Miyazaki's last film

Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese film director, animator, manga artist, illustrator, producer and screenwriter whose career has spanned six decades. He is best known here for his films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, which I consider a masterpiece.

His latest film, and apparently his last, is The Wind Rises, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature. It is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi (1903–1982), designer of the Mitsubishi A5M and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero; both aircraft were used by the Empire of Japan during World War II.

Unlike most of his other films, which employ elements of fantasy and draw on Japanese mythology, The Wind Rises is a straightforward, realistic story, though he uses dreamscape at several points in which Jiro meets Caproni, an Italian plane designer.

Jiro grows up wanting to fly, but because his eyesight is poor, he cannot, so he turns to designing planes. He is drawn to the beauty of flight and how to make machines fly in the most efficient way possible.

During his time at university, where he’s studying engineering, Jiro meets a young girl named Naoko while traveling back to Tokyo from a holiday. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 hits, which stops the train and causes Naoko’s maid to break her leg. Jiro helps Naoko and her maid get to Naoko's family, then walks away without giving his name.

Jiro later works for an airplane manufacturer and is sent to Germany to do technical research. Later, at a summer resort in Japan, he runs into Naoko, and they fall in love. However, she has tuberculosis, and they postpone getting married.

Although the story in the film follows the historical account of Horikoshi's aircraft development chronologically, the depiction of his private life is entirely fictional. Without this fictional content, however, the film would be boring.

Miyazaki includes detail about the development of the planes, but he also develops various characters, giving them interesting personalities, such as Jiro’s excitable boss, Kurokawa, or his best friend, Honjo. There is also suspense, as the Japanese secret police are hunting Jiro. And Miyazaki is able to evoke strong emotions, as in his other films.

He also includes references to other works. At the resort is a German named Castorp, which is a character from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, which takes place at a sanatorium on a mountainside. The film also quotes a poem by Christina Rossetti.

The film was controversial in Japan, receiving criticism from both the political left and right. Miyazaki has criticized Japan’s conservative party for wanting to change the constitution, but he also defended making a film about a war-plane designer.

A clear theme of the film is the tension between an artist who wants to make something beautiful and those who use his talent to make machines used in war. This conflict between art and pragmatism is one Mennonites, especially Mennonite artists, can relate to.

While The Wind Rises is not of the caliber of Miyazaki’s best works, it is a beautiful film that will capture your interest and emotion. See it, and look for his other films, particularly Spirited Away. 

Daddy days: the growing use of paternity leave

 Many, from feminists to evangelicals, have lamented the absence of fathers in families. But the growing use of paternity leave by businesses may be addressing this problem in unique and surprisingly healthy ways.So claims Liza Mundy in her article “The Daddy Track” in The Atlantic (January/February). She notes that while some larger, progressive companies have been offering paternity leave, now several states have come on board. California, as usual, leads the way. In 2002, she writes, “[it] became the first U.S. state to guarantee six weeks of paid leave for mothers and fathers alike, financed by a small payroll-tax contribution from eligible workers.” Later, New Jersey and Rhode Island offered 12 and 13 paid weeks, respectively.

Here’s the surprise, according to Mundy: “In the long run, the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women, and the companies and nations that benefit when women advance.”

A report by the World Economic Forum showed that “countries with the strongest economies are those that have found ways to further women’s careers, close the gender pay gap and keep women—who in most nations are now better educated than men—tethered to the work force after they become mothers,” writes Mundy.

It’s an interesting strategy, if it even is a strategy. A 2007 study found that 60 percent of professional women who stopped working reported that they were largely motivated by their husbands’ unavailability to share housework and child-care duties,” writes Mundy.

Rather than simply raising the wages of women, which needs to happen anyway, paternity leave addresses some of women’s concerns.

Quebec has been offering such leave for some time. In 2006, it increased the financial benefits for paid leave and offered five weeks that could be taken only by fathers. This gave an extra incentive for men to take such leave. And studies found that “fathers who take paternity leave are more likely, a year or so down the road, to change diapers, bathe their children, read them bedtime stories and get up at night to tend to them,” writes Mundy.

You may say men should have been doing these things anyway, but in large part they haven’t. Such a change in behavior has other benefits as well. According to sociologist Scott Coltrane at the University of Oregon, when men share “routine repetitive chores,” women feel they are being treated fairly and are less likely to become depressed, writes Mundy.

Paternity leave also helps change the stigma of parenting. Some employers are more reluctant to hire younger women because they may get pregnant and require maternity leave. “The rise of paternity-leave plans,” writes Mundy, “raise the possibility that bosses will stop looking askance at the résumé of a 20-something female applicant, or at least apply the same scrutiny to a similar male applicant.”

Quebec’s plan has certainly led to changes, and early signs show that California’s paid-paternity-leave program is increasing in use. The percentage of “bonding leaves” claimed by men rose from 18.7 in 2005-6 to 31.3 in 2012-13.

Furthermore, it has not been shown to significantly decrease the number of jobs. Workplaces have figured out ways to adjust. “The biggest hurdle,” writes Mundy, “seems to be getting the word out, particularly among lower-income families.” And yes, in California, at least, the policy is that it extends leave to men in non-white-collar jobs.

As use of paternity-leave programs increases, writes Mundy, “working fathers increasingly report feeling more work-family conflict than working mothers do.”

