 and 17 years old. The schedule had us in Japan for a little over three weeks, and then we would reverse the process with our host brothers or sisters at our places in Kansas. The trip had scheduled a few experiences where the whole group would get together and go to, like Tokyo, disney or the Niko Shrine, where the original Sinoeval, hironoeval, speaknoeval, monkey carvings are at, or to go make pottery with an old school master in the mountains. But for a vast majority of the trip, we were in our separate houses with our separate host families, having completely separate experiences. I stayed with the Chigita family, a family that ran a local hotel, the Chigita Hotel, and in the home were Mr and Mrs Chigita, their three children and Mr Chigita's mother and father. If I remember correctly, my host brother was Kazunori, the middle child of the family, and I got along well with his younger brother, hidenori, and older brother Akinori too. I stayed in a guest room at the Chigita house. It had a small TV in it and late at night, when everyone else had gone to bed, my jet lag and I would quietly check out what the mini channels of NHK had to offer. This was my first exposure to Japanese comedy, game shows and commercials. Speaking of discovering new anime on the TV in the summer of 1997, one of those commercials was for an animated something that was coming. I couldn't actually tell if it was a movie, a TV show or something else entirely, but I knew immediately I wanted to see it. As the commercial continued to come on, I would click into the song first, which is haunting, ethereal and beautiful. Then I would lock into the beautiful landscapes and scenery I was seeing and, finally, the wonderfully rendered characters. The movie was Princess Mononoke, or Mononoke Hime, as I heard it advertised. I'll probably flip back and forth from time to time with how I refer to it, but Mononoke is a 1997 movie from writer-director Hayao Miyazaki of Japan's famous Studio Ghibli. The Studio Ghibli started in 1985 by Miyazaki, isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki. It's often likened to Disney as the easiest comparison for its success, esteem and track record in Japan. But I knew none of that. I had never heard of Miyazaki or Ghibli, but something about this commercial just had me hooked. I mean, the animation was obviously lush and gorgeous, but it was more than just that. The commercial ended with a lot of Japanese writing and then the date of 7.15. I needed to know more. Was July 15th, a TV air date? A movie opening? How could I see it? I went to Kazuhide and Aki for more information, but with no idea how to ask. I must have seemed quite odd, trying to describe the clips I'd seen with my limited Japanese and whatever hand gestures I