Finding ways for fathers to be more involved in raising their children can only make for healthier families. It also helps create healthier communities.

When the watchdog didn't bark

One of the primary functions of journalism is to serve the public by holding accountable those in power who may be harming the public. But sometimes that watchdog function fails, as it did in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008.

That, at least, is the contention of Dean Starkman in “The Great Story” (Columbia Journalism Review, January/ February). The article is an excerpt from his new book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press).

What happens when the watchdog doesn’t bark, when journalism doesn’t do its job of holding accountable those in power, Starkman writes, is that “the public is left in the dark about, and powerless against, complex problems that overtake important national institutions.”

In this case, “10 million Americans uprooted by foreclosure with even more still threatened, 23 million unemployed or underemployed, whole communities set back a generation, shocking bailouts for the perpetrators, political polarization here and instability abroad.”

The business press had produced many stories, but they failed to take on the institutions that brought down the financial system.

To help understand how and why this happened, Starkman looks at two kinds of reporting, what he calls “accountability reporting” and “access reporting.” He draws up a list comparing them (see below).

Access                                                  Accountability

fast                                                        slow

short                                                     long

elite sources                                      dissident sources

top-down                                            bottom-up

quantity                                               quality

investor                                               public

niche                                                     mass

functionalistic                                    moralistic

Access reporting gets inside information from powerful people and institutions and is geared toward investors.

Accountability reporting seeks to explain what those powerful people do and is geared toward the public. It explains complex problems to a mass audience and holds the powerful to account.

Such explaining takes time and is long, which doesn’t go over well with who want their stories quick and short.

In January, a woman who formed an organization to fight human trafficking spoke at my church. She was inspired to begin her work after reading an investigative report in the Wichita Eagle about a 13-year-old girl who was enslaved by a pimp.

I pointed out to her that without that newspaper devoting funds to “accountability reporting,” she would not have read that story.

Some call public-interest reporting “long” and “pretentious” stories by “elitist” reporters. “But opposing long and ambitious stories,” writes Starkman, “is like fully supporting apple pie but opposing flour, butter, sugar and pie tins. In the end, there is no pie.”

When we look at the financial crisis of 2008 and what led up to it, Starkman writes, “accountability reporting got the story that access reporting missed.”

Such reporting goes beyond classifications of right or left, conservative or liberal. Instead it looks at a problem and explains how it came to be. Eventually, we learned about the institutions responsible for the financial collapse, but by then many lives had been ruined.

“Without accountability reporting,” Starkman writes, “journalism has no purpose, no center, no point.”

Family warmth helps pass on religion

One concern many families of faith share is how to pass on their faith to their children. At least one sociologist has made this a major project in his scholarly career. It turns out that one of the most important factors in children adopting religion is the warmth of the father—or if not the father, then the grandfather.

Vern Bengtson started the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a multidisciplinary investigation of families, aging and social change and has followed families since 1970. He is coauthor of Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations and How Families Still Matter: A Longitudinal Study of Youth in Two Generations.

Associate editor Amy Frykholm interviews Bengtson in the Dec. 25, 2013, issue of Christian Century.

Bengtson states up front that “the highest generational transmission [of religion from generation to generation] occurs in families with a high degree of warmth—particularly if the father is perceived as warm and close.”

In other words, being role models, taking the kids to church, being involved in church and having devotional activities at home are all good, but what really counts is what Bengtson calls “intergenerational solidarity or family cohesion.”

Frykholm asks what we want to know: Why is fatherly warmth so important? Bengtson says he doesn’t know. Generally mothers have more contact with the children, and fathers are more absent. He does, however, offer a hunch, that there is something about religion, at least in American society, that is male-influenced. Thus, he says, “if a father picks up on religion, the kids are going to pick up on it, too. And if the father is indifferent to religion, the kids may be indifferent to religion. This is especially true in father-son relationships.”

Turns out it’s not just fathers that are important in transmitting religion but grandfathers as well. Bengtson tells the story of a family in which the parents split up, and the mother was dysfunctional. “The daughter,” Bengtson says, “who is now in her 40s, talked about how on Sundays Grandpa would take them to church, and they would all sit together. He always had a red carnation in his lapel, and it was the same Sunday after Sunday. She said, ‘I felt so secure.’ ”

So what does religion transmission even mean? How do you know if it’s taken place? Frykholm asks.

Bengtson points out that they didn’t just ask about church attendance and membership. The study included questions about religious intensity, he says, such as, “How religious would you say you are?” They also looked at similarity between the answers of the children and those of the parents.

Which groups do it best? Frykholm asks.

“Mormons, Jews and evangelical Christians have the highest rate of transmission,” Bengtson says. He notes that Catholics, Mainline Protestants and Eastern Orthodox assume the family but put more emphasis on ritual.

He also makes clear that he’s measuring religious intensity, not denominational affiliation. So it’s not about Mennonite parents producing Mennonite children but parents with a religious intensity passing that on to their children.

One interesting discovery Bengtson made, he says, “is that the degree of religious influence across generations has not changed much since the ’60s and ’70s, despite the forces in culture that indicate they should have changed: increasing secularization with decreasing church attendance.” In other words, “Parents and grandparents influence their children in much the same way as they did in the 1970s.”

This may feel sobering to those of us who are fathers, seeing how it seems to fall on our shoulders. But it also gives us some insight into what we should be emphasizing in our families: warmth and cohesion.